One of the undeniably good things to come out of blogging, for me, has been my friendship with Moreena of falling down is also a gift, and a few other places which may or may not be competitors of Imperfect Parent, so I won’t link to them directly. Regardless, Moreena is a compassionate, intelligent and generous person whose posts often make me cry at work (which is embarassing when you’re out of kleenex and are reduced to using an old receipt from the bottom of your purse, hoping that you’re not spreading ink all over your reddened, tear-stained face).

Moreena’s oldest daughter, Annika, has had two liver transplants as the result of a congenital disease called Biliary Atresia; she is about to be put back on the waiting list for a third. She is six.

And as she reminded me lately, this weekend is the National Donor Sabbath, an interfaith event and celebration to increase awareness of organ donation.
So many of you will hear this information already this weekend; but for those of you who, like me, rarely darken a church door, here is information about how to become an organ donor and frequently asked questions about organ donation.
And if you have a blog or website and would like to increase awareness of this incredibly important issue, here is a button you can use (right-click, save as, and upload as required):

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My presentation on Friday was part of a panel about mommy blogging. There were five of us; the other four covered mommy blogging as a genre, how blogging about mothering publicly can affect your mothering, mommy blogging as folk art, and how advertising is beginning to affect mommy blogging. My topic was the experience of writing about mothering a child who is, in some way, different–whether it be disability or illness or just an undiagnosable genetic syndrome–on the internet.

In one of those moments of serendipity–or perhaps sensitivity after exposing myself to this issue for a few months–yesterday there was a section in the Toronto Star about access to post-secondary education for students with disabilities, and how attitudes are slowly changing. The articles gave me a great deal of hope–perhaps we, as the last generation to expect students with differences or issues or delays to be segregated educationally, are the last of the dinosaurs, the last to feel uncomfortable in the presence of a child not regularly featured in Parents magazine. Perhaps stand-up comics who can’t stand up and PhD students who can’t spell without assistance will simply be accepted, normal parts of advanced education for our children, and workplaces will automatically accomodate them because schools have automatically accomodated them, and they expect the world to work that way.

Perhaps it will be like the second wave of feminism–not perfect, not fixing everything by any stretch, but accomplishing nonetheless such a sea change that the way things used to be, the world of lowered expectations and isolation and segregation, is no longer imaginable.

I hope so. Because when, after finishing that, I find this letter about the death of a man with primordial dwarfism, I dread the world my daughter will live in.

(I’ll come back and write about the actual panel and how it went once my co-presenters have had a chance to decompress and post their own talks, so that I can point to them. And parts of this post will end up on my own blog tomorrow–but I didn’t want anyone to think I’d had that heart attack. It actually all went very well.)

I feel like a cat with a fur ball. Ack! Ack!

It’s all I can say this week, because I am dying with excitement (ack!) and anxiety (ack!) over talking Friday at the Motherlode conference in Toronto about my experiences blogging about a child with physical differences. (Ack!) The conference is featuring mothering authors such as Andi Buchanan (who wrote MotherShock) (Ack!) and Ann Crittenden (author of The Price of Motherhood) (Ack!). I am sharing panel space with several well-known mother bloggers, including MUBAR, Postcards from the Mothership, Hello Josephine, and the Mother of All Blogs’ Ann Douglas. (Ack!) People have already been signing up for our session (ack!), which the organizers have been promoting on the materials mailed out to registrants (ack!); I splurged on new shoes, even (ack!).

Only to find this in the Toronto Star a few days ago. OK, scroll past the brilliant part at the beginning where the author describes how society is all talk, no action about supporting motherhood to where she writes about the Motherlode.

Do you see this? This part right here?

But O’Reilly says this year’s event takes it to a whole new level. It features 200 speakers from around the world on such diverse topics as teen mothers, raising bi-racial children, post-partum depression, mothering children with disabilities, and mommy blogs.

Mommy blogs! That’s me! I mean, us! Ack!

I’ll be here afterwards to blog about it; and if I’m not, call the ambulance. I probably had a heart attack.

Ack!

Because Canada really wants to accept America’s pedophiliac exiles. I mean, Canada’s children are surely so undesirable that he won’t pose any kind of threat here, would he? So allowing him to remain free as long as he has no access to American children is clearly proof that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have reported on an experiment that demonstrates that when girls are told they are naturally worse at math, they perform worse on tests.

As one researcher said:

“We told one group of women a made-up story about scientists discovering a math gene on the Y (male) chromosome, and those women got only half as many answers correct as the others ???‚¬??? possibly because they choked under the pressure,” said UBC psychology professor Steven Heine, whose study with PhD student Ilan Dar-Nimrod was published yesterday in Science magazine.

“But the women who were told there is no genetic difference in math ability between men and women did better, possibly because it’s liberating to learn you don’t have a genetic disadvantage.”

CNN also reported on the story (see? I do read news sites besides the TO Star!) and had more details on how the study was administered:

Heine and doctoral student Ilan Dar-Nimrod wanted to see how people are affected by stereotypes about themselves. They divided more than 220 women into four groups and administered math and reading comprehension tests between 2003 and 2006. Their results are reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

The women were given a math test, then asked to read an essay, and then given a second math exam.

In two groups the women averaged between five and 10 correct answers out of 25 math questions. In the other two they averaged between 15 and 20 correct.

The women in the lower-scoring groups read essays that either contended that there is a genetic difference between men and women in math ability, or discussed the images of women in art — a reading which did not discuss math but was designed to remind them of being female.

Those two groups not only fell short of the other women, but their performance declined between the two math tests, meaning they scored lower after reading the essays than before.

It’s a process psychologists call a stereotype threat, Heine explained. “If a member of a group for which there is a negative stereotype is in a position to test the stereotype, they are likely to choke under the pressure.”

What does this mean for parents? In yet another case of Experts Telling Us What We Already Knew, don’t tell your children that they can’t do such-and-such because of their sex. Or their height, or their eye colour, or their skin colour, or whatever. Being reminded of a stereotype that claims one is innately incapable of performing a particular task tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if your kids are exposed to these stereotypes from other sources (TV, books, magazines, schools, friends), work with them to understand that the stereotype isn’t true, and even if it was, it wouldn’t necessarily apply to them.