So many of us are trying to find ways to make a difference in our communities, sometimes politically and other times for social issues. We do what we can, but of course change can happen a little more quickly when those with slightly higher profiles decide to get involved with causes.

More Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lesley Jane Seymour is a supporter of CARE, a humanitarian organization dedicated to fighting global poverty. CARE recently held its annual national conference to help teach women how to lobby and approach lawmakers on behalf of some of the poorest women around the world. Seymour thought it would be a great idea if she could convince a group of her readers to attend the conference with her, so she launched the 40 Over 40 Making a Difference effort, which ended up being 50 Over 40!

50 MORE readers accompanied Seymour to the conference to learn about how they can lobby Congress on behalf of the poorest women around the world, with the focus being on securing the positions of women in their families and communities to better their economic situations.

Just days after conference, over 25 new co-sponsors in Congress signed on to the Child Marriage Prevention Act that was in the works, which is important because one of the goals of this year’s CARE conference was to bring attention to plight of so many girls around the world who are forced into marriages at incredibly young ages.

While Seymour was heading back home on the train after the conference, she took some time out to talk with me about why she thinks she, as a magazine editor, should be promoting women’s activism.

“We have the power and the time to help. It’s our obligation to change the world and our readers want to help do that,” Seymour said. “But to do that, we have to know how the legislative process works and get Congress to work for us.” And that’s where the work of the Care National Conference came in, teaching her and other 400 others how to navigate Congressional offices on behalf of causes they believe in.

Seymour talked with the “50 Over 40″ who accompanied her, and said so many were anxious to be more involved in helping to make change for women around the world.

“These women said they had all written checks to charity in the past, but that just giving money alone didn’t feel tangible to them. They wanted to work on a project that could do something with a specific impact,” said Seymour right before she almost missed her train stop because of our chat!

If I had been paying more attention, I would would have signed up for the Care conference, since it was held in Washington, D.C. Because what better information to have as Mothers of Intention, than knowing how to get doors opened and phones answered in the offices of our lawmakers. Just think what we could accomplish if more of us knew how to get that kind of access.

Maybe we should ask Seymour for 60 Over 40 next year?

I’m learning the hard way that they aren’t the innocuous diversion that I thought they were, especially with a daughter on the verge of tweenhood. Check out my latest at 50-something Moms, Fashion Magazines, I Have to “Quit” You.

Don’t worry, though — I’m not quitting punditry anytime soon!

That’s what Supreme Court nominee and federal court judge Sonia Sotomayor has said in the past about how individual experience comes into play when deciding cases and looking at the law.

Many conservatives are afraid of that approach and are going to try to convince America that no judge should be appointed to the Supreme Court who doesn’t decide cases merely by applying the law to the facts of a case in a vacuum.

But which facts? How do we know which ones are the important ones in any case? The right ones? The ones that will sway a case from one outcome to another? As someone who practiced law for about 15 years, I know that sometimes those questions are easier than others.

You can’t decide a case without looking at all the facts, even the ones that don’t seem important at first blush. I learned that the hard way as a young lawyer. That’s where digging a little deeper and calling on the things we’ve learned in life help us out as lawyers in a way that all those law school classes don’t.

At the risk of being called too flip in this analogy, I’d like to invoke my favorite movie lawyer Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. (If you’re short on time, pick up the video at about 4:30).

As a recovering litigator, I LOVE a good cross-examination! I’m not talking about the unlikely witness stand confession — Elle’s personal expertise that the rules of hair care are simple and finite are what turned the tide in that case. Without knowing those facts, she would not have been able to make the connection and prove that the witness was lying. Yet her male bosses scoffed at her, thinking she was headed down a pointless tangent as she questioned the witness.

I know this was just a movie, but the example happens in real life cases every day — lawyers and judges find ways to apply the things they’ve learned in their own lives — to sift through facts to figure out what’s relevant and what isn’t. Sometimes that’s easy and sometimes it takes something more than an Ivy League law degree and years on the bench to put the pieces together to see the whole picture.

Does anyone really doubt that the outcome of the Lilly Ledbetter case would have been different if the majority of Supreme Court justices had faced the kind of discrimination Ledbetter or their colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had? Ginsburg, as is evident from her dissent, saw the facts of the discrimination a lot differently than her male counterparts.

