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Hanna, you brought up the Gosselin affair. According to every tabloid in town, Jon Gosselin, costar of Jon & Kate Plus 8, has been cheating on his wife, Kate. The rumors, accusations, and carefully-worded statements are flying fast and furious. Today, Kate defended her husband on the Today Show, where Meredith Vieira read a written denial by a no-show Jon, and now one of the supposed mistress's exes has launched a website featuring stills from a sex tape that he claims to have made of himself with the Hester Prynne of the moment.
It's all sort of ugly—the mudslinging, the sleazy screencaps, the angry recriminations. Kate: "Jon's poor judgment and irresponsible behavior has also without a doubt caused some added tension and stress between the two of us." I'll bet. As if twins and sextuplets weren't enough. Now, this.
But the fact of the matter is that anyone who has spent any time watching the show knows its subplot is their marriage, and the majority of that relationship seems to consist of Kate treating her husband like something that got stuck on the bottom of her shoe, the property of which she cannot quite identify, eliciting a nonstop look of thinly-veiled disgust and disappointment. In fact, it's hard to think of moments in which this housewife is not humiliating, degrading, and emasculating her husband. On camera, no less. In one episode, she actually chastised him for breathing too loudly. There she is in the supermarket ripping him a new one for being a lousy spouse. There she is at the pumpkin patch shouting at him for being a substandard father. There she is telling him to stop mumbling like a fool. There she is explaining to the camera that she doesn't care what anyone else thinks.
As of late, much as been made of "naughty mommies." Why, they've even got their own twitter feed! (Sample question: "What is the Worst Thing You Have Ever Told Your Child ..." Sample answer: "I told my six year old that if he picked his nose one more time his brains would fall out, shame that he then immediately had a nose bleed, much panic in my house then.") It's all so cool. Bad mommies rule! That their fearless leader Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, earns a purported $40,000 a month in the role of uber-naughty mommy only inspires the rest to be the baddest mommy in the blogosphere.
But what of their husbands? Those men who are regularly depicted by the same bad mommies as fools, as incompetents, as co-failing parents? Well, I guess Jon Gosselin has answered that question. When bad mommies, bolstered by their online sisters, become bad wives, it sucks, doesn't it?
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Hanna, you brought up the Gosselin affair. According to every tabloid in town, Jon Gosselin, costar of Jon & Kate Plus 8, has been cheating on his wife, Kate. The rumors, accusations, and carefully-worded statements are flying fast and furious. Today, Kate defended her husband on the Today Show, where Meredith Vieira read a written denial by a no-show Jon, and now one of the supposed mistress's exes has launched a website featuring stills from a sex tape that he claims to have made of himself with the Hester Prynne of the moment.
It's all sort of ugly—the mudslinging, the sleazy screencaps, the angry recriminations. Kate: "Jon's poor judgment and irresponsible behavior has also without a doubt caused some added tension and stress between the two of us." I'll bet. As if twins and sextuplets weren't enough. Now, this.
But the fact of the matter is that anyone who has spent any time watching the show knows its subplot is their marriage, and the majority of that relationship seems to consist of Kate treating her husband like something that got stuck on the bottom of her shoe, the property of which she cannot quite identify, eliciting a nonstop look of thinly-veiled disgust and disappointment. In fact, it's hard to think of moments in which this housewife is not humiliating, degrading, and emasculating her husband. On camera, no less. In one episode, she actually chastised him for breathing too loudly. There she is in the supermarket ripping him a new one for being a lousy spouse. There she is at the pumpkin patch shouting at him for being a substandard father. There she is telling him to stop mumbling like a fool. There she is explaining to the camera that she doesn't care what anyone else thinks.
As of late, much as been made of "naughty mommies." Why, they've even got their own twitter feed! (Sample question: "What is the Worst Thing You Have Ever Told Your Child ..." Sample answer: "I told my six year old that if he picked his nose one more time his brains would fall out, shame that he then immediately had a nose bleed, much panic in my house then.") It's all so cool. Bad mommies rule! That their fearless leader Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, earns a purported $40,000 a month in the role of uber-naughty mommy only inspires the rest to be the baddest mommy in the blogosphere.
But what of their husbands? Those men who are regularly depicted by the same bad mommies as fools, as incompetents, as co-failing parents? Well, I guess Jon Gosselin has answered that question. When bad mommies, bolstered by their online sisters, become bad wives, it sucks, doesn't it?
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The Root has a set of takes on motherhood today (and yesterday, and tomorrow). We’ve allowed four women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s riff on just how significant is it is that someone, somewhere, grinned and bore it—literally—pushing a football-sized version of themselves out into the world.
