Once busy mom, now empty-nester Jeanette Leonard, 53, is getting caught up!

October 25th 2021 looks to be a banner day for Jeanette Leonard, age 53, who will finally find the time to peruse, get caught up on and enjoy the multiple hundreds of starred, flagged and bookmarked links, articles, and blog sites that friends and family have sent to her over the past 18 to 22 years.

“I have always considered myself intellectually curious,” remarks Leonard, taking a brief respite from mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, “and have really, really, really wanted to stay on top off current events, global politics, and longform profile pieces, such as those contained within The New Yorker.”

The issue, according to Leonard, was that she completely “leaned in” to being a mom to her two children and, as a result, entirely neglected her reading, as well as her fitness, fashion sense, career, marriage, intellectual development, personal growth and general sense of autonomous self for the past two plus decades.

“After all, being a mother is,” she reminds me for the sixth time between gulps of the Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc she requires to steady herself for morning yoga, “the most important job in the world.”

Writing on the “Ms. Complainy Pants” sub thread of the “Oh so Very Tired with Kids!” mommy blog, on which Leonard ranks as among the most prolific of the website’s so-called “Ranters in Residence,” she acknowledges that thanks to efforts she took during the 1990s to try her darnedest to enjoy the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, the music of Thelonious Monk and the writing of S. J. Perelman, as well as time spent cultivating a particularly nuanced understanding of topical issues of the day, friends and family have, ever since, pegged her as an “intellectual,” continuing to send her dense, challenging and provocative high-brow material.

“While I let my subscription to Mother Jones wane around the time that Colton and Dashiell were out of pre-school,” Leonard continues, “I later became quite proficient at Flipboard, saving journalistic pieces that caught my eye for an until now unknown ‘empty-nester’ date, when I could give these articles and issues my full attention,” Leonard states, acknowledging particular interest in finding out what all the fuss was about regarding Mitt Romney’s so-called “Binders Full of Women.”

Now if only Leonard could remember the password to her carefully curated Evernote web clipper app!