Facts are never just black and white. They look a lot different depending on the lens through which they are viewed. For some men, there’s no relevance to how women have been treated differently than men by companies who find loopholes in existing laws. But to a woman who has lived or observed that experience, there’s a very real and significant difference.

When the GOP goes on the attack on Sotomayor’s nomination, as they surely will, and try to frame her as an activist judge or someone who can’t focus just on the facts and the law, keep reminding yourself about Elle Woods.

If she hadn’t been a Cosmo girl, her client would have ended up in jail for life for a murder she didn’t commit. I’m not saying that we should ask if Sonia Sotomayor was ever a Cosmo girl, but sometimes there are important things our life experiences teach us that get us to the right outcome.

That’s not activism. That’s real life.

There’s a storm brewing around me, and everywhere I turn someone is having a crisis about the meaning of hope. The questions are sometimes spoken, but mostly silent, and they sound something like this:

If I don’t want to travel around the world to (maybe scary) places and ask people questions about hope, am I still a hopeful person?
Can you be hopeful and incredibly doubtful at the same time?
Is there some sort of expert definition of hope and do you have to be a survivor of various tragedies to claim it?
What if the hope you know best is the kind that shows up in tiny moments–like giving a child a bath or washing the dishes or making a bed–and what if you’re not so hopeful about other things–like if the person you love loves you back? or if your life can be dramatically different than it is right at this moment, even though you desperately wish it was?
Is being hopeful best left to a hope specialist? or do regular people who (theoretically) have nothing to complain about really have a shot at that thing at all?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I’m watching carefully as the questions unravel the askers and I’m hoping against all hope I have nothing to do with all the accompanying self-doubt, but I’m not so sure.

What I do know is that hope starts as a seed and if you are very, very lucky, you find a place to plant it, and someone else comes along and waters it and little by little together you can watch it grow. What it grows into no one can predict exactly unless you were also lucky enough to find the master gardener who gave it to you and ask her what it will turn out to be, but even if you can find that person and she decide to tell you, I’m not sure you could believe her or that your heart could even let you know the answer–the future of seeds being generally mysterious and uncertain, especially to the person who’s never held a seed before.

At least not a seed as simple and innocent as this.

It was just a flash, anyway, right? The way you felt when you saw the fire in her little girl eyes. The way your heart leapt when you first looked through the lens at running water, fresh turned earth. The way you knew everything had to change when you heard your name, when you read the fine print.

It hardly matters.

Or does it?

Hope asks that you notice tiny moments, each one, but not only this. Hope asks that you trust them, that you listen to them, that you take that sneaking suspicion that the Universe is indeed a safe place, a good place even and that you plant it deep into that dark corner of your heart.

It’s a ridiculous act, and no one need know. Until, of course, everyone has to know. That something’s growing here. And that whatever it is, it is no longer meant for darkness, that it is taking over actually. That it is expanding beyond the confines of your mind and twisting and turning its way out your ears and your eyes and even–God help us–your mouth where it says exactly what it was thinking, back when it was just a seed in a case in the dark in the part of your heart where you were most hurting.

And believe me, these words are a scandal. They are deceptively simple. So simple, you could miss the click before the explosion goes off, before you understand really, that everything must change if this thing is even half true.

“You have everything you need.”
“You are not alone.”
“No one belongs here more than you.”

By the time you speak them, you will forget about hope or the seed or the flash when you first wondered if it could be true. By then, you will have an actual living thing to tend to, a living thing that looks nothing like when it started–a little bit of nothing in your hands. With this living thing–this Hope made manifest–you will have a place to rest, a place to stand, a view from which to see the world, a blossom of goodness to inhale, a bit of fruit to nourish you, a site to behold from a far off land. From the shoots of this living thing, you will plant again and again and again until your life is a field of possibility, until your land is a garden of Hope where any lost traveler can come.

For something to eat.
Or a seed.
Or a story.
Or a place to be convinced,
the best is yet to come.

Thanks, Jen! We can’t wait to see the photographs you come back with. Anyone who knows you knows they will be filled with inspiration for the rest of us.

