How I love March Madness. And not just because of the basketball.

OK, not at all because of the basketball. I’m not a big fan, plus I was always torn between hometown favorite St. Johns and best-name-ever Gonzaga. Now I’m a Wolverine but am realistic that Michigan State could do it. Makes my head spin, so I just end up blurting out, “Kentucky?..” when anyone asks me.

But I still love March Madness, because it’s the season of [everything] Madness. There’s a contest for everything: from Fug Madness to cake vs. pie madness to beer madness. It makes every day seem like an epic battle of good vs. evil, when really it’s just March.

Now I’ve entered the realm of madness myself, with a face-off of mothering calamities of everyday proportions: 9-month sleep regression, persistent diaper rash, leak milk through blouse at work, child throws golf ball down toilet and plumber can’t get it out, etc. The Moxie Madness 2012 brackets are up now and ready for you to make your picks. Voting for the first round starts this Thursday.

Any speculation about which one will win? I’d tell you my picks but I don’t want to influence the votes. I have a feeling it’s going to be hard to beat “Baby pukes in your mouth,” though…

Moxie Madness 2012: Misery Poker Tournament of Champions is open! Voting starts Thursday, March 15 and the finals are April 2. Download your brackets and make your picks, then vote early and often.

Magda Pecsenye write about parenting at AskMoxie.org and about co-parenting after divorce with her ex-husband at When The Flames Go Up.

Follow her on Twitter at @AskMoxie and join the AskMoxie Facebook group.

We were at an impasse, the kids and I.

I wanted to give them a gift, an electronic gift that was too expensive to buy two of. I wanted them to share it, since no one needs to be plugged in all the time, and I knew they’d each get a different kind of good out of it. I’d bought the device, and had it in my closet, but I knew I needed to talk to them about it before I gave it to them and asked them to share. When I told them I was giving it to them, they did not react the way I’d thought they would. The older one sighed and teared up, and the younger one said, “Yay!” but then looked at his older brother and looked sober.

“Mom, I don’t want to have to share!” the older one wailed. “We’ll just fight over who gets to use it!”

The little one confirmed. “Mom, we’ll just fight over who gets to use it and then you’ll have to take it away and nobody will get to use it!”

Wow. My kids were turning down a gadget they’d been playing with every time we passed one in a store. And all because they didn’t think they could stop fighting over which one of them played with it.

I’m not good with mornings.

Not that I’m not a morning person. I can get up and be emotionally present and have deep thoughts before 9 am. Before 6 am, even. I like waking up and going out to run. I enjoy a good sunrise. I’m just not good at all the logistics of mornings with my kids and me together having to go places.

Full disclosure: I work from home now, so I’m now able to focus only on the kids until they’re off to school, and then deal with myself. But those years we all had to be totally equipped for the day before leaving the apartment for our 45-minute subway ride to the kids’ school followed by another 40 minutes to my office, well, I might still have some trauma from that.

This time of year I hear a lot of hate about Valentine’s Day, and I think all our problems with it could be alleviated if we’d just admit the truth: Valentine’s Day is Halloween without the costumes.

Think about it:

It’s all about the candy. Seriously. Do you really want to get–or give–flowers or a teddy bear? No. You want candy. And maybe oral sex. But mostly candy. And this time of year you don’t even have to roam around with a pillowcase begging for it, or dodge Bits O’ Honey. Advantage: VD

It’s fun for kids, but too much pressure for adults. Assuming the kids go to a school at which every kid has to give valentines to every other kid so no one gets singled out, Valentine’s Day is pure fun for kids. Candy, bad puns, and an excuse to not do schoolwork for part of the day. In contrast, adults are all freaked out about what to wear and who’s expecting what when and what everything MEANS and how many Weight Watchers Points Plus all that candy is. And the stupid radio plays way too many love songs and not enough “She Blinded Me With Science.” Advantage: Halloween

If you delve too deep, the actual origins of the holiday are thoroughly gruesome. Halloween: The night in which the barrier between the dead and the living is lowest, so evil spirits are everywhere. Valentine’s Day: various martyred saints and a mob massacre. Advantage: no one.

Somebody’s using the day as an excuse to dress in an inappropriately sexy way. Red camisoles as office wear are hideous, as are sexy nurse costumes, sexy devils, sexy cats, sexy zombies, sexy Mitt Romneys, etc. Advantage: it’s a draw.

The only people who care about it are retailers and people who hate it. At Halloween it’s the retailers and “Halloween is eeeeeville” people who care about Halloween, and everyone else just shuts up, puts their noses to the grindstone to find costumes for their kids, and that’s it. At Valentine’s Day it’s the retailers and newly lovey-dovey paired-up people who care about Valentine’s Day, and everyone else just buys SpongeBob-themed valentines for their kids to hand out and a bag of Dove hearts to eat alone after everyone else in the house is asleep. Advantage: retailers.

When you wake up the next morning it’s totally over and you don’t have to think about it for another 11 1/2 months. Unless you choose to stock up on half-price candy. Advantage: you.

So try to hang in there a few more hours until it’s over. It could always be worse–you could be dressed like a sexy nun.

I work from home, and that means that every morning at 10 am, my trigger to make coffee is the theme song to The Ellen Show. The timing works out such that I’m usually putting the coffee in the machine and starting it during the intro of the show, and then I get to dance along with Ellen, and then my coffee’s ready and I sit back down and drink it while I’m working. Sometimes my only interaction with Ellen is our daily dance, but if I’m interested in her guests I’ll keep an ear on the tv.

One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve been watching is how kind Ellen is. She’s witty and sharp, but she’s also kind, to the viewers and to her guests. (Kinder than the guests deserve, sometimes.) She seems like a completely normal person, who just happens to be funnier and prettier than most of us, and married to an unnaturally gorgeous woman.

So when she announced that she was the new spokesperson for JC Penney, it made complete sense to me. I figured JC Penney was trying to make a new push into retail since KMart was going down in flames (and who knows what that would do to Sears) and was trying to be more modern. Why would you not ask one of the most likeable, least controversial people in America to be your spokesperson?

Gwynnie’s at it again. More advice, from the woman who has it all together:

“I have little kids in school. I want to maintain my marriage and my family, so I have to be here when he comes home.” Hence her recent advice to a girlfriend (who remains tantalizingly unnamed): “She is an actress and in a new relationship with someone else with a big career, and I said this may not be feminist, but you have to compromise. It’s been all about you and you’re a big deal. And if you want what you’re saying you want—a family—you have to be a wife, and that is part of the equation. Gloria Steinem may string me up by my toes, but all I can do is my best, and I can do only what works for me and my family.”

My friend and mentor Num-Num (her internet nickname, not her real name) says that the key to success in life is seeing your luck when it comes. She believes that everyone has luck that comes into your life, but some people don’t see that it’s come so they ignore it, and others see it but don’t do anything with it.

Since the divorce, I’ve tried to be aware of my luck and grab it and hold onto it when it shows up. Getting admitted to the grad program I’m in is the most obvious example of luck that’s popped up and that I grabbed onto, and I’m thankful every day that I grabbed it. (OK, maybe not every day. Like the day I took a 3 1/2-hour Financial Management exam from the Orlando airport between a work meeting and a flight, with random kids pelting me with candy and some lady yammering on her phone right near my head about how her flight was late. That day I wasn’t so excited about it. But other days, yes.) It is amazing to me how much things fell into place when I followed that path, even though I had no idea how it could possibly work out when I started on the path.

While most of us got excellent care during pregnancy and birth, some of us have heard bizarre things, alarmist misdiagnoses, or just plain weirdness from our care providers.

Slide show of weirdness after the jump:

A famous blogging couple announced a split, and the internets are wondering how it happened. I wrote about the sadness we feel when a couple we thought was healthy breaks up over at the co-parenting blog I write with my ex-husband, but I thought I’d talk about what it means to be a blogger who reveals something so big and so secret.

The thing about blogging is that you share so much of yourself with your readers, but you’re not sharing everything. Those of us who have been online for a long time have gotten very good at sharing the essence of us, without every detail and every interaction. When you’re in a marriage that’s going south (or even in a job you hate but aren’t ready to leave, or another situation you have to be loyal to until you can make the break), you aren’t asking for input. You don’t want to crowdsource marriage counseling or whether you should stay or go. So you CANNOT say anything about it until it’s a done deal. There’s a part in the amazing book Uncoupling by Diane Vaughan (which I recommend to anyone going through a breakup because it’s just a timeline, not a guilt trip) that talks about having that seed of doubt that your relationship will work but not being able to be disloyal by saying anything about it to your partner. In a way, in blogging, your readers are your partners. If you know something is wrong, but you can’t tell them, that means you have to try even harder to live on the good parts and only write about things that seem normal.

Add to that the complication that in a divorce you are in a legal fight and have to defend yourself and advocate for your best interests constantly. Until the settlement is signed, it’s constant negotiation (negotiation if you’re lucky; donnybrook if you’re not) and anything can change anything. From something as small as which set of grandparents your children get to spend Labor Day with this year to where your children live and what school they go to to how much money you will have to live on in two years–it’s all up for grabs.

Even if you both want the split, even if you agree on how the days should flow for your kids, even if you trust the other person to do what’s best for the kids (and those are some huuuuge assumptions), there are moments in which you panic. You are assessing exactly who you can trust and exactly how much you can trust them constantly, and if you find out that there’s been even a tiny breach, it can send you into a tailspin.

The media image of divorce is that it’s a knock-down-drag-out in court with parents who become so self-centered that they will do anything they have to to get their ways, or (the latest media darling, and yes, my ex and I have been asked to play into this image all the time) so calm and peaceful that the separating is just logistics. And maybe there are some people who fit those extremes. But the truth for most of us who’ve gone through divorce is that your story changes every single day. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. You are simultaneously trying to figure out what happened, figure out who you are, figure out what is best for your kids, figure out what’s best for you, and then fight to get those bests against someone you thought you knew but don’t want to be around anymore. It is exhausting and hopeless, with no safe place to stand.

How could you possibly let your readers into that? Some of them wouldn’t understand, and some of them would understand too well. Some of them would take anything you wrote as the truth for always, and some would dismiss everything you wrote as being too emotional. So, honestly, it’s best for everyone if you write about the same stuff you’ve always written about. Eventually you will have your feet under you again, and that stuff will become the truth once more.

Even if you are tempted to blog it all, every incident, every revelation about yourself, every emotion, you can’t if you have children. You cannot throw your children under the bus by saying negative things about one of their parents. Whether it’s the other parent or you, you can’t leave a trail of things on the internet for them to read about what a bad/weak/disloyal person their parent is. If it’s true, they will figure it out on their own, in private. If it’s only a (perhaps temporary) version of the truth, you will hurt them by writing it.

And so. The straight facts are out there: he is moving out, she is leaving, we are splitting. And while your regular readers give you the benefit of the doubt, others do not. But you can’t tell your whole story, especially while it’s happening. You can only keep writing the essence of who you are and hope that they understand.

By now everyone knows that Beyonce and Jay-Z welcomed their baby Blue Ivy to the world last Saturday, January 7. Aside from the name (it’s like they read Awesomely Luvvie but didn’t get the point), questions about who actually gestated the baby, and a bunch of other weird stuff, there are a lot of concerns about what happened at Lenox Hill Hospital that day.

For those of you who don’t live in NYC or know anything about hospitals there, LHH has for years been the place celebrities and women with high-risk pregnancies go to have their babies. At the time I was giving birth (7-10 years ago), LHH had a c-section rate of over 40%.

In other words, LHH has the reputation of being a boutique hospital for people who need or want a lot of interventions and are willing to pay for it or have great insurance. I don’t know if this is deserved or not deserved–I don’t know what their actual demographics are. This is just the way it’s perceived by the average parent on the playground in NYC.

So no one was surprised that the Knowles-Carters a) went to LHH over other hospitals in the NYC area, or b) had a private birthing suite. (Rumors about their spending a million dollars to have an entire floor to themselves notwithstanding.) It also doesn’t surprise me that they brought their own security. And that people visiting the hospital wanted to catch a glimpse of the baby and were denied by the private security and got mad about that.

What is surprising and concerns me is the claim by parents with babies in the NICU that they were prevented from seeing their children during the time the Knowles-Carters were at Lenox Hill. Most vocal about this are Rozz and Neil Nash-Coloun, who had twin daughters in the NICU.  Here’s the NY Times story about the Nash-Coloun’s claim. LHH has counter-claimed (in the hilariously-titled press release “Lenox Hill Hospital Clears the Record on Beyonce Birth” which just, well, let’s just say “Mission Accomplished“) that it didn’t happen and no patients have come to them about being barred from seeing their children.

Here’s a hint, Lenox Hill: The parents haven’t talked to you about it yet because they are going to sue you back into the Stone Age. Or at least downtown. I don’t blame them.

Can you IMAGINE going to see your baby–your child–in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and being told that you were not allowed to, and that all security cameras on the floor of the hospital were being turned off or covered?

Note: I’m not blaming Beyonce and Jay-Z for this, as they were doing what they thought was best for their child, even though it was in complete disregard for other people. (See also: “Why rich and powerful people make seriously questionable decisions,” which may be the topic of my PhD dissertation, from a business ethics, leadership, and corporate governance angle.) I land this squarely in the lap of Lenox Hill Hospital. They have enough celebrities having babies there that this has to be something they’ve dealt with before. Balancing desires for privacy with the right to see your child seems like it would be a common issue for the hospital, and one that they’d done many times.

So why didn’t they have a plan that allowed for separation so the Knowles-Carter baby could be isolated but other patients could still have the access to their children that they were legally entitled to? Or maybe even, you know, tell the Knowles-Carters they couldn’t comply with their security requests, even if it meant that they had the baby someplace else?

If it had been me that was barred from seeing my child, Lenox Hill would have been acutely aware of the pending lawsuit. I can’t decide if I’d have gone full-on Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on them, or let it play out more slowly à la Keyser Söze. Would I bust my kid out of the NICU like the lady in “Not Without My Daughter”*? Would I simply get the police to come and arrest the head of security at LHH for kidnapping, or would I leave a horse’s head in the bed of the head of the hospital**? Or would I open a competing hospital nearby and put them out of business***? The possibilities are really endless, but the moral of the story is twofold:

1. Don’t get between a mother bear and her cub, and
2. If you go someplace that privileges money, you are only assured of your rights if you’re the one with the most money.

I really didn’t care much about this whole pregnancy and birth thing until I heard about the mess LHH got itself into. Now I’m super-curious to see how it plays out. Any thoughts?

* Not recommended, as I’d probably have to bust out one of the nurses with my kid, too. And maybe some of the machines.

** I would not actually harm a horse.

*** Release the hounds, Smithers.