Monthly Archives: October 2009

Ranting Mamas


UPDATE: This post got me unfriended on Facebook by one of the mommies who inspired it. I’ll leave you to guess which one.

There is so much about the mommy blogosphere that I am out of step with. I don’t worship at the Buddha bellies of my offspring (who are too old to be Gerber baby round and Downy fresh anyway). I don’t believe motherhood fulfilled me in a Frodo-esque LOTR’s type of way. I am not terribly concerned about how much time other women put in or out of their homes. Blogging for the trinkets of the marketplace doesn’t interest me and, generally speaking, my husband is for snuggling, bragging about and thanking God for (if I inclined in that direction and mostly I don’t anymore).

I can rant with the best of them. I have ranted. My dear readers will happily step up and attest to it, but I will disclaim for honesty’s sake anyway.

But  there are some places that the mommies go that I just don’t get or can’t follow along with like these recent examples.

The woman who greatly embellished her recent TSA encounter for instance. Being no fan of heightened security in any of its forms in the United States, I feel her frustration, but she didn’t really tell the truth. In fact she was so over the top that the TSA actually deigned to defend itself in the form of releasing the actual footage of the incident the woman, Nic White, ranted about on her blog.

And there was the woman who went ballistic because her honor student daughter’s feelings were hurt when she was correctly busted for a dress code violation. While I agree that the VP in question needed schooling in bedside manner – and for the record not being polite is almost a prerequisite for being a VP in most of my experience – her child was in the wrong, and the fact that schools have big issues to take care of these days doesn’t mean they should ignore things like dress code violations even when the offender is a good kid with excellent grades. It’s really beside the point.

In my experience, far too many “good” kids are taught that their academics and overall nice personalities somehow put them above the rules that lesser children/students are held to. That’s simply not real world. What is real world are superiors who blow up at you for minor things out of the clear blue even though you are a good employee. Or being pulled over for being 5 miles over the legal limit even though you were being passed right and left and are an exemplary driver. And generally not being immune from the occasional self-esteem ding even though it’s widely acknowledged that you are so incredibly wonderful.

The first rant example apparently backfired to the point that Ms.White had to close comments. The second resulted in a disturbing yet typical hen-fest of sympathy where almost no one bothered to point out that perhaps being an honor student did not exempt a child from the rules that the trailer park set are subject to and on a common sense level, no one held forth with the radical idea that summer wear is as inappropriate to the school setting as it is in the workplace because the way things are going economically most of our kids are going to be wearing some version of a work smock anyway.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Rob. “When I venture into the mom’s realm, I read about women who find motherhood so overwhelming and under-stimulating that they need to drink daily, shop excessively, pop antidepressants and Xanax like Pez and believe that husbands are snark targets for the enjoyment of their readers.”

He didn’t comment. He didn’t have to. As I have noted before, I am not a mommy-blogger and therefore I don’t understand.

The Biggest Fear


The paperback edition of the book my heavily disguised widowed dating/remarriage experience appears in is coming out in several months and the author asked if I would be willing to complete a Proust questionnaire for the appendix. Aside from feeling honored, I always like to write about myself, experiences, and feelings.

But the first question stumped me. Rob says I am just being chicken, but I don’t think so. I really don’t know how to answer it.

What is your biggest fear?

I don’t have a bigger than another fear. I don’t think I even fear things as much as I worry incessantly and run worst case scenarios on a worn out loop in the worry corner of my mind.

I used to fear never having an opportunity to experience those milestone events that we are supposed to. Like love. Marriage. Motherhood. And then I feared failing.  At Everything. Whatever the situation or great life event – I would be a failure.

But I have had opportunities. Even back in the day when I was lamenting my lack of them, they were really there. I just didn’t see them through the haze of cultural expectations.

So once I had marriage and baby and career, I feared being outed as a fake. The discovery that I was only pretending to know what I was doing but it was all just so much smoke and strategic placement of mirrors would ruin me and sending me in search of the deepest darkest cave to live out my remaining days in shame.

And when that didn’t happen, then it was loss. I feared losing what I had. Husband and child and job and home and earthly possessions – most of which came from Target.

But at some point I looked around and realized most of the things I feared were silly or were beyond my ability to do anything other than simply live beyond them. Fear sort of subsided to worry at that point – which is a problem when it results in life halting inertia – but is actually quite manageable and survivable.

Now I just have knowledge. Not that I particularly want it. In some ways fear is better because it is a sign of innocence. My innocence is consigned to the past. Bad things have happened. Bad things will again. If the past is any indicator of my survival, I’ll deal as I have always done. Where is the fear then?

