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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
More than half of adult women are mothers. It's not a lifestyle. It's
not a trend. It's just one of those things—you know, continuation of
the species and all that. A biological urge complicated by societal
factors that has been, not incidentally, the subject of great art and
literature over the past few centuries. Into that pantheon comes Motherhood: The Movie, promoted by a trailer full of worn tropes and painful moments. Want to silence Uma Thurman, the ruthless killer bride of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2? Stick a binkie in her mouth. Motherhood, the Great Infantilizer. How did we come to this? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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An odd, not-quite-paradoxical consensus is forming in our discussion
over surrogacy. There is the assumption that the sticker price of
$20,000 is surprisingly low, along with the assumption that surrogacy
is so astronomically expensive that it’s only available to rich ladies with billionaire husbands and baby nurses.
Both might well be true, but I’m more convinced by the former than the
latter. Is surrogacy really out of the reach of your average
middle-class dual-income couple that can, at any rate, afford to raise
a kid for 18 years? Traditional pregnancies are by no means cost-free,
so the cost of hiring a surrogate over becoming pregnant is lower than
it first appears.
The real question is why, in the age of the active,
mercury-avoiding, one-glass-of-Merlot-will-destroy-your-baby-forever
pregnancy, wealthy women are not bidding up the price for equally
vigilant super-surrogates ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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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. 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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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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 ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It is not easy to stop being somebody's mommy, but there comes a time
when your kids are done. The five-year-old gets on that damn carousel
and only two or three horses go up and down before she has a tattoo and
a boyfriend. Mimi Swartz in her Double X Empty Nest column wonders how she will restart her life as her son Sam transitions away to his own adult life. Over the next few months... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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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... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Forgive me for injecting this note of sadness, but I'm mourning the
death today of my friend Eden Ross Lipson. Eden was for a long while
the children's book editor of the New York Times. I knew her after she retired. She e-mailed me one day a few years ago about a piece I wrote on reading books to boys that are usually given to girls, like Little House in the Big Woods.
I'd just started writing about kids and motherhood, and I felt the
opposite of confident about whether I had much to say worth hearing.
Eden's brisk e-mail made smarter points than mine. But she didn't point
that out. She offered suggestions for the next piece, the best kind of
deft encouragement. From then on, she wrote when she wanted to tell me
I'd gotten a children's book right, or when I'd gotten it wrong. She
suggested topics. She became my literary fairy godmother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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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."
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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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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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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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Ann: Thanks for sharing that "misread" headline. Indeed, it would be refreshing to see a headline about someone who "runs down mommy groups." As a non-mother who happens to be at that age when all of your friends suddenly become mothers, I find the mommy-group behavior utterly puzzling and mysterious. I confess I've wondered: When you become a mother, does your DNA mutate and briefly turn you into a 15-year-old again? Why else do otherwise relaxed, normal-seeming women become moralizers on behalf of the whole group? Isn't the whole pleasure of adulthood the fact that, finally, you're able to accept your own idiosyncrasies and faults? Just the other week I was having coffee with someone very close to me who was practically in tears at how mean the other "Brooklyn mommies" have been to her. I find it as puzzling as the dog yoga Jess just wrote about. But you (and, recently, Hanna, in her breastfeeding piece) have written astutely about this, suggesting that it's the fact that we don't have gender scripts now that may paradoxically--or ironically--be at the root of all this group identification and implicit peer pressure and rule-setting about what is acceptable for other parents to offer their children. (Only organic goodies, not too much sugar, etc.) And so I didn't know whether to feel relieved or horrified the other day when, out for a run, heading toward Prospect Park, I spotted a dad hanging out on a deserted block near the Gowanus Canal with his two sons, their skateboards, and....a palpable lack of helmets.
