Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner.

*updated: sorry for the total tease, but for some reason, WordPress is not letting the code for this link stick. It was supposed to go to www.cnu.edu

And now you all know!

No, he’s not here to shoot another film (Marijean Almighty?), but Charlottesville’s favorite Hollywood director, Tom Shadyac will be in the house tonight at JPJ to honor PACEM award winners and volunteers and to provide an update on the First Street Church day shelter project.

The event is free and open to the public, from 6pm until 8pm, with free and available parking. It’s at JPJ in the Sandridge Room (main lobby). Charles Marsh will keynote and Fire will perform.

I will be there, too, as a PACEM board member and volunteer. Stop by and say hi!

I had to chuckle at Blackbird’s post about shopping for Middle for the prom. Shopping for a tux the boy was difficult, but not as tough as what bb had to face . . . the challenges are somewhat different. While both Middle and the boy are skinny kids, the boy is nearly a foot taller, and weighs only, maybe eighty pounds more. After a meal. So we set a record, they told us, at Men’s Wearhouse when we ordered the longest pants, jacket and shirt they had to offer, and will present some opportunities for the on-site tailor to make it all fit.

Now, I leave you with the worst prom photos from St. Petersburg, Fla. Enjoy!

My dad started it, as he does most things, with his appearance as a senator in that fine feature film, Legally Blonde 2, Red White and Blonde. He announced his upcoming starring role one Thanksgiving and we eagerly anticipated the release of the film. He regaled us with tales of his interactions with Reese Witherspoon and Sally Field.

Then, my husband, at the girl’s urging, auditioned for Evan Almighty, and can be seen in several scenes as the tallest photographer in the crowd.

Not to be outdone by the other two hams in the family, my sister jumped at the chance to star appear as an extra in the upcoming Marley & Me. Not, as I pointed out, a sequel, like Dad and Mark were in, but a movie based on a beloved book, and due to be released in time for peak-movie season, the holidays. I live vicariously through these Hollywood types in my family, and hung on every word of my sister’s reporting on her conversation with Owen Wilson. SHE TALKED TO OWEN!

I’ve not met my quota of stars. In fact, my celebrity-sighting list is quite lame. I plan to take it up a tiny notch this Friday, though, when Evan Almighty’s director Tom Shadyac returns to Charlottesville to speak at PACEM’s Award and Volunteer Recognition event at JPJ. Maybe we’ll meet. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll say, “You are PERFECT for my new film,” and whisk me off to stardom. Or at least a speaking part. That would be cool, too.

Let’s see. I became a mom in 1990. And a working mom several months later. But that’s going back too far. I’ll start here . . .

In 2002 I accepted my failure as a poet, set aside my dreams of being a novelist or, at best, a short story writer and started cranking out random essays on a variety of topics. I submitted one to The Commonspace, an essay about how I’d never make it in St. Louis because I didn’t go to high school there. (Follow the link to see the haircut that makes me look ten years older than I am). It was the first time I published anything online and it began a friendship with the editor/publishers that I still treasure today.

What The Commonspace did for me, as I published several other pieces with them, was give me the writing confidence I needed. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked Brian and Amanda sufficiently for this so I’ll do it now: Thank you, guys. You changed my life.

Then, I wrote a goofy little essay about capri pants and who shouldn’t wear them and e-mailed it to some friends and family. My sister pushed me a bit further and said, “You should talk to the Post, this is really good.”

I started the conversation with the Post-Dispatch, encouraged by both my sister and the response I’d gotten from what I’d written so far, and with dry mouth and in a nervous sweat, wrote my first “test” article for STLToday.com.

I wanted to do a consumer column. Something where I reviewed the crappy customer service at retail establishments all over the St. Louis Metropolitan area. I started with an article about car washes. What’s the difference between the $4 wash and the $6? Is it worth it? Fortunately, I guess the bit showed some kind of promise, because I started with an experiment the Post was trying, writing roundups of what was going on in town and other little pieces for the online version of the paper. All of that work resulted, finally in Shop Talk, the shopping column, then blog, that I wrote for a few years.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’d been writing the weekly Shop Talk for about a year when my editor said, “I think this would work better as a blog.” It being 2003 or so, I knew what a blog WAS, I just didn’t know HOW to blog. So I went home and figured it out, diving in headfirst and setting up STL Working Mom on Blogger (I’m now using Wordpress). I remember sitting at my desk thinking, well, now, who the heck AM I? And what do I want to do with this thing? I decided, if nothing else, I would use my blog to capture the silly stuff my kids did and said — just so I would remember later. I thought maybe I could share some wisdom with working moms struggling to successfully balance work and kids. AS IF I HAVE ANY.