In 1995 I traveled out West with my folks to visit CB and his then wife. On the trip back we found ourselves in a tiny prop plane flying in circles over the Iowa cornfields in a vain attempt to go around a thunderstorm. At one point we hit some wicked turbulence, and the plane dropped like a dead duck. It felt like that initial stomach flop one experiences as the car heads over and down the first drop on a roller coaster. Only from much higher up. Mom was in tears and Dad had his arms around her, trying to calm her. I was in the seat across the aisle by myself, and he looked over and asked,

“Are you afraid?” which was strange because I think he knew that I wasn’t.

“It’s a little late for that,” I told him. Because it was. Fear is only useful if it keeps you out of potentially dangerous situations. We were on the plane. The storm was raging and rocking us about the dark clouds. Fear was less useful than paying attention and keeping one’s wits.

The same thing applies now. I have confronted most of the fears of my younger years at some point or another. It hasn’t cured my innate need to worry, but I don’t know that I am necessarily afraid of anything. And I wonder too. Are those things we label “fears” simply unknowns and would it make more sense to call them “worries”? Or, is fear more about our reactions than about the thing itself?

Damn you, Proust.

Mommy Wars: This is Why Women aren’t Equal


Dr.Phil pimped the never-ending, though completely effective tool in the continuing subtle subjugation of women, working mom versus stay at home mom “discussion” on yesterday’s episode.

I didn’t see the episode but for this clip. I didn’t follow the Tweetie skirmish. I did follow a bit of the conversation at Jessica Gottlieb’s blog. Yes, the Jessica in the clip. I didn’t learn anything new. I didn’t hear anything I haven’t heard for a decade or more. The argument is tired and ultimately pointless. Why? Because women are idiots. We let ourselves be diverted and distracted like Homer Simpson and with a sprinkled donut.

Watching this Dr. Phil clip and reading the comments on Jessica’s blog just adds to my conviction that women will never be equal on any playing field with men as long as we willingly divide ourselves. Men don’t have to use sexist practices against us. We do it ourselves.

Stay at Home or Work? Diet/exercise or accept fat? Age gracefully or wage war against every wrinkle, peeling them off with our teeth in our en suite if necessary.

Women don’t have the skill set to be a coherent group working towards a common goal. We are mommies or not. Marrieds or singles. Straight or lesbian. White or Black or Asian or Hispanic or Aboriginal. We simply cannot accept that women come in a variety of flavors and leave it at that.

“This mommy war thing is another example of why men rule and women are forever second class,” I said to Rob. “I mean, would men argue about what makes one man a better father than another?”

“No,” Rob said, “if fact it wouldn’t even occur to a man that this would be a topic needing discussion.”

Because when it gets down to it, mommy wars are really part of the larger debate on what it is to be a woman. What defines womanhood? The natural default – imposed on us by religion and culture – is vagina and uterine based.

Am I not more than an incubator with a cunt? This seems to be all that is truly required from my by society. That I continually service others and forget that God (or whoever) gave me a working brain too.

Men, by and large, accept that being a man takes on many forms and that at the end of the day they are united as one gender fighting for the greater advantage of themselves as a group. Of course, they don’t have to wage too strenuous a battle in the western world because women are obligingly taking each other out one subdivided group at a time.

I have played on both sides of the mommy street. The grass is the same shade of green though how green and lush is more dependent on the luck of the socio-economic draw than anything else.

I think what I object most to in this current debate is the fact that motherhood today is being perverted into a child worshipping thing that it was never intended to be. My mother lacked most of the modern conveniences of her day due to my Dad’s cheap nature and the fact that we were solidly lower-middle class descended from farmers. Mom worked. Hard. And she took care of us kids but she didn’t drool over us or think that she’d fulfilled some Lord of the Rings like quest by becoming a mother. I can only recall one mother on my block who parented from a child-centered view, and no one wanted to play with her daughter because she was entitled and had clearly spent too much time being treated as a mini-adult.

My grandmothers worked too. They were farmers. Kids were tended to until they could be tended by older siblings and elderly relatives, or could fend a bit for themselves, and the days were filled with chores. Work. Really hard work.

The idea that women have to choose between work and motherhood hasn’t really existed until the last few decades. And what a boon that has been for those determined to set the clock back on feminism and equal rights. They’ve barely had to lift a finger – just scream “stay at home or work” in a crowded Target (because here is our only touch point – shopping – and why isn’t that common ground enough for us to all just get along?)

I loved Dr. Phil’s comeback line for the beleaguered working mom,

“Step off.”

Because it gets right back to the heart of the matter. This isn’t an important issue. Health care is an important issue. The rising tide of fascism in America is an important issue. The fact that our daughters are being inoculated for HPV while our sons – the equal carriers of the virus are not – is a real issue. The fact that gays are still not afforded the right to marriage despite the fact that it is a state sanctioned function and clearly a violation of equal rights – that is an important issue. We are ramping up a war in Afghanistan to fight terrorists who aren’t there – big issue.

But women are notoriously shallow and unable to leave our high school musical days behind us, and so we glom onto any trivial issue to perpetuate the heated rivalry of days of yore.

We are idiots.