Friday, May 08, 2009 - Posts
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Bonnie, Jess, I confess I haven't been able to read Jess's piece about talking to her mom yet; I started to, and it brought tears to my eyes. Like Jess, I used to talk to my mom all the time, about matters large and small. (Should I refrigerate peanut butter? Should I take that job? Who are you voting for?) But my mother passed away on Christmas Day of 2008. And so I can't talk to her. I didn't think that Mother's Day was going to hit home at all, because my mother, a wry pragmatist, considered it a fake holiday... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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To all you young men out there swearing to mom this Sunday that when you grow up, you'll be lucky to find a woman just like her, and to all you moms out there who believe what your sons are telling you, we are about to burst your bubble. Christine Whelan, a professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, has been analyzing results of a survey taken steadily by college students over the last seven decades asking what they want in a mate... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, www.DoubleX.com!)
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On this Mother's
Day weekend, here's a shout out to Jessica
Grose's mother who as Jess writes, "didn't want to get in the way" of her
college age son's and daughter's independence so she would never call them,
though they could call her whenever they wanted. It takes a lot of self-discipline... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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While Bristol Palin was enjoying another prime time moment making her ambassadorial debut as the Candie's Foundation's abstinence spokesperson—Meghan, you're right, what dizzy come-hither-hypocrisy is at work there!—you probably missed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Moreon Rosen attacking Sotomayor: It's not just women judges who get blasted for being tough. It's also tough male judges—including judges whose intellectual and personal qualificationsfor the Supreme Court it's hard to imagine anyone questioning. As a commenterat the New Republic pointsout, it's worth comparing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Bristol Palin is partnering with the Candie's Foundation, a subset of the Candie's company, to promote "abstinence" as a way to "raise awareness" and "combat teen pregnancy." Never mind that one form of awareness, of course, is the awareness that pregnancy and STD rates often drop when teenagers are educated about birth control. Or that abstinence-only education doesn't seem... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In his response to the justified hoopla over his attack on
Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Jeff Rosen writes:
I was satisfied that my sources's concerns were widely
shared when I read Sotomayor's entry in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary,
which includes the rating of judges based on the collective opinions of the
lawyers who work with them. Usually lawyers provide fairly positive comments.
That's what makes the discussion of Sotomayor's temperament so striking.
Rosen quotes a bunch of negative comments from
attorneys-"overly aggressive," "abuses lawyers"—followed by a brief
acknowledgment of... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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What struck me most, Kerry, about Elizabeth Edwards interview with Oprah was her repeated insistence John's possible child with Rielle Hunter is irrelevant. She told Oprah that she doesn't know if the baby is John's (She also said John didn't know if the baby was John's, which reminds me of Emily's post wondering why, if Elizabeth Edwards has such an infallible bullshit detector, she's married to this dissembler in the first place) and that it doesn't matter. Here's a quote of her talking about the child, always an "it", at length:
"It doesn't make any difference to me [if Hunter's son is John's]. If I have to analyze why that should make a difference to me [it would only be because] I care about something completely extraneous to my life. That is not my life. And if we were to discover it was, that would be part of John's life, but it is not part of mine. And I cant see any upside to making it part of my life. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't change anything. It's not going to change my life in any way. I could try to make it change my life and could keep myself up about if I thought he was trying to start a family with this woman. That would be one thing, but I do I not think that's true. I do not by any stretch of the imagination think that's true. And therefore, it doesn't have any effect on me. Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable about something that matters, or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn't matter."
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And her children's possible half sibling is something that doesn't matter? And can something, a something that's really a son, be "part" of John's life without being a part of hers? Does saying something won't change anything over and over make it true?
I found this exchange even more blinkered in the context of the entire interview, during which Edwards seemed, as she usually does, remarkably open, likeable, thoughtful, and authentic—as Hanna pointed out, her key trait. (In an age of disappearing privacy, it's worth remembering that we're not all equally equipped to kill our private lives. Some people, Edwards and Oprah among them, are better able to totally explode the distinction between their public and private lives by virtue of being more natural, comfortable, and open at television and publicity than the rest of us).
But on this subject, her husband's probable kid, Edwards seems willfully unthoughtful, as if she has artificially cordoned off one of the more painful aspects of her husband's philandering and decided that her ability not to think or feel about it means it doesn't warrant thoughts of feelings. I wonder if there will be another book that comes after Resilience, like Acceptance (or maybe Divorce).
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Thanks for all of the amazing Obama drawings you've been
submitting for our Drawing
Obama series. We're still on the prowl for more, so if you haven't yet, go
scour the fridges and playrooms of homes with kids and send us whatever wonderful Obama portraits you
turn up.
We now have the grisly counterpart to our princess-ified
Obama: Monster Obama. Five-year-old Wyatt "makes everything he draws into a
monster," writes his mother, Jayne Hayden. "To Wyatt, monsters can be good or
bad—the thing that he seems to like about them is that they're powerful. So
this is a portrait of power." For those who can't read Wyatt speak, Jayne
provides this translation of the text on the drawing: "monst/ r brocobom/ u."
Are those the hands of Wyatt's monsters reaching for the jack-o-lantern
Obama pictured below? Exposed light bulbs? Prickly boom mics? Only the artist,
7-year-old Nathan, knows for sure. This one was submitted by his mom, Janice
Malloy.
And this Fairey-inspired piece comes to us from Eric
Gollihar, whose 6-year-old daughter, Anna, works in dry-erase marker on
whiteboard.
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In her much-discussed Tuesday column on Elizabeth Edwards, Maureen Dowd wrote:
Elizabeth said when they married, the only gift she asked John for was to be faithful.
Yesterday, while interviewing Edwards in her home, Oprah teed up the same anecdote. "You asked your husband for just one gift when you got married; what was that?" she asked. "I wanted him to be faithful to me," Edwards replied.
I found this strange in Dowd's column and stranger during the interview. Maybe I'm naive, but... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!"
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