Laughing At Spilled Milk: A Skyping Adventure

Oh my good golly, I just did my first ever Skype talk! Yes, a wonderful, beautiful, intelligent woman with fantastic taste found my website and invited me to speak for her MOMSNext group in Michigan. Ah, the wonders of the internet.

Honestly, I don’t know who was more excited about this: me, because I was talking live half way across the country or Troy because he got all the tech stuff to work.  Of course, he totally sabotaged himself because now that I know he can do stuff like this, he can no longer defend his “the dishwasher loading procedure is just too complicated” excuse.

All joking aside, Troy was fantastic.  It pretty much rocks being married to both your tech support and photographer. Because of the latter, he set me up with a backdrop and killer lighting using his expensive photography equipment. Yes, we had a small squabble because he still can’t get it through his artsy little head that lighting the face of a 42 year old woman so that you can capture every detail of her aging face is not a good thing, but whatever.   We were keeping it real.*

There are several perks about Skyping.

–          You can do it from your bedroom, sitting on your bed even

–          You only have to curl the front of your hair

–          You can stay in your PJ bottoms

The down side to Skyping:

–          It kills my dream of being flown across the Pond to speak just about anywhere in Great Britain.

–          They were two hours ahead of me in the Eastern Time Zone which means I only managed to be alert and fresh faced after buckets of coffee and applying my make-up with a putty knife.

Anyway, the thing that struck me about this experience is that while these women were over a thousand miles away (that’s like three countries in Europe. Sounds more impressive when I put it that way), they were not any different than the women here in Colorado.  Same struggles to find time to fit everything into busy schedules, same needs for friendship and support, and same appreciation of my sense of humor (whew!). There’s great comfort, somehow, in knowing that no matter where we are in the world, moms are moms.  Our hopes, longings and love of family are the same.  We all belong to a great and wonderful sisterhood and knowing this makes me ache to give each one of these precious ladies I “met” today a great big “yep, I get it and we’re all in this together, aren’t we” hug. But I couldn’t. And that’s kind of a bummer.

So while it is fantastic that I got to reach out and speak to moms so far away and I would do it again in a heartbeat, there is something about meeting in person that cannot be replaced no matter how amazing technology gets.

Therefore, if you are reading this from anywhere in Great Britain, and you think I’m funny and would be a great speaker for pretty much any event you are holding, please fly me over.  My mommy hug is totally worth it!

*Cute incidental Troy story: OK, so he really, really wanted to listen in on my talk, which I get because he was pretty invested with all the setup he did, but I put the kibosh on that.  Yes, he is my biggest fan, but he is also my most tactless critic (he calls it honest.  I call it a one way ticket to couch city) so my talks tend to crash and burn if he is around as he makes me stupid nervous. Because of this, once everything was set up I sent him to the basement.  20 minutes later the talk is going great when I suddenly become aware of the sound of spoon scraping across the bottom of a cereal bowl outside our door.  Pathetic.  43 years old and he still hasn’t figured out sound travels.  And it’s not like I can call him out as I’m right in the middle of my talk – except that I so totally do, and the ladies find it funny and we all laugh at him and I get my revenge because I can see the red glow of his blush coming from beneath the door.  Mwa-ha-ha!