The STL for those of you having trouble with that part, is the airport code for Lambert St. Louis International Airport. Many St. Louis Web sites use this as a prefix, such as the most popular St. Louis Web site, STLToday.com. Since I was writing for that Web site at the time, and very accustomed to typing STL, STLWorkingMom seemed like the way to go — a blog for St. Louis working moms. It wasn’t until last summer in Chicago at BlogHer when I realized, as people from all over the country glanced at my nametag and asked, “Still Working Mom?” that outside of St. Louis, the URL is kind of a problem.

Two years ago, after having established myself pretty thoroughly as the St. Louis Working Mom in STL, we picked up and moved 800 miles to Charlottesville, Va.  

There was much to do in the two months I had to prepare for the move. That, and Mark moved without us so I was playing temporary single parent while trying to sell the house, keep it clean, learn all that went with a new job, manage the kids’ schedules (and prepare them to move) and oh lordy, Thanksgiving and Christmas were in there, too. I was definitely in high gear during those two months. I started sloughing off all I could, calling the Post to tell them I would no longer be able to do the features I was contributing to the print version of the paper (pieces on shopping and fashion that required me to go out and pick up items from stores and bring them to the Post to be photographed). That was the first thing to go. I stopped cooking, too — we ate out almost every night for a few reasons — there was just the three of us, I didn’t want to mess up the kitchen and it seemed that every evening we had to be away from the house to allow a Realtor to show it. Then, I gave up the Shop Talk blog — I needed every minute I could get and while it broke my heart to stop, I had to give them enough time to find a replacement writer, so gave my notice and drafted my final post. Finally, I stopped blogging on STLWorkingMom for about a month, writing a post to explain my absence and letting the reader my readers know I’d be back.

Somehow, we all made it through the move. The house sold, we packed up, I went on “vacation” until after the new year, we arrived in C’ville and set up shop. I started blogging again soon after, gratefully discovering Waldo, befriending Jennifer and settling into the local contingent of the blogosphere. Yes, my first Charlottesville friends were bloggers. How better to learn about a new community than reading its blogs?

I have kept my St. Louis readership — just as I’ve kept my St. Louis job and friends. Several people asked if I was going to change the blog to Charlottesville (or C’ville) Working Mom and frankly, I just haven’t seen the need. (Also, there’s a great new blog called C’ville Working Moms that takes care of that!) I also know that URLs need to stay the same if people are going to continue to find and follow you, so www.stlworkingmom.com is not going anywhere. People know my story and in fact, I think being a two-city working mom might just make this blog a little more interesting.

So that’s the story. I think that even though we have no plans to leave Charlottesville, I’m always going to be the St. Louis Working Mom. Thanks for reading and — if you are the person one of the readers who have followed this journey from its earliest days — thanks for hanging in there and for following me 800 miles!

The End

I published this story in segments last year and will publish an update, soon. This is the story as it has been written to date, for those of you who have catching up to do.

I had a hard time becoming a working mom. Mostly because I had a hard time becoming a mom, and then realized I’d never really worked, so figuring out how to do both at the same time was pretty overwhelming. I was 19 when my son was born, a year of college under my belt and experience in absolutely nothing. In one particularly sad moment, I remember looking up “beauty schools” in the yellow pages thinking maybe I could have a career in hair. I think that was a move inspired by the movie Grease. Fortunately, I never dropped in, so never became a dropout.

I finally summoned the guts to go job hunting when the boy was eight months old. We needed the money and I needed a life outside of our apartment. I was more lonely and depressed than I’ve ever been that first year — my friends had all gone back to college, I’d moved to a city where I knew no one, and I was at home with a baby while my husband worked long hours and made new friends. The boy was my sole focus; my entertainment, my job, my friend. I needed to get out for his sake as much as mine.

I found someone to watch the boy while I found a job and then, when I actually had a job. That was mystifying – do I find the job first, or the childcare provider or the other way around? Connie watched the boy, and then the girl in a relationship that ended up lasting many years and many different jobs.

I remember the day I found that first job — at a touristy store in Old Town St. Charles — making just a dollar more than I was paying per hour for childcare. The day I applied I was hired on the spot, wearing a floral skirt and sweater I’d had since I was sixteen years old. “I like the way you look,” said the store’s owner, a woman who within two months had a breakdown, abruptly closing the store without notice. It became apparent during my short time there that she had a buying addiction. She was in way over her head and kept acquiring more merchandise to sell.

It was OK, and probably a good thing that job ended, although it was jarring to show up for work one day and find that I had no job. I called my sitter from a pay phone to tell her what happened and that I was heading to the mall, that bastion of employment for the underexperienced, to find another job immediately.

