My New Bio

My mother is a wonderful, self-appointed editor. She takes it upon herself to fix all my theirs and theres. She emails me about my typos and misspellings, my run-on sentences and my dangling participles. I’m grateful for her help. And when some stranger emails me to tell me what I mis-typed, my first response is: How did my mother not catch that!

Her last email to me was how dated my Meridian Magazine Author’s Bio is now. It must be amended. After all,  the kids have had birthdays, heck, I’ve had a birthday, and the new 2011 edition of our offspring just rolled off the line. We’re in a new house, I’ve grown out my bangs, and life is marching on, apparently across my face.

I don’t want to be like one of those nationally syndicated columnists whose picture is still so obviously from 1962, bouffant and all. So in the name of being current, here is a rough draft for my new bio:

Margaret Anderson is the mother of 5, count them 5, young, wonderful, do-all-parents-think-their-children-are-this-fabulous children. Five is a big number around her house. She often finds herself counting to five, whether in an effort to control her temper (Inhale! One, two, three, four, five…), demonstrate to her children the seriousness of her demands (One! Two! Threeee! I mean it!! Four!) or to ensure her brood is all present and accounted for at the park, at the pool, or at the beach. (One, two, three, four, where’s five? Oh no! Where’s fi…oh, thank goodness! Five!) Her middle child just turned five, next year she will turn 35, she nurses her new baby at 5am, and she can currently function just fine on 5 hours of sleep.

When Margaret is not counting to five, she is either in her pajamas until noon, or answering the front door in a large terry cloth robe and sopping wet hair around 12:15pm because her toddler knocked on her shower door and said she had company.

She buys Legos, Play-Dough, and markers against her better judgment. She writes grocery lists and to-do lists on paper plates, and she is in love with her minivan. She slurps down green smoothies and is currently on a “no white sugar, no white flour” diet in an effort to loss the baby weight. Ironically, her little “office ” is in the kitchen.

She is ever-devoted to her children, madly in love with her husband, and has a love/hate relationship with running.

You can read more by Margaret on her blog at jamsandpickles.com

So, what do you think? (Don’t worry, if it has a typo, my mother will catch it.)

Do I really have to update the picture too? Can’t I at least wait until this whole “no white sugar, no white flour” thing works its magic? Then I can just tease my hair into a fetching bouffant and call it good for decades.