Mom's MOPS adventure

A long time ago, when I was floundering in my lonely little new-mom sea, my darling sister-in-law told me I should look into attending a MOPS group. For those not in-the-know, MOPS = Mothers Of PreschoolerS. This is an international organization that is split up into small groups that meet at local churches, and is basically all about getting moms of young kids together so they can feel like they are not alone. Here is how a typical, two-hour-long meeting goes: meet, greet and snack; listen to a guest speaker talk on a topic relevant to moms; have a little crafty activity of some sort. I found a group wayyyyy north of where we live, but which is the ONLY group in the Seattle area that meets at a time other than weekdays during working hours. How lame is that? Anyway, I found out last night that this MOPS group was brand-spankin' new -- this was their very first meeting. There were four other ladies there who all went to this church together and all knew each other and each others' spouses and kids; then there was the lady who was the guest speaker, who was a regional MOPS coordinator; then there was lil ole me. Now, I could have felt like quite the outsider, but these ladies were all incredibly warm and welcoming, with fabulously biting senses of humor.

The guest speaker lady gave a talk on a book she and her husband had read together, called Men Are Like Waffles, Women Are Like Spaghetti. What this means: Men=Waffles, not because they 'waffle', but because their world exists as a conglomerate of boxes -- they compartmentalize their lives, and don't enjoy when one box interferes with the other (like, for example, when the Wife box tries to butt into the TV box). Women=Spaghetti because their world exists with each area of life interwoven with many others. While I can see on a coarse level that this analogy might hold, I didn't really appreciate this lady's constant desire to stereotype men and women, mainly because Michael and I, in many cases, don't fall into the stereotypes perpetuated by this book. Yes, I think Mike does like his "boxes" sometimes, but another suggestion of this book is that the spaghetti-ness of women's lives is what makes them the more verbal sex, and it is quite obvious that Mike is the more verbal of us. Also, women being spaghetti is symbolic of how women are supposedly excellent multi-taskers, since they must keep track of how all the noodles are running around. I, the woman, am a horrible failure at multi-tasking. Some of this lady's peripheral points were well taken, however; that we should recognize that men and women are different and will always be, and that we should celebrate that. While her constant references to how we should be for "our men" and blahdeeblah, and especially her jokes about how all women do is shop and all men do is think about sex, made me bristle a bit, I did try to listen closely, since she has been married to her hubby for over 25 years, and that is certainly something to strive for.

But enough of my feminist soapbox, because I was much more stoked about craft-time. We made a magnetic picture-frame out of popsicle sticks ala 3rd grade -- but, if I do say so myself, mine looks almost 4th-grader quality (see above). I learned that the purpose of craft-time is not to take home some masterpiece, but instead to have something to keep one's hands busy while one yaps with one's trap. One of the ladies there is 8.5 months pregnant with her first baby, a boy, and so the rest of us delighted in ganging up on her with our unsolicited labor advice. I hope to send my lovely craft to my sister-in-law, if it will survive the trip -- it's just popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue.