Pioneer Mom

I was watching this Pioneer Woman thing on the Food Network, because I wanted to see what someone was doing with my pioneer mom idea. She's this lady out in the flat wilderness of like Texas or someplace where it's all flat with the signpost to the ranch sticking up at the end of a vacant driveway and black cows hanging around in clumps, looking like they want to join jazz groups and move to New York. The driveway is so long you can't even see the house, like you have to catch a connecting flight from the driveway entrance, ascend, eat your peanuts, descend and taxi right to the house.

Anyway, this lady is so happy about cooking, she has dimples when she smiles. She made these cornbread blueberry muffins that looked delish. She has these four kids that she homeschools at "the Lodge," which is I guess a Lodge, somewhere on their property, they had to drive to it probably for 45 minutes from their house, and never saw a human being or left their own property. The kids seemed so shy and quiet, even the teenagers, and I thought dude, how great, these kids are living in "The Shining." They never see other kids, their mom makes them every meal, their siblings are their class science team - as a mom, I enjoy the tidiness of this. No outside world, just do everything I tell you and eat my food and at 18 you can go be a junkie and live in Washington Square Park.

I guess I thought Pioneer Mom would do more outdoor cooking, or certainly more cow milking or yelling. My version of Pioneer Mom would be so much more fun - we'd stir up big vats of barbeque that would probably taste bad so we'd have to go out to eat. We'd dress more frontier, like gingham, and our hair would be done in cool sausage rolls. In Pioneer days, you would have a community of other covered wagon families, there'd be Nellie Olsen, the bad seed, there'd be hay chopping and kids cheeks flushed pink from sunshine and exercise. The things I miss with our kids connected to electronics, iPods and TVs.

All the connected to the land stuff was missing, all the struggling to get through the day was missing, TV Pioneer Mom was double dipping chocolate smores as treats to give to the kids after a spelling bee. But there was no other kid whose ponytails you dipped into the inkwell, or lunch you stole, or teacher you had a crush on. You need the whole picture. A Pioneer Woman is someone out in a vast - open - wide space, training her people like warriors in the wilderness, teaching them with the help of sun, seasons, land and the one-roomed schoolhouse.

Maybe the Food Network is more interested in the smores. They aren't called the Wide Open Idea network. I guess I was hoping to see a frontier mom like me. Never enough time for anything, running the farm, feeding people, keeping people excelling in school, guiding them after school, laying flat on the ground in despair for a few minutes in the middle of each day, in the sun, then the slow slide into dinner and bed, the nighttime funnel where the littlest one is always scratching to go back up the slide but still has to slide down into the end of the day as well.

But I am a Pioneer Mom, with a genuine interest in being bigger than I am. Messier, wider, wrap your arms around the earth and squeeze tight. See what happens. Maybe in the end, the only important thing is that blueberry corn muffins are worth making. They sound good. But part of the show should be the hard work, the joy - the scrambling, always, to get the cows in before dark.