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I'm still years (and, I hope, a wedding) away from being a lactater, so I've yet to experience the pressure from other mothers or lactation specialists or medical studies about how to nourish my newborn. But I must say, I'm excited to breast-feed (and, I suppose, pumped to pump). As women, we're so often battling our bodies, cursing the way we put on weight or break out or start menstruating years before we actually want to reproduce, and making all sorts of decisions and purchases to try to counteract those truths. Breast-feeding is this one perfect, incredible thing that our body actually does right. Our breasts know when we have a hungry baby, and they make it food! And not just any food—food that's "better than a mango, even." If my breasts are willing to be so intelligent and industrious, I am eager to put 'em to use.
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I just wanted to chime in in support of Hanna's great Atlantic article. Like Hanna, I happily nursed my first two children for a year. With my second, I had the great luxury of working from home, so I rarely even had to pump. I'm planning to nurse my third. (For one, it's free; for another, it's a lot easier to get back to sleep after those 2 a.m. feedings if you're nursing than if you have to schlep downstairs to the kitchen to make bottles.)
But I think it's crazy for women to guilt one another into breast-feeding, or for women to feel like they have to exclusively breast-feed. Two anecdotes from my older son's first few weeks hammered it home to me. First, while I was still in the hospital, recovering from an emergency C-section and trying to grasp the whole concept of motherhood, the "lactation specialist" visited our room. She handed me a bottle of glucose water and said, "Now, if baby gets hungry, just give him this, not formula." When my nurse saw it, she flipped and ordered me to hand it over. Turns out the lactation specialist hadn't bothered to inquire about my son. I'd had that emergency C-section because he weighed 10 pounds, and the doctors suspected I'd had undiagnosed gestational diabetes, so he was also dealing with blood-sugar issues. Glucose water was the last thing I should give him.
Still in new-mother mode, I tried to avoid formula when we went home, but I still remember the night Brandon cried, and I tried to feed him. And he cried, and I tried to feed him. And so on. Until we gave in and gave him just an ounce or two of formula. And then we all got four hours of sleep.
To me, it seems like breast-feeding is just another front in the "Mommy wars"—whether to work or stay at home, whether to live in the cities or the suburbs. I'm not sure why women feel compelled to guilt one another over such decisions when there is never one right answer that applies to every woman. But consider me Switzerland.
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Meghan, I'm fascinated by the "cultural metabolism" (as you so aptly put it) of these parental age stories, as well, but I suspect that men will never feel the same sort of pressure no matter how many of these studies are pumped out. Even with the rise of a few emo daddy bloggers, there is still not the same sort of imperative. Women are told, implictly and explicitly, that their lives are incomplete unless they become mothers. All you have to do is look at the celebrity fetishization of motherhood to see how this plays out. After Brad and Angelina started having kids, Jennifer Aniston was cast as pathetic because she was childless, and countless tabloid stories were churned out speculating about Jen's potential baby bump or lack thereof. On the other hand, Angelina was heralded as the second coming of Mother Teresa. Do we ever read stories about how George Clooney cries into his Cheerios because he's never been blessed with a bundle of joy? Of course not. Obviously the celebrity media isn't a complete reflection of pedestrian life, but I think in this case its telling.
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Like E.J., I am interested in this news about older men. We're used to hearing about the downsides of being an older mom: It's harder to conceive; there's more risk to you and the fetus, etc. And as a woman in her early 30s, I can tell you that all the women I know have internalized the "you-better-have-babies-before-your-fertility-drops-at-35-notion." It's as if it's tattooed to our inner eyelid. But now we're finally beginning to hear more about what I've always intuitively believed must be true: It's not so great to be an older dad, either. This piece in the Independent has details about a comprehensive study of children of older dads, and the news isn't so hot. They are "more likely" to do "less well" on intelligence tests than the children of younger men. The children of older mothers, by contrast, are not. Meanwhile, as anyone who keeps an eye out for these studies knows, this study is hardly the first to suggest that being an older dad isn't so great. As the article puts it:
However, recent studies have linked paternal age with congenital problems such as neural tube defects and a range of medical disorders of later life, such as schizophrenia, dyslexia, bipolar disorder and autism.