They’re all great pieces. I notice that in the younger ages, there is downward pressure—the being-a-daughter part takes center stage. In your 30s, there may be kids, but things turn inward—Rebecca Walker sums up mothering at that age as being “about getting your proverbial sh*t together.” Forty-something Salatheia Bryant-Honors, who lost her mother, feels both at once. But of course, the tale with which I identify most closely is from my friend Helena Andrews, who writes from her 20s with the specter of maternity breathing down her neck:
If you’ve ever been to a wedding, funeral or father-daughter purity ball, then you’ve sat—perhaps teary-eyed—through John Mayer’s “Daughters.” The song is the audio version of a Lifetime movie event. Basically it’s about how some girl got so messed up by her parents that now she can’t truly love the man standing on her steps with his heart in his hand.
The last two lines of the hook are something like a eulogy: “Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers. So mothers, be good to your daughters, too.” Why not “girls become lovers who turn into. ...” something other than mothers?
Why, indeed? I’m certainly not averse to motherhood—I’ve seen some pretty great examples of it in my life. But like Helena’s, my own wonderful mother has also suddenly been afflicted with “a crazy case of the ‘grandbabies.’” At dinner in Washington this week to celebrate our mutual birthdays, she was way unsubtle about her desire for me to get hitched and start cranking out some grandkids. She jabbed me and said that I was “ready.” I got up to go to the bathroom. She waxed nostalgic about the joys of raising me and my sister—Irish (or Nigerian) twins—while my dad completed his medical residency 300 miles away. I swapped my empty wine glass for hers. She described what sounded like awful sacrifices and stresses. I joked about how lame it must have been to be pregnant-to-bursting with me on her 28th birthday. Still, she persisted in her relentless advocacy for early marriage, and little ones for her to go all Marion Robinson on.
This is all by way of saying that Mireille Grangenois has singlehandedly made me reconsider my glib eye-rolling. All of The Root’s storytellers do wonderful jobs of explaining their lives as women and mothers, but Grangenois, a media executive, gives a particularly honest take on what it’s like to have an 11-year-old at age 53—just as everyone else seems to be having all the fun. “I am flanked on both sides by the comparatively carefree existence of two other women in my peripheral orbit. My husband Steve’s ex-wife celebrated her 60th birthday in December with surfing lessons in Costa Rica as she vacationed with their adult daughter.” My mom is no M.I.A., but she couldn’t be more excited to be empty-nesting at 52 (sorry, mom!), sipping wine at a trendy out-of-town restaurant, instead of changing diapers or, heaven forbid, still wrangling my hair.
She really needs to stop being right all the time.
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Hanna, you masterfully parse Elizabeth Edwards' public persona, but you don't really touch on the other people who might be affected by her ill-fated tale. No, I'm not talking about John. I'm talking about her children: Catharine, Emma, and Jack. When Edwards was on the Today show earlier this week, she said she wrote the revealing Resilience explicitly for her children. This morning, Tina Brown and Gloria Allred argued in front of Today's Meredith Vieira about whether or not Elizabeth's choice to speak out about her husband's affair was a good one.
Gloria was staunchly pro-Edwards. She said that Elizabeth was revealing herself "with dignity," as she had done everything else in her life. Tina was anti-Edwards. She upheld Hillary Clinton as the model of how to weather a cheating husband in public, because she barely acknowledged Bill's wandering eye. Tina described the situation as "squalid" and added "I regret that [Elizabeth] used her book to drag everyone into this."
Are you with Tina, thinking Elizabeth's young children must be damaged by their mother's public discussion of their father's philandering? Or do you side with Gloria, who believes that Elizabeth is being a good role model for her offspring by showing them that life is "complicated"?
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As a woman who has declined to put her picture on Facebook—my profile photo is a drawing of me by my daughter—I respectfully disagree with Katie Roiphe's assumption that this somehow represents some reprehensible self-effacement on my part as a working woman. I'm admittedly a little late to social networking, and not exactly a devotee. A friend of mine jokes that my status line should read, ''Sara Mosle is now unavailable on Facebook,'' as I almost never check it. I joined out of curiosity and don't dispute its occasional uses: I have happily reconnected with several long-lost and far-flung friends. But generally these days, I'm trying to spend less time—not more—online, so I might actually do the high-powered job that Roiphe wants me to take more pride in and have more actual face time (as opposed to Facebook time) with family and friends.
In one sense, I agree with Roiphe: I don't like pictures of kids as stand-ins for parents—but not for the reasons she says. I don't think any child's photo (especially that of a non-consenting baby or toddler) should be out there for casual public consumption. It's her face, not mine, after all (and a profile picture can be seen by anyone). Also, plenty of men use pictures of their children (or of their dogs or of Bart Simpson). I don't think any of these people—male or female—are necessarily hiding behind their kids or canines so much as hiding, period. Not everyone wants to be a public figure (even if their careers occasionally require them to be one)—hence my own use of a drawing. Anonymity has its uses, too—something Elizabeth Edwards might have done well to remember. (There are recent pictures of me and my daughter on my actual page, which friends can see, but, to me, this is different from a profile photo that can be seen by anyone.)
