Picket Fence Post

I’ve always had a soft spot for Felicity Huffman’s character Lynette Scavo on Desperate Housewives. In the first season when she was an at-home mom of four, Lynette spoke the sometimes ugly truths about her struggles with parenting small children, her loneliness and how she frequently felt as though she was screwing up at every turn. In season two, she returned to the workforce and was the comedic embodiment of the modern woman’s no-win attempts to balance her career and her home life.

However as the show got older, I found I liked my once favorite character less and less. The writers, I believed, fell down on the job and gave her some pretty cruddy story lines, especially last season’s when one of her kids was arrested. God last season was a bad one for Lynette. She’d become a shell of her former, real mom character.

When the new season began, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Lynette I admired from seasons one and two had returned. Now, she’s back working as an advertising executive who’s found herself pregnant again with twins, and she’s feeling distinctly ambivalent about the pregnancy, something not many folks would admit in public. And Lynette  seems to have regained some of the spark she’d lost.

Below is a scene from the season premiere where she was in an ob/gyn’s waiting room and brought a first-time pregnant mom to tears. The old Lynette is back, baby.

I blog weekly about the latest Desperate Housewives’ episodes at Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. My review of the most recent episode, “Being Alive,” can be found here.

Item #1: Stone Soup Book

I love the way cartoonist Jan Eliot’s mind works. In her Stone Soup comics, she’s able to put into pictures what I labor to do with words. So, a few months ago, when Eliot e-mailed me to ask me if I’d write a blurb for her new collection of cartoons, This Might NOT Be Pretty, I felt honored.

“Jan Eliot has been spying on my family,” reads the blurb I wrote that’s on the back cover of Eliot’s newly-released book, the seventh in the Stone Soup series. “There’s no other explanation why Stone Soup so accurately captures the absurdly realistic yet painfully funny antics that go on in my house. Stone Soup is a window into the gloriously flawed American family.”

The book’s great for when you need to know that you’re not the only one who, as you’re raising your children, finds yourself in patently preposterous situations.

Item #2: ‘Desperate Housewives’ Trailer

Season five of Desperate Housewives, a once razor-sharp satire of modern life in the ‘burbs, is on the horizon. (Premieres September 28.) This season the show shifts five years into the future where everything has supposedly changed for the Wisteria Lane residents, most markedly for Eva Longoria’s character Gabby Solis, now a non-glamorous mother of two, while some of Felicity Huffman’s character’s kids are now teens and on a first name basis with the friendly folks at the local juvenile detention center.

Huffman has said that the half-decade time jump has invigorated Desperate Housewives’ writers and that the characters’ slate of stories has been wiped clean. I certainly hope so. The show has lost its mojo in recent years and just hasn’t been as good as it was in season one and early on in season two. I hope it can redeem itself. And soon. I’m rooting for Huffman.

Item #3: Tonight’s Historic Moment

Regardless of your political affiliation or for whom you plan to cast your vote for president in November, there is no question that tonight’s speech by Illinois Senator Barack Obama formally accepting his party’s nomination for president is a historic one for our country, particularly coming on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the iconic speech our children are shown in their classrooms every January, the one they hear when they learn about the condition of race relations in the 1960s when King spoke and why the Civil Rights Act was eventually passed.

Fast-forward four decades later, and you can now explain to your own kiddos with pride how far our country has come from that moment to this one. This is a moment they’ll want to remember.

Image credit: Amazon.com/Stone Soup.