Photo courtesy of Tracey Clark of Shutter Sisters

It shouldn’t be such a stretch to expect Barack Obama to appoint a woman with his first Supreme Court nomination. After all, as Laura Stiller Rikleen pointed out at the Boston Globe:

[W]e wonder, by what possible analysis could a woman not be appointed as only the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court since it first assembled in 1790?

… [E]ven with our significant numbers in the legal profession, some commentators insist on classifying women as a “special interest” that the president will need to consider. How did one-half of the population and a third of the profession come to be viewed as a special interest?

Neither women nor mothers are special interest groups — we’re the ones who spend most of the money and manage our families, be they children, spouses, parents, siblings or more.

President Obama says he wants to appoint someone to the Supreme Court who can bring real life perspectives to the bench, as well as the necessary intellectual heft. I couldn’t agree more. Think about how things might have turned out differently if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hadn’t been the only woman (and mother) on the court when it told Lilly Ledbetter that it wouldn’t do anything about the wage discrimination by her employer Goodyear and when the court suggested that there is a role for its paternalism when it comes to reproductive choice.

And if there had been other women’s voices on the Court, would the outcome have been different in the Court’s recent decision that employers are justified in discounting maternity leave when it comes to determining pension eligibility of female employees? One more blow to our fight for equal pay for women that Congress must address since the guys on the Court just don’t get it.

It wouldn’t surprise me if decisions like that make Sandra Day O’Connor wonder why she ever left the Court in the first place.

Justice Ginsburg has fought the good fight, especially with the language of her dissenting opinions, in calling out her fellow justices in their attitudes toward women, but she’s only one vote. And she’s 76. She needs some back-up.

I’d like to suggest that a mother who still has children at home (or isn’t too far out from that experience) could provide an interesting peek into the intersection of judicial ivory towers and real life — someone who is still living the daily reality of what it means to be the one in the family who brings home the bacon, fries it up in the pan, and makes sure the grease doesn’t get poured down the sink because she’ll be the one who has to take time off from work when the plumber has to come and snake the drain. Someone like that could be a powerful voice of reason when it comes to getting the remaining members of the Supreme Court to remember that there is a place for the law to intersect with real life.

The current short list of SCOTUS candidates contains many outstanding women candidates — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Kim Wardlaw, Diane Wood and Jennifer Granholm — and several of them are mothers.

Another commentator has suggested that if Obama wants to consider a qualified candidate who is a mother, he might also take a look at Caroline Kennedy, Marian Wright Edelman and Sentaor Claire McCaskill. And if law degree isn’t necessary, I’d suggest that the President look around these parts of the blogosphere — I KNOW there are some women around here who could make some good decisions for the working families of America and teach some of those other justices a thing or two about the impact of making judicial decisions in a reality vacuum.

Obviously, there are plenty of women candidates who don’t have children who would make great additions to the court. But as long as we’re taking life experiences and personal lenses into consideration, why not think about how another mother’s view from the highest bench in the land might give us the additional ally we need when it comes to decisions that impact women’s health, women’s salaries and women’s lives?

After all, we’ve got a mother and a grandmother in the White House and one as Secretary of State. It’s time to beef up the presence of mothers in the court system too!

I have to admit that I am so tired of all the eye rolls from friends, acquaintances and even doctors after even the slightest mention that there are certain foods I AM CONVINCED have an adversely affect my son’s behavior.

The typical comment (accompanied by a snicker) is These foods have been around forever, your son is not the first to eat them. These kids are fine and Chill Out.

But, now a kindred spirit in the form of mom Robyn O’Brien, founder of AllergyKids, has laid it all out for us mamas to understand in her book, The Unhealthy Truth.

I knew it! I am not crazy. The unhealthy, and unfortunate, truth is that since the late 1990s, our food supply has undergone a significant change where for example the package of boxed macaroni & cheese that you ate as a child is not that same that you are feeding your kids today. Instead our food supply is NOW laden with genetically-modified proteins, antibiotics, chemical additives and preservatives, all allergens irritating our kids’ immune systems and contributing to a skyrocketing allergy epidemic.

Robyn O’Brien leaves no stone unturned going from food group to food group and telling us what we need to know. Really! There’s drama, financial intrigue and politics behind the scenes of the FDA, CDC, and FAAN when it comes to Soy, Corn, Milk, Artificial Sweetners & Coloring. O’Brien is our generation’s Erin Brokovitch sharing with us a John Grishamesque-tale wherein you expect Julia Roberts to be starring in the book’s movie-version. Unfortunately, this isn’t the Pelican Brief, it’s a true story and our kids are the victims.

What Robyn O’Brien learned and has shared with us is that parents need to be the ones reading every label (if only that were good enough) and understanding from where their children’s food is sourced because unfortunately our government has done a piss-poor job over the last 10+ years protecting our food supply. Until things change, parents need to be more active and responsible.

Now, you can read The Unhealthy Truth and get really mad. Or, you can read it and be motivated to act like Mama O’Brien. We can make our food safe for our kids and make laws to protect our children from dangerous foods just like the European, Australian, Japanese and Russian moms have already done.

See, our food has changed and new ingredients have been added that have NEVER been tested for safety. Don’t you think our food should be clearly labeled so that we have a clear choice about what to feed our kids? I sure do.

The European Union has a law requiring the labeling of foods containing ingredients with more than 0.9% of genetically-modified content. We Americans have nothing. Heck, I had no idea corn (found in virtually all processed foods) and soy were genetically-modified. Shame on me? Shame on our government? Or, shame on the food industry?

It is possible for big companies to make and sell kid-friendly, family-friendly and healthfully-processed foods. They are doing it in many countries outside of the US.

In the UK, many US-based companies like Wal-Mart, Kraft, Coca-Cola, and the Mars Company have voluntarily removed artificial colors, the preservative sodium benzoate and aspartame from their products. Which begs the question why are these companies not doing a better job here at home?

Don’t our kids deserve better?

What can you do? Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.

1) Start reading food labels much more vigilantly again; we’re very good about organic dairy, vegetables and grass-fed meats already. (The book provides you with a list of brands to trust)

2) Eliminate some of the worse offenders from my son’s diet (Yellow 5 & Sodium Benzoate) swiftly.

3) Support initiatives to have a safer food supply. I went to Change.org, typed “food” in the search button, and supported actions that made sense. I’m not done here, there’s much action to be taken.

Does this mean my family is going cold turkey and you’ll never see us chowing down on some colorfully-processed foods? No. I love me some cheeseburgers & fries (with a shake to go with it) for special times and won’t deny my son the same guilty pleasures on occasion.

But the bigger issue is getting the companies and the government to make it so that we parents don’t always feel like we’re playing bad cop but rather can walk confidently down our local grocery store aisles and shop for food without fear that it is making us sick.

If your child’s health is important to you, then yes, The Unhealthy Truth is for you. It’s intense (don’t plan to fly through it like the Twilight series), but it’s an important book, one that parents need to digest. I didn’t feel there was any fear-mongering in it, but rather well-researched and important information about the connection between our food and why it is possibly making this generation of kids sick.

Thanks so much, Isabel, for being this week’s Mother of Intention!

So, I figured it was time to learn a little but about all the bells and whistles on this fancy-schmancy camera, so I took a quick class this week on learning how to use many of the features. I decided to get a little artsy while I was at it.

The first commenter who can correctly guess where I took this photo will win an autographed copy of Maggie Mason’s No One Cares What You Had for Lunch (from my personal collection)!

Photo by PunditMom

Michelle Obama speaks out often about her experiences as a working mother and her personal struggle with the all-elusive work/life balance. And she’s been quick to point out that even as challenging as it has been for her, she’s had it easy compared to many working moms who not only try to juggle it all, but have no safety net — meaning they get no paid sick time, and their employers don’t cut them any slack if they have to leave work early to pick up a sick child or have the sitter cancel at the last minute on a work day.

So on the one hand, I was encouraged when Michelle spoke recently the annual meeting of Corporate Voices for Working Families, but I have to wonder if this organization is something that will really move working families forward or whether it’s just window dressing to keep the masses quiet?

For example, in her remarks, Michelle said we need to “discuss” on-site quality childcare. But my question is this — what’s left to discuss? There’s really no question that everyone would benefit from more flexible policies –families win by not having to worry about losing their jobs to care for sick kids and employers win because their employees become more productive and more loyal.

