Month: May 2018

Please Invent MOM APP, to Track Household Work Done Each Day!

Maintaining a household for a family of 4 (or more) is hard work! It’s endless, constant, menial, laborious and non-intellectual–and the worst part? It’s all invisible work. Nobody really knows how much physical labor you’re doing as a mother. There’s no hidden account keeping track of all thoes hours BOTH of your hands were tied up, holding children and putting various items away.

And…if you dare to say anything regarding the amount of drudgery, and brain-shrinking, incessant clean-up, you immediately are castigated for “complaining” and “you know what you were getting into….maybe you should have thought twice before having children”.

Yes, yes. This is all true--except the part about “knowing what you were getting into before having children.”

Who knew that you actually never get a break unless you’re fortunate enough to have an occasional babysitter, grandparent, older helpful children, daycare or nanny nearby?!

But society needs future tax payers and we need people to raise them. So mothers are still a very important part of this process. We’re not outsourcing our childcare and housework to mother-nanny robots yet.

There are pedometers, there are apps out there for “daily steps walked” and there are apps that keep track of your health. But what about an app for all the moms who want something to show for all of their constant, childcare and clean-up around the clock with no breaks?

Someone needs to invent a way of calculating the precise amounts of weekly time spent on childcare and housework. Mothers need to have a way of recording and proving all of the time spent trying to prepare meals and “feeding” unwilling-to-eat-a-bite toddlers.

We need to know how much laundry our hands have spent folding and putting away as we dealt with a screaming baby and toddler constantly obstructing our path to the closet.

We need to know how much time we’re spending vacuuming floors and wiping off counters and faces and hands and re-puting dirty dishes into the dishwasher and unloading clean dishes and picking things up every second of our waking hour.

We need to have a documented account of all the time spent cleaning the front and back porches, weeding the flower beds, doing diapers on two children and removing all the garbages and diaper pails and scrubbing the bathroom shower and tubs and toilets.

And don’t even get me started on every single grocery shop for our household–ALWAYS–with 2 children in the cart. And bringing every single heavy grocery bag in every single time and putting ALL groceries away EVERY SINGLE TIME. Grocery Shopping is literally a 3 hour ordeal every time– and we’re talking 2-3 times each week.

We need to know how little time we spent doing any activities we enjoyed throughout the month– compared to others.

I think that a handy phone app that somehow tallied up all of our invisible work done by mothers each day–all day, ALL NIGHT in my case (with an 8th month old who wakes up every hour and half throughout the night, no kidding) –all the work that kept us from scribbling a half-ass blog post in 3-4, weeks would do some justice.

Practice Writing Every day! Use your Blog to do it!

Practice Writing Every day! Use your Blog to do it!

We’ve all heard it before, “Good writers write frequently, they practice and sharpen their writing skills by writing 500–sometimes 1000-1,500 words each day”. Practice makes perfect.

Stephen King makes 40 million dollars a year for his wordsmithing, and guess what? He writes 1000-2000 words every single day. He’s been doing this for decades, so if anyone’s getting practice writing, he certainly is! Is it any wonder that the people who succeed are getting practice daily?

Nothing comes for free. Not even talent– because it must be continually refined and updated and this takes time of course, precious time that you could be spending elsewhere. You’re going to have to get good at trying… attempting to write and doing it regularly. And you’re going to have to get good at being brave.

Now, here’s an idea, how about using your personal (or public) blog space to practice your own writing? You certainly don’t have to scribe your inner-most thoughts every single day or post anything too controversial that might turn you into a public pariah, but you can find something to blather about.  I know you can.

If you haven’t noticed, this is exactly what I do here on this blog! I’ve committed myself to once-a-week blogging (which is writing, right?). My ultimate goal for this blog is posting 3 times each week. Do you have any long-term goals for your blog?

There are these random thoughts that come to me while I’m unloading the dishwasher. Sometimes they come while lying in bed just before sleep impales my brain. Perhaps a stranger makes a crass remark in a parking lot. More often than not, it is movement–physical movement–that triggers a cascade of thoughts. As writers, we all need a cascade of thoughts.  We need a supply of input in order to have ANY output. Ironically, now that I have two children, I’m moving so much more and my thoughts are swirling but I have less time to write. These thoughts are the jewels that need to be mined.

In my mind I can think of the two most important things for bloggers:

  1. Posting weekly/regularly.
  2. HAVING CONTENT–you NEED something to write about, to babble about that has the potential to draw a reader or arouse curiosity.

People are unable to blog because of the 2 reasons I listed above. I promise. That’s it!

The content part is the biggie. There are far too many people out there who are worried to write because they HAVE FEARS ABOUT THEIR CONTENT. They worry about how they are perceived. They worry that:

A. they look like they complain too much.

B. they look like they’re bragging/being a show-off

C. they’re making too many (public) errors in their writing.

D. they’re writing is too inane.

E. they’ll leave some indelible mark on the internet so that people can, at some point in the distant future, point to what they wrote and say, :”hahaha, you wrote that piece of crap. You suck”.

F. People will think they’re mentally unstable

How about, who cares? None of these reasons are legitimate reasons for the passionate writer/thinker/creator. In fact, all of the above are great avenues for writing from time to time. Eventually you’ll find other topics to explore, but generating content is definitely going to be the thing you struggle with, so don’t let any of the thoughts above halt your progress if you happen to go into such territory.

Now how about a link with advice from an experienced writer to those of us beginners? Here you go:

Why is Stephen King so successful at writing?