Dear IF readers,

International Family Magazine is proud to be a partner affiliate of Hot Moms Club at www.hotmomsclub.com. As you can see, we have a button for membership on our home page now. It is a wonderful organization. It is a club begun by two friends Jessica and Joy who wanted to shift the image of motherhood from one of entrapment to one of joy and freedom. When I say “entrapment” I refer to my own experience of becoming a mother and feeling as though the eyes of the world were on me to be prim and proper, moral, disciplining, tidy, quiet, self-sacrificing, silently suffering, pious, and lord knows what other attribute that I had never been before having a baby.

Hot Moms Club gives women permission to stay fantasticly themselves even after they have children. Hot Moms Club and Jessica Denay’s “Hot Mom’s Handbook” ask women to be role models to their children rather than disappear behind the children or the men in their lives. To be a role model is to be someone who is true to self and has a full-bodied self to contend with. Too often I myself have met women who in nurturing their children disappear into their children’s identities rather than continuing to grow, glow and blossom themselves. A cautionary image for me has always been the little girl who is dressed up like a doll with curling hair, ribbons, pretty dress, frilly socks and patent shoes while holding onto a mother dressed in sweats, no makeup, looking tired with messy hair. When I went into the hospital with the first birth of my oldest son Jax, I brought equally as many fancy outfits for myself as my new little baby.

And so Hot Moms Club. Amen. I would not have fit had they not come along and given the world of mothers another option. Believe me, I am not saying that motherhood is easy and does not work me like no other job (Publishing/Entertainment, Communications/Wall Street) I have ever had. I could more easily be working my four offices, airports and 70 hour work weeks that I left for motherhood. There was always a clean, pretty suit and a warm coffee close by. But if I didn’t try to work as hard at this job than any of my other jobs, I would feel I had failed at the one I cared the most. I care the most that my children are loved and nurtured AND by a mother who loves and nurtures herself. Because by even age 5 in which Jax dresses himself and bounds off to school and friends, he studies Daddy and I very closely. He holds us to standards of behavior and dress and diet and work ethic. And I like that I am still one step ahead of him always. That is how it should be. I am his guide alongside Daddy. I cannot hope he will be a successful adult if I am not.

Thank you Hot Moms Club. Welcome to International Family Magazine and thank you for welcoming us so generously.

Happy reading, happy selves, Cat Wayland, IF Mag Editor

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