motherhood

The REAL Lesson of Tim Tebow? Choice.


Tim Tebow plays quarterback at a college in Florida. Aside from that, the only other fact I know about Tim is that his mother was working as a missionary in the Philipines when she was pregnant with him. She became ill and needed heavy-duty antibiotics, which doctors warned her could potentially damage the fetus. In fact, the doctors worried that Tim would die in utero, putting his mother’s life in danger too. They urged her to consider terminating the pregnancy. She weighed the option against her faith and continued with the pregnancy. Tim is a Heisman Trophy winner today.

During the Superbowl this coming Sunday, The Focus for Life group will run an ad about Tim and his mother. The ad’s message clearly being that given Tim’s accomplishments in football, what a loss his non-birth would have been.

The loss to professional football aside, what strikes me about Tim’s mother is that she was given a choice. Her doctors presented her with the medical facts, their recommendations and allowed her to make her own decision. Wow. A woman granted the right to choose. Powerful.

Women’s rights groups are beside themselves with horror at the idea of this ad running. Focus for Life is an anti-choice group which makes the story they are championing all the more necessary to be heard.

Pro-choice groups are lobbying CBS (the network airing the Superbowl) to nix the ad. Ridiculous. Stop being old school reactionary. Women’s groups amaze me with their short-sided hysteria. Let it air. And then spend a lot of time reminding people that Tim’s mother had a choice. What a woman chooses is not the point. It’s never been the point. The point is HAVING A CHOICE.

What is so difficult about that message that the choice people constantly manage to screw it up?

R*E*S*P*E*C*T


I think it is interesting, at times frustrating, to ponder why we loathe to be labeled as “mommy bloggers” while at the same time demand to be respected as “mothers”.

I ran across this sentence via a comment to a post on a blog written by Jessica Gottlieb that pondered the uncomfortable nature of blogging and being recognized. The commenter blogs anonymously, which is something I find fascinating but wonder at its feasibility in the long term. Regardless, her musing intrigued me because I don’t like the mommy-blogger label or the fact that as a woman writer, who happens to blog, that I have to be a mommy blogger in order to find outlets on the web. It is a social media glass ceiling of sorts that condemns women to shilling for wampum by trading their cute kid stories and making fun of their husbands.*

How?

Because I’ve put my uterus to work just the one time, this has somehow made what I think about anything not related to child-rearing, housekeeping and female related consumerism irrelevant. My experiences and perspective are tainted by marriage and procreation. I am clearly not in my right mind.

Clearly this would have been the case anyway, but the second part – about needing to demand respect for the whole luck of the sperm bagging an egg thing – is not something I can wrap myself around.

Because I don’t care.

When I was teaching, I had occasion here and there to point out to a recalcitrant child, or classroom full of them, that teaching was not a democracy. I would not be polling them for input nor did I need their approval. Teaching them was my job. My decisions were in the best interest of their learning, and sometimes they would not agree and that really didn’t matter.

Parenting is not a democracy. Polling others for what they would or wouldn’t do with your child is something that adults charged with rearing babies to competent, independent adulthood shouldn’t do very often, if at all. What you think of my parenting is your business because my business is raising my child with the values and skill sets that my husband and I have decided upon. Other people don’t get a vote.

And there is also the fact that creating a baby is something that almost everyone can do without too much instruction (although I couldn’t but that’s another story) and that some of dumbest people I have ever met have created, birthed and sort of raised children to a tenuous independence or even a brilliant state of grown up. It’s not quantum physics. Which is probably a really good thing.

I suppose though that there is a kernel of truth to the idea that there are those among the parenting set who feel disrespected for their efforts and zeal, but respect can’t be wrung out of those who wouldn’t have made your choices in similar circumstances. The eye of the beholder  looks in more than it looks out.

An interesting perspective.

*I can tell a cute kid story with the best of them, but zinging my husband? Seriously? What material object could possibly be worth your marriage?

Condescension


So a while ago now moms blogging in the great ‘sphere were offended by an ad that Motrin put out there that – really – wasn’t all that far off the mark if one has spent even the tiniest amount of their lives reading blogs written by mothers who deal primarily in motherhood.

This weekend Uma Thurman gears up to sell her new comedy called Motherhood which topically is about the totally hot ole “profession” of mommy blogging.

Will the fact that Uma is beautiful and sexy in spite of make up and wardrobe’s best attempts to frump her up by darkening her hair and making her wear really big clothing appease the fearsome lot who took on, and k.o’d Motrin ? Or will it feel like the condescension it sorta looks like? Because it looks like a rather cutesy dismissive pat on the fanny to me. You know, unappreciative of the gift of SAHMommyhood  Mom tries to boost her flagging self-esteem by creating a  precious little writing “career” via blogging, gets too wrapped up in the “business” of it all and comes crashing back to thanks to the epiphany laden grounding realization that motherhood is all – and that passion really does flow up from, and out of, one’s uterus.

Okay, now I am a bit offended.

It looks a bit Erma Bombeck to me. Erma Who? The mother of all mommy blogging. My mother had a copy of her book, The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Septic Tank. She’s to blame for this. Her and Dave Barry milking his family exploits via a column and then a sitcom. Pre-net one had to write on paper and run it past a publisher. Not like today when any woman looking to reclaim what motherhood has stolen from her show the world what mommies are made of can publish themselves. Which is why mommy blogging and this movie feel dated.

Dee watched the trailer with me and said,

“She’s a writer (Thurman) and you’re a writer. Is that just a movie?”

Think. Think. Think. So much wrong with this picture. Yes, it’s just a movie. I don’t write because of Dee. Writing, the actuality and the need, predates her by decades.

My guess is that mommy bloggers will not see the put down in this film but embrace it as some kind of homage. Comedy is not about paying homage. It’s purpose is to expose.

Saddle up, Motrin Moms? Probably not.