Surprise! I'm a single parent

Did you ever see the movie Fargo?  Great movie on lots of levels. A super cool thing about it is the protagonist – a female cop in a snowscaped rural america – is very very pregnant as she investigates a murder or two. This got me thinking (oh i dunno maybe it didn’t but i know at some stage i got to thinking) and the think I was mulling over was how protagonists (the main characters in books) are usually single and no kids. 

An unfettered hero is great for a writer. No need to stop the plot while they go to work,  find a baby sitter, cook the family dinner, wait on the phone to sign up for next terms swimming, or hold out till pay day before they can afford to travel to the next point in their journey. In fact part of the happy ever after is often settling down to a life where ‘adventure’. 

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows I’m living in post happy ever after. 

Well it’s often ocured to me we need more stories like fargo – in fact farther along than fargo. Stories of Mums having lives as well as kids would be cool. I’ve thought of writing them mysef but I’m so fricking busy being a Mum and working and the occasional blog. But then I was reading up on my new weird fascination: Sarah Palin and I came across reference to ‘Mom lit’. Wow really? 

Of course then i was dissapointed. It turns out Mom lit is the spawn of chick lit and the apple isn’t rotting far from the tree. Boo. I am always a person to judge a book by it’s cover and chick lit is just too pink and kooky Mary Quant looking. (Hmm what would Sarah Palin think?) 

But here’s the thing – in the instant when i thought I knew what Mom lit was (the sort of Mom lit I wanted to write) I was all excited but I was also thinking to myself why wasn’t I writing that and now I’ve discovered there is a job still out there to do! Much more interesting than vacuuming.