With her signature saucy style, local author — and former KTYD morning radio personality — Jenna McCarthy dishes up some ditties on why parenting truly is a trip.
Leslie Dinaberg: Tell us about your newest book, Cheers to the New Mom! Cheers to the New Dad!: Tips and Tricks to Help You Ace the First Months of Parenthood.
Jenna McCarthy: It’s very much a gift book. … They call it two books in one because it’s a flip cover; one half is “Cheers to the New Mom” and you flip it over and it’s “Cheers to the New Dad.”
LD: Cute idea.
JM: The first book, The Parent Trip: From High Heels and Parties to Highchairs and Potties, is kind of my story. The whole idea is, I’m a writer, so I’m a reader, and I get pregnant and I go out and I buy every book on pregnancy. I was like, why does everybody else love it and I don’t? And why is everybody else all kittens and sunshine and I hate my husband right now?
I don’t hate my husband, but I have these moments. So I wrote this whole thing that was just my reality. All these people came to me and said, “Oh, my God, that’s me,” and “Thank you for saying that.”
Then this other publisher says, “We want your voice and your tone, but it’s not the story anymore, it’s just little tips.” So it’s everything divided into half for moms and half for dads.
LD: The Parent Trip — which made me laugh out loud — reads like columns. Were they ever published anywhere else?
JM: I published a serialized pregnancy diary in Fit Pregnancy magazine.
Coincidentally, I entered a contest sponsored by Community of Voices. I won and the prize was a scholarship to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, which was a week away. So I get the packet for the conference and I’m so excited, and it says bring something you’re working on.
Like what? I didn’t know I was coming here so I’m not really working on anything. I was a magazine writer at the time so I was like, I’ll just bring the pregnancy diary and see where that goes.
In the workshops they make you read. So I would be reading stuff and even guys would be like, “I would totally read that.” So I kept going.
LD: Good for you.
JM: It’s very fun to get it out; it’s very cathartic. I was always pretty sure it would make it into a book, but even if it did not, it’s a love letter to my daughter. How many of us know what our parents went through and what they were really thinking?
LD: I’ve kept journals since I was 10, but the whole time I was pregnant and then in my son’s early babyhood, my journals are the most sparse they’ve ever been because I was just so tired.
JM: In the moment you think, “I’ll never forget this. I’ll never forget one minute of this beautiful-horrible-whatever-it-is to you.’’ Then, especially when you go to do it again, it’s, “Was I this big? Was I this sick?’’ You have no idea.
LD: So now you have a whole series of “trip” books planned, The Toddler Trip, The Kindergarten Trip, The Tween Trip, The Teen Trip?
JM: I’m trying to decide that right now. Part of me wants to keep going because it’s fun and, frankly, it’s easy for me to write first person. But then I go, is that really what I want to be? Do I want to be Brand Jenna? I want to write all sorts of stuff. I’d love to write fiction, I’d love to write a million different things, so I feel like I’m at that little crossroads right now.
LD: I totally relate to that.
JM: It literally just hit me this week and I’m struggling with it so much. I love what I do; I love that I can do it from my house in my pajamas. I love that I can do it in my house when my kid has a 100-degree fever, and I don’t have to call anybody or freak out or lie. I’m home. Here I am. This is what I do. And so I’m asking myself, what is it that I want that I don’t have? I’m published internationally. I’m in, like, 17 different countries and a million different languages and I reach millions of people every month, so what it is that I don’t think I have? I don’t have the answer.
LD: What’s your typical day like?
JM: I get up early. My 4-year-old and I are usually up by 6 a.m. together. She likes me to print the coloring pages off the computer. The other day it was Mount Rushmore, one day it was a frog with a prince crown on it. I have to find the thing that she wants to color and she does that while I go through my e-mail.
I have a million little quirks, but I do not like my inbox to have more than 30 e-mails in it, so before I can start my day — literally, before I can get my kids up, get their breakfast — I’ve got to have 29, and then I come back there an hour later and there’s 58, but that’s like my little thing.
Most of my day is for the magazine articles I’m working on. So sometimes I’ll have phone interviews scheduled, sometimes I’m dealing with East Coast stuff, and then I like go back and forth: e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, write, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, write. I’m a little ADD in that way.
My husband works out of the house, too, and we’re on Skype all day long. … We have a three-story house, he’s on one and I’m on three. So I’ll e-mail him something and then I’ll Skype and be like, did you get the e-mail I just sent you?
LD: What kind of stories do you like to write?
JM: I love first-person stuff. I hate saying that because it sounds so narcissistic, and it’s not the me, me, me. It’s just I can have my own voice.
My mother calls me a shock jock. I like saying what nobody else will say. I like that little, you know, shocking thing at the end. My favorite thing I ever wrote was about how much I love my husband, and how fabulous he is, and day after day I have the pleasure of spending most of my time in his company. It’s only at night that I fantasize about killing him, because he snores. And that was what the story was.
LD: What do you do when you’re not working?
JM: This always makes me sound like such a geek: I like to read. I don’t knit or anything cool like that. I play tennis. Not competitively, because I can’t serve, which I’m bitter about. I like yoga and just hanging out with my kids.
LD: I know you’ve been thinking about this. If you could pick three adjectives to describe yourself, what would they be?
JM: I already scratched out all the ones that are true but unflattering. I have to say funny because I make a living trying to be funny, and people tell me I’m funny and sometimes they laugh when they’re with me.
I’m very grateful. My husband and I have a little theme that we always say from the day we met; we always say, “How lucky are we?” How lucky are we in a million ways. How lucky are we that we get to live here. How lucky are we that we have two beautiful healthy children, how lucky are we that we both work from home and we love our jobs and we wouldn’t do anything else even if somebody offered us 10 times more money, which would still be a very small amount. I am very, very grateful, and I try to make a point to be grateful, to vocalize that.
And is neat freakish an adjective?
LD: Sure.
JM: Then I’m definitely neat freakish.
Vital Stats: Jenna McCarthy
Born: May 15, 1969, Queens, N.Y.
Family: Husband Joe Coito; daughters Sophie, 6, and Sasha, 4
Civic Involvement: “I used to be on a couple of boards and now I’m on absolutely nothing because I do not play well with others. I help my husband with fundraising for the Santa Barbara Triathlon, which has a different nonprofit beneficiary every year. This year it will be the Santa Barbara Cancer Center.’‘
Professional Accomplishments: Author of Cheers to the New Mom! Cheers to the New Dad!: Tips and Tricks to Help You Ace the First Months of Parenthood. McCarthy’s writing has been featured in dozens of national and international magazines, including Parenting, Seventeen, Ladies Home Journal and Cosmopolitan.
Best Book You’ve Read Recently: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Little-Known Fact: When you’re on the radio for two years you don’t have a whole lot of secrets. I once dated the guy who played Skippy on Family Ties. And I like to drink hot coffee through a straw.
— Noozhawk contributor Leslie Dinaberg can be reached at leslie@lesliedinaberg.com.