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	a quiet place by peggy o'mara

Peggy O’Mara is the mother of four grown children. She has gained international celebrity as publisher, editor and owner of Mothering Magazine. She is also the author of four books: Having a Baby Naturally: The Mothering Magazine Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, Natural Family Living: The Mothering Magazine Guide to Parenting, The Way Back Home: Essays on Life and Family, and A Quiet Place: Essays on Life and Family. A dynamic speaker, she has lectured and conducted workshops in conjunction with organizations such as the Omega Institute, Esalen, La Leche International, and Bioneers. She has appeared on numerous television and radio programs and has been featured in national publications including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Mother Earth News, and Utne Reader

Where's Joseph?
Issue 148 - May/June 2008
by Peggy O'Mara, Editor and Publisher

Over the years, people have asked me many times why we call the magazine Mothering. I always tell them the 1970s story I've just told you. Then I tell them that mothering requires a certain kind of attention and focus, and can be done by men as well as women. In addition, the word mothering evokes a more deeply felt response than does the generic term parenting.

But these arguments now seem shallow to me, in the face of a new generation of fathers who are challenging me to move beyond them. One of these fathers e-mailed me some time ago to say that he and some of his friends, many of them stay-at-home dads, felt left out of Mothering's coverage, even condescended to. Though at first I felt defensive—it is not my intention to exclude dads from the magazine's coverage—I suspected that this young father was telling me something I needed to hear.

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I replied to him, saying that while we didn't intend to leave out fathers, Mothering is, after all, as its name suggests, an intimate conversation among mothers. I also pointed out that if women can take pride in reading men's magazines, and even brag that they "like the interviews," then fathers can take pride in reading a mothers' magazine. This was evidently not the answer he was looking for—I never heard back from him, and I suspect he felt patronized once again.

Some months after this e-mail exchange, I was speaking at a breastfeeding conference in Albuquerque. During the question-and-answer period, a man in the back—I think he was the only man in the room—said to me, as he held up a copy of the magazine, "There are no pictures of men in here." Others tried to hush him up. Later, I looked through the entire issue to see if he was right. He was.

In March, articles editor Candace Walsh, marketing director Kathleen Chambers, and I met with Allan Shedlin (see "Living Treasure," page 104) and Deborah Boldt, of the Reel Fathers Film Festival (see "Bulletins," page 32). When I heard Allan tell the stories of the fathers and children he had interviewed, and speak so movingly about what he calls "The Daddying Movement," I realized that what he was saying was what those other daddies had been trying to tell me.

There is a new generation of fathers who are not second-class parents to their wives. They are fully present and know what to do. Just like mothers, they have to figure things out for themselves and learn from their mistakes, but more of them than ever are willing to show up and get involved.

In my generation there were only a few such daddies, and in my mother's, even fewer. When my husband and I led workshops at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in the early 1980s, the fathers would sometimes look as if they'd been dragged to the event by their wives. By the '90s, they were attending on their own accord, and in this new century, daddies have found their voices.

This is not to say that, all along, fathers have not been loving and supportive. Of course they have—but their role was usually more narrowly defined than it is now. Fathers of this new generation want to be more actively involved in the life of the home and the care of their children. Many are primary caretakers, and proud of that role. (Find out about the 13th annual At-Home Dads Convention, to be held November 8 in Sacramento, California, at www.athomedad convention.com.)

I began to understand what I'd been missing in the exchange with the new father whom I'd patronized when I spoke with another young father, Paul Newman, at the recent Natural Products Expo West. He told me a story about a mothers' group that his wife belongs to. One night, she couldn't attend, and suggested that he go in her stead. He was the only dad at the meeting, and he told the mothers how hard it was for him to go to work every day and leave his children, and how much he missed them. We both got teary-eyed as we spoke, and wondered that so much of a father's experience is unarticulated in our culture.

As I listened to Paul's story, it occurred to me that this was an intimate conversation. While women have a habit and history of gathering to talk about their experiences, these kinds of conversations are not their exclusive domain. And even though its name suggests otherwise, Mothering really is an intimate conversation among mothers and fathers. (Our readers' surveys indicate that fathers read the magazine as much as mothers do.) This intimate conversation is defined not by gender, but by commonality of experience and depth of inquiry.

I told Paul that I was coming to realize how much we unintentionally glorify the image of "woman alone" in the magazine. I personally am inspired by the image of the Madonna, and have pictures and statues of her all over the Mothering office. Now, however, it occurred to me that nearly all of those pictures and statues depict a woman alone with her baby. Aside from a sculpture of mother, father, and baby on my desk, most of the other artwork in the office begs the question: "Where's Joseph?" No wonder we think we're superwomen.

This new awareness inspires me to include more images of families and fathers in Mothering. In fact, this issue's cover depicts the triad: mother, father, and baby.

In addition, here are some other things I want to do to more actively include fathers in the pages of Mothering and on mothering.com. While we've always welcomed articles by fathers, we now want to encourage and publish them even more. Please send us your ideas and submissions.

We're also developing a new regular department, "In His Own Words": a short interview of a dad by a dad, with a photo. Look for the premiere interview in the July/August issue. Give us your suggestions about fathers to interview.

Joe Kelly is our online fathering expert.

But we want to develop even more content for fathers on mothering.com, and have asked Jeremy Adam Smith, of Daddy Dialectic (www.daddy-dialectic.blogspot.com), to help us set up daddy blogs: uncensored epistles about the experiences of real fathers. I'd also like to use our considerable experience in managing Web forums to host online discussions among daddies. I don't know, however, if that again crosses a line, is condescending. While it's important that Mothering facilitate intimate conversation among mothers and fathers, it's also important that fathers have their own autonomy.

Ideally, perhaps, many of these features could be hosted on a separate site, especially for fathers, that Mothering could help facilitate. There are several online magazines for fathers, but no print publication. In the past, several have been tried and failed; perhaps the climate is now right, and perhaps a new online magazine is the way to start.

In the spirit of sodality, I would like Mothering to facilitate daddy discussions online, as well as a print magazine for fathers. We could host the discussions as independent boards on our site, host the online magazine for fathers on our server, and share our publishing expertise. Let me know what you think of these ideas, and please share with me your own ideas about how Mothering can better embrace fathers.