Neither Yao Ming nor Tracy McGrady have proven themselves physically strong enough to make it through an entire NBA playoff run, so after lifting the Rockets out of the first round, Yao being out for the rest of the Rockets’ season is no surprise. Discovering how his remaining teammates handle the Lakers with small ball is why they play the game, as my husband would say. Let’s not count them out before the series is over.

Damn Web surfing. Drawing me into a discussion I’d usually avoid. Anything with Michelle Obama in the headline means I’m skipping the link. Too many misconceptions and she’s just like us! exclamations that drive me crazy. But I’m already crazy today, so why not mix it up?

As mom-in-chief Michelle Obama also subverts a deep, powerful, and old public discourse on black women as bad mothers. Enslaved black women had no control over their own children. Their sons and daughters could be sold away from them without their consent, or brutally disciplined without their protection. So when a black woman claims public ownership of her children she helps rewrite that ugly history.

WTF, Melissa Harris-Lacewell of The Nation? Enslaved black women—and let’s strip the milquetoast and call them slaves—had their children stripped away from them not because they were bad mothers, but because they were slaves, property, non-human chattel in the American 17th century lexicon of the human condition. Having no control over their kids spoke nothing of their parenting skills, but of the evilness that can be found in the human spirit when people take ownership of other people. When a modern black woman “claims public ownership” of her children, she is no different from any other halfway decent mother of any other race, and she is certainly not trying to redeem her ancestors’ poor parenting choice of having their children sold to the highest bidder. I halfway want to blame poor sentence structure for this newest twist on “blame the victim” but I suspect the assertion is more insidious than bad writing.

My mother and I have talked a few times about the media’s fascination with Michelle Obama. It’s as though Michelle exists in a vacuum and no other black woman is capable of taking care of her children without a monthly welfare check. Or a hand-to-mouth job. Or, my personal favorite, the black woman’s meal ticket: the sports superstar son who will fly everyone out of the ghetto on his jump shot.

Michelle Obama loves her children! Michelle Obama loves her husband! She shops online! The coverage is breathless and monumentally insulting when her ordinariness is used, as in The Nation article, to measure her mom-ness against stereotypes perpetuated by those who think black mothers can be only slaves, lazy welfare cheats or Oprah (if only she had kids, she’d show ‘em all how to do it right)

We exist mainly in the middle of both the ugly and magical realism of motherhood. When we are single mothers, a great majority of our sons are in school, not in jail or starting careers as crack-sellin’ carjackers. When married, Michelle Obama is not the only one of us who loves her husband while working full-time while teaching her children please and thank you.

Michelle Obama is an important corrective to this distorted view of black motherhood. She and her own mother, Grandma Robinson, are kind, devoted, loving, and firm black mothers who challenge the negative images that dominate the public discourse on black motherhood.

Mothers, no matter their skin color, constantly battle negative images. Black mothers, I suppose, might be fighting their battle up the steepest hill, but who really knows? This article did more to reinforce the negative images than it did to dispel them, and it granted no greater perspective of working mothers and motherhood. Simply throwing out a version of the media’s Oprah-as-Michelle-as-Oprah as the right way to do it does no favors for either black mothers or those who need a better understanding of us. [Hey there, welfare cheats, no one's fault but your own you didn't marry that Ivy League once-in-a-lifetime political visionary when he asked you that time. Remember? When you were working at that law firm? As a partner? Oh, wait...]

Yao-less Rockets leading Lakers by 18 at the half.

Black mothers struggling to be seen as everyday moms for the next eternity.

Overcoming low expectation in comments…

• so when do I get to start ignoring my co-workers with my earbuds?
• making myself at home
• Friday evening mishmash
• Blogging from my open-air cube
• journoblogging PPD