The Linda Cult
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2001, at 7:18 PM ETHi Martha,
I'm sorry we didn't get to talk in person at lunch. (You of course know, but I will fill in our dear reader: Slate invited us and our offspring to a very nice holiday lunch, for which we thank them.)
I meant to come back and propose a bet: How long before Linda Chavez tanks. But of course we now know: Chavez is no mas.
I'm sure you missed the press conference, as you were driving home, while I just walked over to the Slate office. But I hope you will indulge me in my urge to dissect; it's been a long time since I've seen a press conference, and I found this one a bit disquieting. To fill you in, Chavez rounded up the People I Have Helped. One by one, she ushered them to the podium to give their testimonies, in varied accents, about how nice Miss Linda is.
The stories rang true enough--she helped me find a job, English classes, etc. But the whole thing felt a little forced, like a Linda cult, as Tim Noah put it. "I love Linda very much ... she is like a second mother to me ... I would be nothing without her." Strangely absent was of course, Mercado, once a good friend, now referred to as "the Guatemalan woman."
The whole thing just doesn't add up. If she did nothing wrong, why is she withdrawing her name? Also, she admitted that she knew Mercado was illegal and that she helped Mercado try and find a job. You can't have it all ways. This reminds me of my college friends who would blockade university buildings and then get furious when they were arrested. Fine if she wants to be Robin Hood for illegal immigrants. But then she can't also be labor secretary.
Also, she can't possibly think helping a "friend in need" is a good standard for breaking immigration laws. Then every restaurant owner in Chinatown would have many, many friends in need.
Finally, the obvious. The "politics of personal destruction"? "Search and destroy"? Those clichés didn't exist before her crowd came along.
OK, enough about Linda. As for your confession of indifference to work, it sounds stupendously healthy to me. You will surely wind up the better mother, while I will end up in some Arle Hochschild spiral of shame, where I secretly confess one day that I enjoy work more than home.
On the day care vs. nanny debate. I don't mind a stranger in our apartment, but then I've never lived alone. On the other hand, I have some kibbutz-inspired fantasy about child care, where all the children learn to play together and share their toys and grow up to be ... um ... camp counselors or prison guards or something. But then I also have unrealistic fantasies about living in a commune. On the other hand, most people I know have nannies, so there must be a reason. As you can see, I'm confused.
Another fantasy that came up at lunch: Imagine if we could continue to dine all our lives the way infants do. Stare only at the food and ignore everyone around us. Snork, snuffle, and grunt at the plate and stick our face in it. Then fall asleep at the table, to be awoken only for the next meal. I think a restaurant indulging this fetish could make lots of money. It would be called, of course, Breast.
Well, by my current standards this has been a long and overstimulating day. I sign off till tomorrow.
Love,
H
P.S.: Something else I thought of at lunch: Have you ever seen anyone nursing in public? It must be done somewhere but then why have I never seen it?
The Linda Cult
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2001, at 7:18 PM ETMartha Hirschfield is an attorney, a new mom, and is married to Slate's William Saletan. Hanna Rosin is a Washington Post reporter on maternity leave and is married to Slate's David Plotz, who is Martha Hirschfield's cousin once removed.
Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: A lot of messages about birth control, and about penguins. Great discussion on childcare followed on from Paul Decker's post, below. Some readers--how can we put this?--weren't fully in sympathy with the Breakfast Table's new mothers: others were.]
I quote: "Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: But what if Noa want to be a zoologist, specializing in penguins?" I suppose we need to cut new mommies some slack, but there aren't any penguins at all in the Arctic. How many hundreds of emails came in with this point? Sigh. Unfortunate, but there it is, the medium makes criticism so much easier. If this were print in the pre-internet era, then you might get two letters pointing out that penguins live down below in the Antarctic and are primarily food for leopard seals and so forth. But now, with Dear Editor only a click-on-reply away, the possibility of gazillions of outraged penguinphiles writing to you at once and crashing your server can't be called a mere possibility, but rather a stone cold certainty, and cold stones naturally brings me back to the odd fascination penguins have with pebbles, which they stack in little heaps. Nearly 15 years ago, when the oldest of the offspring was a newly gooing bundle and I was the only dad in the park with a stroller, I decided to do something once a day in the company of grownups, so as not to go berserk. I wound up taking Intro Chinese. The rest is rock and roll history, and here I am in Beijing, with three and a half years already spent here in a couple of big chunks, and all four sons fluent in Mandarin Chinese-- two in fact taking end of term Chinese tests as I write-- and all because when Martin was born, there was no internet, there was no Breakfast Table, there was no email inbox, there was no Instant Messenger. Congratulations on the birth of your wee one. Says I, father and primary child care provider for nearly a decade and a half, there is nothing better. Nothing comes close.
--Mike Connelly
(To reply, click
here.)
A pacifier is not pure distraction. It has mystical properties. I believe the sucking actually produces changes in the child's neurochemistry. The problem is how to get the damn things away from them. My 2 and three-quarter month old daughter worships her pacifiers--she literally builds shrines to her pacifiers. Help!
--David Edelstein
(To reply, click
here.)
Pacifier elimination is the first cold turkey parenting situation. Later will come unlimited cable TV and internet privileges. Depending on how phone services are billed in your locality, phone call privileges may go the way of the pacifiers for some period of time so that school work can get done on time. If you are lucky to not have free local calling, you can just make them pay for the itemized charges which usually makes them stop calling their friends all night long.