Friends of mine, or more accurately, my husband’s, encouraged me to apply at the new Sears store in town. Two of them were working there, making OK money and combining flexible hours with college. The day my job disappeared in Old Town St. Charles, I went to Sears and applied, getting a job in the appliances/electronics department right away, as a merchandise assistant. I worked about 25 hours a week and made barely enough to make it worth it. It was important to me, though because I finally had some friends in town — some people to talk to everyday and something to do with my time besides obsessing over my 10 month-old son.

I remember my boss, Stef, allowing me to set my own hours — 10am-2pm five days a week. I wanted to make sure I was home in time for Oprah. I watched more TV the first two years I was married than I ever will again. (See symptoms of depression: excessive TV watching.) The schedule worked for me as I eased into what I still found difficult — getting myself and a child out the door and still managing everything I needed to do at home. The first whole year I worked was like a practice run — the job was not demanding, but life was.

I worked at Sears for seven long years. I moved into a sales position and worked from 30-40 hours a week depending on the season. By the time I’d been there for six months or so, I re-enrolled in college, taking one course at a time at the community college. I’d missed school so much my heart ached. I was insanely jealous of my friends, cruising along with their educations, set to graduate in a couple of years. Lifetime movies or TV commercials about moms graduating from college made me sob with envy. I had to get back to school, no matter what it took.

By 1992, a friend, another young mom that worked at Sears, convinced me to apply to Lindenwood — a local four-year college with an accelerated night program. I decided to look into it and in a very quick move, ended up enrolling full time in regular day program with a scholarship and grants that paid for all but a few hundred dollars. I was shocked at myself — and unsure how all this would work — but I plotted it out all so carefully, registering for classes only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or Tuesdays and Thursdays so I could work the remaining days and still be home for my husband and son in the evenings. I managed to pull this off for six semesters (taking one or two summer courses to make sure I graduated within the three year goal I’d set for myself to finish). My advisor had so many visits from me that we bonded — she invited me back a few years ago to do a reading for the school and I was somewhat unsurprised she remembered me, from all the afternoons I camped out in the English department.

It was exhausting. I worked or was at school every day for three years. I needed to get done, though — to get the piece of paper that would allow me to get on with life — to get out of my sales job into what I really wanted to do, and to make the money we needed to move out of our apartment and not worry endlessly about money.

The day I graduated from college my whole family was there — but my fondest memory is that of my five-year-old son, in dress pants, oxford shirt and clip-on tie, witnessing his mother in a moment of sheer pride. All he remembers, he says of that day is that it was hot.

I waited till I was old enough to have my first child to have my second child. That’s been my line ever since the girl was born when I was 25 years old. I was ready, finally, and embraced pregnancy and childbirth without fear and in fact, with a degree of confidence the second time around. I knew so much more about myself and what was happening that I decided — and stuck to — the decision to give birth naturally.

The drug-free birth of my daughter was a vast improvement over the epidural experience I had with my son. Being a teenager, (I was 19 when the boy was born) I simply took the advice of others in my childbirth class the first time around. What did I know? Childbirth sounded pretty awful. Fortunately, I’m good at it — no problems with either child’s birth and if we’d had another, he or she could easily have been born at home. Not that I’d want that — too messy and I happen to really enjoy hospital food. Why not? Someone else makes it and it’s pretty darn healthy.

A year and change after I graduated from college, the girl was born. I was still working at Sears up until a week or so before she was due, standing for eight-hour days on my swollen feet in maternity clothes I darn near outgrew. Sears had great benefits — a five-month paid maternity leave and excellent health coverage. When we started talking about child #2 we decided I should stay in my sales job — that and I wasn’t finding anything in my chosen profession right away.

Having two children and working is, so I’ve heard, like having seven children and working. The transition from one kid to two is incredible. (Are you listening Sean and Amy?) You might as well have seven with the increase in everything — food, laundry, bills, appointments, running around. I liked the space between my kids; 6.5 years was just about right for us and the boy was a good helper. Unfortunately, having kids this far apart was a bit like starting all over again. I had to set a new schedule, find my new groove.

And then, I found an internship at a public relations firm.

Sure, it seemed like starting at the bottom but I realized, when you work in PR, this is where you start. The internship is critical to entering the communications profession. I took the internship when the girl was six months old. It was hard, after five months of being home with her to suddenly dive back into two jobs — I felt like I was in college and working again. I continued to work at Sears about 20 hours a week while working at the firm 20 hours — I had to — the internship paid $5 an hour. It was a crazy schedule I worked out — working until 2pm at the firm, driving to the store in St. Peters, Mo. from Brentwood to work until close two nights a week and working on the weekends as well. It was really hard at times but I was determined and had to believe that this was the right step — a necessary step to get where I wanted to be, not just for me, but for my family, as well.