Sure, it’s wonderful to have high profile and big name corporations apparently behind the efforts of CVWF. But what they are doing in their own corporate lives? Do all 50 corporate sponsors give their employees paid sick leave? On-site childcare? Flex-time for emergency school pick-ups and doctor appointments? Becky at Deep Muck Big Rake raises this tidbit in answer to that question — Marriott and other CVWF sponsors who claim they want to be more flexible are also members of the US Chamber of Commerce, which is actively lobbying against any increases in the Family and Medical Leave Act — changes that would significantly help working parents manage these issues. Forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical; it just seems like a bit of a disconnect to me.

Even when companies offer programs aimed at making things more manageable for working families, are employees encouraged to take advantage of these benefits or are there subtle forms of discouragement?

That’s really the elephant in the room, isn’t it — whether employees face unwanted consequences if they take advantage of these efforts designed to make things a little more manageable? I’m not the only on wondering. Ellen Galinsky, President of the Families and Work Institute, wrote at the Huffington Post:

At a private meeting that I attended with her following her speech, Mrs. Obama heard more about “what works” from two companies and asked us why these initiatives aren’t more widespread. If family-friendly programs and policies are so good for employers and employees, she asked, then why aren’t more companies providing them?

…

The people around the table suggested a number of reasons why more companies don’t provide flexibility and other work life programs. They said it can be more difficult to manage employees who are working flexibly, flexibility is seen as a perk, not a business strategy, and some programs can cost money.

Then a man in finance spoke up. He said, “Show me the dollars saved by these programs.” Although it wasn’t mentioned, if someone assumes that “presence equals productivity,” they dismiss even dollars and cents arguments.

Just because options are there, doesn’t mean that unspoken consequences of taking the leave don’t exist. When I was an attorney in private practice, I had plenty of paid sick leave and four weeks of vacation time each year. But even as a singleton with no child care obligations, it was made clear that there would be career and income consequences if I went on vacation for a month, let alone actually called in sick when I was under the weather.

So that’s why I have to wonder if these new efforts are just window dressing? Because, really, if employers had an epiphany that it made sense to be flexible, wouldn’t they just do it? We wouldn’t need another study or FLOTUS Michelle and her wonderful bully pulpit.

A real work/life balance solution needs to start with making time and resources available, but there also needs to be a major shift in how employers view and treat their employees who dare to take it. I have a feeling that shift will take a little longer than Michelle’s first four years in the White House.

Common wisdom suggests that President Barack Obama will name a woman to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice David Souter. The names of Sonia Sotomayor, Kim Wardlaw, Elena Kagan and Jennifer Granholm seem to be on the short list, at least if you listen to the pundits on cable.

Without much fanfare, a new name seems to have been added, quite stealthily, to the list — Judge Carlos Moreno of the California Supreme Court.

There are many men and women who have the intellectual heft, and life experience, to be good additions to the Supreme Court. But as we’ve learned the hard way, judicial decisions that impact women are influenced in a certain way if women are on the bench. It’s not just that a female vote helps form a majority, but studies have found that there is a less tangible force at work that at least statistically suggests that courts are more likely to vote in favor of a woman plaintiff in discrimination cases if there is a woman on the bench.

I’m sure Lilly Ledbetter would have preferred that.

So I wondered as I read the news about Moreno, who’s name was suggested by Senator Dianne Feinstein, can President Obama withstand the political heat that would inevitably come from women voters and women’s groups if his first SCOTUS nominee leaves Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the lone woman on the Supreme Court?

I suppose there’s a chance that President Obama might think he’ll be in the clear if he appoints a male Justice, in light of this little poll that suggests the majority of Americans don’t think diversity is all that important a consideration when choosing a lifetime nominee to the highest court in the land.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the President pays no attention that poll. And I sure wouldn’t want to be him in a family full of strong black women if he puts more testosterone on the Supreme Court bench! Would Michelle make him sleep with FDOTUS?? If nothing else, I’m sure Oprah would have something to say about that — and I don’t think he wants to cross her. He’ll need her again in 2012!