The cute thing about teenagers is that they whine the same way they did as two year olds when you took away the pacifiers.
--Tom R.
(To reply, click
here.)
New mother Hanna has not spent enough time reading trashy women's novels. They often make reference to abortifacients, usually after the heroine gives it up to the hero in some ill-advised fashion, gets pregnant, and tries to keep it a secret. Fun things like wacky combinations of herbs. Even better, the birth control measures! Sponges soaked with vinegar!
As far as the Pill being an abortifacient as well as a preventive measure: it does prevent ovulation, as Momma Hirshfeld points out. However, it provides a backup plan as well. If you do ovulate anyway, the fertilized egg cannot implant into the uterine wall. So, technically, a potentially viable pregnancy is ended. The key word is technically - certain people, such as Ashcroft, will make any argument rather than accept that people should have control over their own bodies. Why do certain Republicans think the government should no power over our monetary decisions, but should have total control over our biological ones?
--Laura
(To reply, click
here.)
Apparently Martha was able to find a place in a decent child care center because of her affiliation with a federal agency. But what of the vast number of other families without access to such resources? Preschool child care is a state issue (except in the federal District of Columbia), but as far as I know, no state is doing anything to support it. Yet, there has been no organized movement to do anything to change this, either by getting state support for private preschools or by any other means (though there are plenty of efforts to get state support for private schools, and they aren't all religious).
I have thought from time to time that raising child care work from its current low-paid ghettoization in the dot-com economy would be a unifying cause that liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives would embrace. It hasn't happened yet, but I haven't given up hope.
--Paul Decker
(To reply, click
here.)
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: A lot of messages about birth control, and about penguins. Great discussion on childcare followed on from Paul Decker's post, below. Some readers--how can we put this?--weren't fully in sympathy with the Breakfast Table's new mothers: others were.]
I quote: "Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: But what if Noa want to be a zoologist, specializing in penguins?" I suppose we need to cut new mommies some slack, but there aren't any penguins at all in the Arctic. How many hundreds of emails came in with this point? Sigh. Unfortunate, but there it is, the medium makes criticism so much easier. If this were print in the pre-internet era, then you might get two letters pointing out that penguins live down below in the Antarctic and are primarily food for leopard seals and so forth. But now, with Dear Editor only a click-on-reply away, the possibility of gazillions of outraged penguinphiles writing to you at once and crashing your server can't be called a mere possibility, but rather a stone cold certainty, and cold stones naturally brings me back to the odd fascination penguins have with pebbles, which they stack in little heaps. Nearly 15 years ago, when the oldest of the offspring was a newly gooing bundle and I was the only dad in the park with a stroller, I decided to do something once a day in the company of grownups, so as not to go berserk. I wound up taking Intro Chinese. The rest is rock and roll history, and here I am in Beijing, with three and a half years already spent here in a couple of big chunks, and all four sons fluent in Mandarin Chinese-- two in fact taking end of term Chinese tests as I write-- and all because when Martin was born, there was no internet, there was no Breakfast Table, there was no email inbox, there was no Instant Messenger. Congratulations on the birth of your wee one. Says I, father and primary child care provider for nearly a decade and a half, there is nothing better. Nothing comes close.
--Mike Connelly
(To reply, click here.)
A pacifier is not pure distraction. It has mystical properties. I believe the sucking actually produces changes in the child's neurochemistry. The problem is how to get the damn things away from them. My 2 and three-quarter month old daughter worships her pacifiers--she literally builds shrines to her pacifiers. Help!
--David Edelstein
(To reply, click here.)
Pacifier elimination is the first cold turkey parenting situation. Later will come unlimited cable TV and internet privileges. Depending on how phone services are billed in your locality, phone call privileges may go the way of the pacifiers for some period of time so that school work can get done on time. If you are lucky to not have free local calling, you can just make them pay for the itemized charges which usually makes them stop calling their friends all night long.
The cute thing about teenagers is that they whine the same way they did as two year olds when you took away the pacifiers.
--Tom R.
(To reply, click here.)
New mother Hanna has not spent enough time reading trashy women's novels. They often make reference to abortifacients, usually after the heroine gives it up to the hero in some ill-advised fashion, gets pregnant, and tries to keep it a secret. Fun things like wacky combinations of herbs. Even better, the birth control measures! Sponges soaked with vinegar!
As far as the Pill being an abortifacient as well as a preventive measure: it does prevent ovulation, as Momma Hirshfeld points out. However, it provides a backup plan as well. If you do ovulate anyway, the fertilized egg cannot implant into the uterine wall. So, technically, a potentially viable pregnancy is ended. The key word is technically - certain people, such as Ashcroft, will make any argument rather than accept that people should have control over their own bodies. Why do certain Republicans think the government should no power over our monetary decisions, but should have total control over our biological ones?
--Laura
(To reply, click here.)
Apparently Martha was able to find a place in a decent child care center because of her affiliation with a federal agency. But what of the vast number of other families without access to such resources? Preschool child care is a state issue (except in the federal District of Columbia), but as far as I know, no state is doing anything to support it. Yet, there has been no organized movement to do anything to change this, either by getting state support for private preschools or by any other means (though there are plenty of efforts to get state support for private schools, and they aren't all religious).
I have thought from time to time that raising child care work from its current low-paid ghettoization in the dot-com economy would be a unifying cause that liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives would embrace. It hasn't happened yet, but I haven't given up hope.
--Paul Decker
(To reply, click here.)