I have a friend who works for a major news agency. Their website was launching a new feature about busy moms and one of their first articles was going to be about traveling with children. My friend recommended me to the writer since I’m an expert at traveling with children.
Really? Who knew?
Apparently, I once sent my friend a multi-page treatise on the Lessons Learned While Traveling with Our 3 Month Old Son. Imagine, me – going on and on about my new-found knowledge. Shocking, isn’t it?
So, lo these many years later, I found myself being interviewed over the phone about traveling with children. The night before, Philip and I had sat down and brainstormed our best tips. At this point, we have traveled all over the world with our children. We’ve crossed the International Date Line 4 times with the two older ones, we’ve traveled by car, by train, by airplane. I’ve been pregnant for a good portion of the trips and we’ve had all sorts of experiences, good and bad. While we’ve never considered ourselves to be experts, certainly, we do have lots to say about the subject.
I wrote down my main points that I wanted to cover and 10 minutes before I expected the phone call, I sent my children upstairs. I gave them instructions that on pain of death, they were not to come downstairs. No screaming, yelling, hitting, biting, or throwing. Don’t make each other mad. Don’t touch each other. Don’t look at each other and don’t even breathe in each other’s space. For the love of all things holy – don’t bother me during this phone call.
So the phone rings and the interview begins. I give the correct spelling of my name and brief family history, including travel experience. I answer the questions intelligently, giving examples and personal anecdotes to illustrate my points. Thank God I had written my thoughts down because it was hard to concentrate with all the screaming going on upstairs.
The writer was appreciative and enthusiastic over all I had to say. She told me that the article was due to run on June 2nd. She said she’d probably call back later in the week after she’d typed up her notes. She never called me back.
That should have been my first clue that something was up. Just this morning I remembered that the article should be up on the website by now. I Googled my name. Nothing. I went right to the news agency’s website and found the link to their Busy Moms articles. I found the story about traveling with a baby or toddler.
If you’re an actor who gets cut out of a movie, it’s called ending up on the cutting room floor. What do you say when you’re an “expert” that gets left out of an article? Well, whatever it’s called, that would be me.
The writer decided to go with real experts. She quoted an author and a director of an internet parenting site, both of whom had shockingly similar advice as I did.  I guess that I, with my four children and thousands of miles of actually flying experience with them, lacked credibility. Not that I’m bitter, of course. I’m just saying.
I did get mentioned, though! My entire wealth of travel tips was reduced to 2 sentences about how Pumpkin Girl once threw up all over Philip on one of our flights to Korea.
At least my name was spelled right.