But to take on Roiphe's point directly: What is it to her if some woman defines herself by her children? I know lots of women—serious, committed career women—who, if they had to choose, would put their children first. Or more accurately, to borrow from Judith Shulevitz's terrific point, would put their kids first for now—when, at other points in their lives, they have or would put themselves, or their jobs, or a friend, or a partner, or their elderly parents, first. To me, the whole point of feminism is not to dictate to women what their self-definition (which is surely forever changing) should be, but to support the full range of women's roles throughout their lives. Maybe the problem is that Facebook, invented by men, forces women to choose a single photo for their profile—when any woman, almost by definition, is a collage.
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In the spirit of Meghan's stated desire that the XX Factor blog remain a site of amicable cacophony, I'm feeling the need to stand up for my girl Dooce. Well, the blogger who goes by that name, Heather Armstrong, is "my girl" only in the sense that, like millions of her readers, I've been following her life online for more than five years now on an almost daily basis. But after reading Susannah Breslin's recent takedown of the "bad mommy" phenomenon, Ann Hulbert's review of a spate of recent confessional parenting memoirs, and a terrific discussion of those same books between our beloved Double X editors and the redoubtable Stephen Metcalf, it strikes me that something obvious is going unsaid in these blanket dismissals of navelgazing "mommybloggers": Not all writers on a similar subject are equally worthy (or unworthy) of being read. Heather Armstrong is a success, not only because of her subject matter or what Ann calls her "very pretty self," but because she's a sensational blogger.
I say "blogger" and not "writer" advisedly: Though Armstrong can write circles around most parenting memoirists online or off, where she really shines is as a serial chronicler of daily domestic life, a genre she has been crucial in helping to invent. Like the Andrew Sullivan of personal blogging, she's created a huge following just by showing up every day and telling us what she's thinking about. I read Dooce before Armstrong became a parent (I still remember the day she posted a photo of her positive pregnancy test, and how weird it was to feel thrilled for a total stranger) and long before I became one myself. I don't read her because I need confirmation of my own bad or good mothering, or because I identify with her struggles with postpartum depression. I read her because she's funny and smart as shit, and because she maintains an elegantly designed, frequently updated, terrifically entertaining website.
I haven't read Armstrong's new book, It Sucked and Then I Cried, and I'm not sure I will—in the past I've found that the work of bloggers I love doesn't always translate that well outside the serial format. But I read her website nearly as dependably as the daily paper, and plan to keep doing so as long as she keeps making it worth the visit. Though I'm fairly sure the estimates that Dooce.com makes $40,000 a month in ad revenue are exaggerated—if monetizing online writing was that easy, we'd all be in stretch limos right now handing each other Grey Poupon—I admire the fact that she's pulling in enough money for her husband to quit his job and work full-time designing and managing her site. (Come on, admit it—is that not the ultimate writer's fantasy?) Dooce may not be to everyone's taste, but as women in the process of launching an online publication, we should seriously consider, like the woman in the deli scene in When Harry Met Sally, having some of whatever she's having.
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Whining is universal. From the frantic peeping of baby birds to the whimpering of a kid deprived of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs in the supermarket checkout line, young critters know how to get their parents to feed them. Crying or squeaking or mewing tells the baby's caretaker that they have needs that must be met NOW!!! But in the case of the European earwig, begging is a fatal miscalculation. Whiny earwig babies don't get sent to their earwiggy rooms—they get starved to death by their mothers.
European earwigs, easily recognized by the giant pinchers adorning their buttocks, are a common garden pest that eats other insects, plants, and fruit. Despite their crawly appearance, female earwigs are good mommies, taking care of their 50-100 babies by feeding them regurgitated glop. Baby earwigs, called "nymphs," don't make sounds, but they do signal their hunger with chemical signals.
To figure out how the mother earwig responds to her offsprings' hunger, researchers ground up well-fed nymphs and poorly-fed nymphs, extracted the oils from their bodies with solvent, and dosed intact earwig nests with eau de baby. They found that nymphs treated with the happy-baby smell got fed, while nymphs treated with the sad-baby smell were ignored. Mother earwigs concentrated their efforts on the least needy babies, while the nymphs that smelled like whining were left to starve.
