The headline this week in The Portland Phoenix is “What Women Want”…which of course echoes the famous Freudian question.

This got me thinking…isn’t the real question, which heretofore has failed to be asked, this: What do Moms want?

Anyone? Anyone?

Well, I’m here with the answer to this never-before-asked question.

Mom’s want (what my friend calls) a “Party for One”. That’s it. That makes us happy. What is a “Party for One” (will I will abbreviate as PFO)? Time alone in our house.   Rules for “PFO”:

1. Unstructured time. No appointments.
2. No housework: this means no laundry, no meal preparation (unless it is solely for ourselves and because we really do prefer our own cooking to going out).
3. No “just picking up a little”  in the kids’ rooms…this is a colossal time sucking vacuum that, once entered, is extremely difficult from which to disengage. Close their doors. Back away.
4. Do whatever you feel like doing and don’t feel guilty. Watch those Oprah episodes that you’ve been taping for 6 weeks but have had no time to watch. Get out the stack of magazines that you have had no time to read. Grab a book from the pile that you hoped to get to read someday. . . PFO is that day!

Final thought:

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'”
-From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones, 1953

…maybe he should have asked a Mom. 🙂