Fortunately, the experience was positive and at the end of four months, they offered me a full time job. It paid less than I made selling appliances but it was the foot in the door I needed to get on the path I desired. I was able to kiss Sears goodbye at last. I remember telling one of my fellow sales associates that I was leaving to go work in public relations. She said, “What’s more relating to the public than this?”

We’re getting really close to a college decision here at Chez Jaggers. And by we, of course I mean, the boy is really close to deciding because of course I have neither influence nor say in this decision and I reserve all of my personal opinions by keeping my big mouth shut. Ahem.

He has summarily rejected my offer to homeschool him for college. Even the promise of free tuition, room and board couldn’t keep him under my roof. I can’t say I blame him. My lectures tend to be a little dry. So’s this campus. (Bah-dum-dum. Thanks. I’m here all week.) I’d be heading out to a four-year myself.

The boy will visit the number one draft pick this Friday for “admitted freshman day” with his dad, who promises not to ogle the cheerleaders who will perform at orientation. Well, ogle, he may, but engage in conversation, he’d better not. We really don’t want him to be that dad. (How YOU doin? What’s YOUR major?). Yeesh. I guess it’s better than having me along, the mom who’d pout if not a single college boy fired on her.

So my guess is, by the end of Friday, we’ll know. The school in question is 161 miles from home (but who’s counting?). The guys will get up early and head out and probably not return until after dinner.

I wait, in suspense.

The boy was away for a long weekend, so we had a preview of what the fall will bring. When he’s not here: 

• There will be no need to buy mayo or ranch dressing.
• Laundry will be easily done in a day instead of three.
• No one will wake me at midnight to say, “I’m home.”
• The trash will not get taken out.
• Bacon, cookies and ice cream will not disappear overnight.
• There will be no thundering footsteps, bounding up or down the stairs.

And, oh joy! I will finally be able to clean his room. Bring on the hazmat suit.

The boy has a band. They call themselves the Honey Bunches of Goats. They’re cool. (Cool, that is, if you consider the melodica a cool instrument.) You can fan them on Facebook. Lots of people have, despite the fact that they have yet to play a gig. When they play, they wear matching red and white striped vests. They play some Weezer and, believe it or not, a song from the Tears for Fears album, Songs from the Big Chair.

Anyway, the Goats are here, playing Rock Band and Wii, and it’s nearly dinner time. The Goats want to be fed. So I’m throwing together some dinner and enjoying the sounds of four teenaged boys hanging around at my house.

Even that title stirs the pot a bit, doesn’t it?

I’ve noticed something in the momosphere. Someone will write a post about the virtues or the guilt of being a working mom or a stay-at-home mom. Someone will imply that one is preferred over the other, because of personal opinion. In this space, it’s sometimes been a working mom who expresses her thought that she would “go crazy” being a stay-at-home-mom. I’ve heard lots of working moms with small kids say this.

At this point, the stay-at-home moms get defensive. They often feel attacked, I think. They think that the working moms somehow think they’re superior to the SAHMs, for what, I don’t know. Maybe, as working moms, we say, look at us! We’re contributing to the family income! We’re doing it all! Hear us roar, bring home bacon, fry it, etc. Sizzle, sizzle.

I’ve seen SAHMs get really angry over this. Insulted. Restless. What’s amazing to me is that I don’t know a single SAHM that isn’t a working mom, really. There have been some, claiming the SAHM title who are writing a book or a blog, who are volunteering at the school or in their communities, who are homeschooling their kids, thus taking on the job of full-time teacher in addition to all the household responsibilities.

So when these flare-ups happen in the momosphere, there are often hurt feelings. Things said that aren’t meant to insult one group or the other. Generally, if we all recover from the incident, someone leaves a comment, something to the effect of, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

But that’s really the point, isn’t it? We’re all working moms. Let’s let that go, shall we? We all, in reality, have similar challenges. We all worry about money, our kids’ health, our relationships, the dust collecting under the entertainment center, what our retirement years will bring and last of all, our own precious health.

I have this idyllic vision of what moms used to be to one another. It’s based on I don’t know what — Lucy and Ethyl? Wilma and Betty? It may be based in TV land, but I think that moms used to look out for one another, used to help each other with kids, advice, and screwy messes (Lucy!). Once in awhile I will see some moms like that; friends who pop over with a casserole when they know you’re having a busy week. Friends who will come help you paint your kitchen on a weekend. Friends who will take your kids for a few hours, so you and your husband can remember what it is like to sit, talk and listen to one another without interruption.

I know you are out there, being friends to one another, regardless of who brings home a paycheck. Tell me your story.