Despite its cruelty, this makes evolutionary sense for animals with lots of babies that aren't expected to live to adulthood. Why spend your time feeding whimpering weaklings when you could prepare your very best offspring to be all they can be? Unfortunately for people stuck on airplanes with whining Homo sapiens offspring, evolution dictates that species that invest a lot in a single baby have to take better care of it. Still, don't you think the "Tale of the Begging Earwig" would make a great bedtime story?
Image by Menchi/Wikimedia
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I agree with Dahlia that humility is rare in Sonia Sotomayor's professional circle, but I do hope this self-effacing quality helps her in the very humbling confirmation hearings coming up. In the context of introducing herself to the American public, however, I doubt, as Samantha wonders, that the judge was downplaying her achievements to counter critics who consider powerful women "bitchy." (But as an aside, I'd add a little self-deprecation in the face of such dazzling glory is certainly not "harmful to the rest.") Although modesty is encouraged in immigrant families, in fact, in the nominee's biographical statement, "ordinary" was an apt comparison to the odds-overcoming determination of her extraordinary mother. Celina Sotomayor, a foreign-born widow with two small children, one with diabetes, worked as a nurse distributing methadone in a drug clinic six days a week to afford rent in a Bronx housing project and her kids' parochial school tuition.
Even a mother who just does the regular impossible decades-long job of educating, nurturing, and economically supporting her children, busts her buttons when they succeed. Imagine the head-exploding pride for Mrs. Sotomayor yesterday, sitting in the White House while the President, her child at his side, praises both her accomplishments and the texture of her life. You can see how well her daughter Sonia was raised, though. In all the excitement, she still understood the importance of thanking her mother.
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Hanna, I too read the Sandra Tsing-Loh piece in the Atlantic, and I think she's missing part of the point. It's not modern marriage that's the problem, it's modern child rearing. Motherhood and marriage are inextricably linked in Tsing-Loh's piece, and while she never explictly says it, she chooses modern motherhood over her marriage:
Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families.
But even though Tsing-Loh complains about the "staggering working mother's to-do list," she refuses to get a nanny because she "secretly worried that using domestic help was exploitative"; she describes children with an "extraordinarily challenging roster of extracurricular activities and a quarterly testing schedule." And everyone seems to want to have sex ... until children come along.
This is obviously a debate of privilege, but all the women Tsing-Loh describes in her piece can afford a nanny, a housekeeper, or a baby sitter. I don't think it's so much that the idea of a life-long partner is out of date. It's that women need to hand over some of the child-rearing duties, and perhaps let little Timmy play baseball in the yard rather than signing him up for the elite traveling team; to let little Timmy study for his tests on his own, rather than getting so freaked out about his "quarterly testing schedule." If those things are more important to you than working on your marriage, that's your choice, but it's not the fault of the institution.
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Hanna, you call out the false dichotomy between the miserable married and passionate single, and in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Ginia Bellafante discusses Jodi Picoult's novels, and the false dichotomy between good parent and bad. According to Bellafante, Picoult's incredibly successful slew of novels, including My Sister's Keeper and Nineteen Minutes, involve "terrible things happen[ing] to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence." Bellafante continues, "Picoult’s message is at once cautionary and subverting. As much as her novels underscore the hazards of parental shortcomings, at a certain level they seem to exist to make a mockery of the cherished idea that we ought not to have any."
Basically Picoult is pointing out that there's no such thing as the perfect parent, without shortcomings, just as Sandra Tsing Loh observes that there's no such thing as a the perfect marriage. But Bellafante's commentary on the underlying message in Picoult's novels—that they expose a deep ambivalence about having children—could be said of our collective feelings toward marriage as well:
Picoult’s books and the whole cultural machine devoted to maniacal worry about children often seem like a reflection of our collectively sublimated ambivalence about having children to begin with...Picoult’s novels access this disparity, the difference between what is said and what is done, the difference between parenting that assumes the shape of performed concern and parenting that takes the form of active tending. So much of the ugliness that transpires in her books could be prevented by a marginally greater degree of psychological caution.
Substitute marriage for parenting—"the difference between marriage that assumes the shape of performed concern and marriage that takes the form of active tending"—and you've hit on what we've been discussing all week with Tsing Loh's piece. Meghan quotes a statistic from an AOL poll that says 72 percent of women have considered leaving their husbands. What she didn't mention was that in that same poll, 71 percent of women said they'd be with their husbands until they die. Talking about any of these monumental life events—marriage, motherhood—in absolutes is a mistake. It shouldn't be surprising at all that most women are ambivalent about marriage and motherhood; most people are ambivalent about everything. Just because some marriages don't work out and sometimes terrible things happen to good children doesn't mean the institutions are doomed or are in need of an overthrow. As a woman who is on the brink of what Hanna describes as a "vanilla pudding" future, I think I'll take Dahlia's advice: Ignore what the books say and just live.
Photograph of mother and child by Getty Images.