Who knows how many of these studies are credible. But I'm interested in the cultural metabolism of them. In the late '90s, the culture got all frothed up about sending the message to "career women" that they couldn't have it all—they'd lost their chance to have babies by putting it off too long. I remember feeling there was a kind of meanness in the coverage, a "so there" quality. Who's betting the same thing will happen to men? Not me, I have to say. Or if it does, it'll be milder.
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Susannah. The headline here is actually kind of worse than “Julia Roberts is OLD.” The headline—or subhed—is the coy suggestion that “Julia Roberts is a superstar, but her box-office reign might be over.” Then the piece is packed with arguments (as Dana points out, without any actual evidence) about how Roberts is old. I suppose you could read this piece as a comment on the punishing standards of beauty and youth in Hollywood. If, say, you skipped every other sentence. But I read it as a faux-defense, not unlike Maureen Dowd’s efforts to both celebrate and send up Michelle Obama this past weekend. Maybe this is some new form of double-lutz ironic journalism, in which we pretend to bemoan some appalling societal trend (strong arms, shallow Hollywood ageism ... ) while still wallowing in its every last cliché.
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More for Susannah on Julia Roberts: I don't think either Dahlia or I were motivated to tear into that Newsweek piece on her by our undying love for America's sweetheart. Rather, we were struck by the article's disingenuousness, what I called its "eyelash-batting" quality. I get that by using the phrase "Hollywood ancient," the author is distancing himself from the assertion that the 41-year-old Roberts is hopelessly superannuated. But by never refuting, or indeed questioning, that assertion, he winds up simply reinforcing it, while also getting to wipe away a tear for JR's poor lost career.
Your comparison of Roberts' "comeback" with Mickey Rourke's is telling, in terms of what it reveals about our (unconscious?) presumptions about women, children, and work. On the one hand, there's Rourke, who made horribly self-destructive choices, alienated every director he worked with, then spent 10 to 15 years spiraling into addiction and despair before resurrecting his career with The Wrestler. Then there's Roberts, who took a planned five-year break at the height of her career to raise a pair of twins and a younger son. Mind you, this is no attack on Rourke, whom I love as both an actor and a public personality—I was delighted to welcome him back from obscurity, I wish he'd won the Oscar, and I'd far rather hang out with him than with Julia Roberts. But to compare his decade of darkness with Roberts' extended maternity leave—hey, they both stopped working, then started again!—is to reinforce the belief (held at a semiconscious level by many working mothers, including, at times, me) that opting out of the work force for a time is somehow a source of shame.
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Yuck. Like Dahlia, I hate the way this Newsweek article on Julia Roberts perpetuates sexist assumptions—41-year-old women are "ancient"! Time off to raise children = career suicide!—while batting its eyelashes innocently. The author is effectively saying, gee, what a shame that people might think Roberts was a washed-up old hag ... just because I'm publishing a Newsweek article to that effect! Dahlia points to a few actors exactly Roberts' age, all of whose careers are currently at their white-hot peak: Jamie Foxx, Benicio del Toro, Philip Seymour Hoffman. And what about Clive "Methuselah" Owen, who's cast opposite Roberts in next week's Duplicity? He's 47, poor thing, just like our enfeebled, half-senile new president.
There are other, non-gender-related things that bug me about this article—for example, calling Roberts' massive, toothy grin a "Mona Lisa smile" seems simply off. Isn't the whole point of a Mona Lisa smile that it's the subtlest of expressions, almost not a smile at all? Then there's the fact that the author resignedly eulogizes Roberts' career without having yet seen her new movie. Duplicity, a corporate-spy thriller that's the second film from exciting new director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) stands an excellent chance of being both a critical and box-office success, and even if it's not, both Roberts and Owen have survived other flops. Before we declare Julia Roberts' "comeback" a failure, can we let her actually come back?