An Embarrassment of Bitches

Joyce Maynard wrote an article for the New York Times "Modern Love" column (which is one of my favorites) a long while back (2009!) in which she talked in detail about her grown daughter. Her daughter responded in turn and the whole thing is played out here.

Didn't click that? Let me share the highlights -- from the comment section:

Dear Oversharing Blogging Parents:
You may want to pay close attention. This is your future.

And

Does it seem to any one else that most memoir writer types are raging narcissists as a rule? And golly don't those types just make the BEST parents...(snort).

I'm betting that pissed you off if you write (or read) a blog that might include your short drunk people from time to time or if you write a blog about your life and all the non-kid people in it because um, scandal someone else wrote about her kid and her life and oh shit? Lots of people don't like that.

At all.

Oh, PUHLeeze.

This cheerful discourse happened before the Tiger Mom got her teeth pulled and before Ayelet Waldman declared herself a "Bad Mother" because, among other things, she loved her husband more than her kids. And it happened before Lisa Belkin's Motherlode Book Club unleashed the beasts with Torn:

All of this happened a long time AFTER (my personal hero) Anna Quindlen was publishing her "Public and Private" column in the New York Times, which was one of the best written collections about the experience of being a modern woman, mother, worker, and wife. Erma Bombeck probably got there first, and I am sure I am missing others.

The fact is: women write ugly dirty nasty stuff because women feel ugly dirty nasty stuff -- about kids, relationships, work, parents, life, friends, politics, people, dishwashers. Women also write with the wing of an angel for a quill about all these same things... I've witnessed it.

I can tell you from experience, the devil and the goddess swaps her presence in me basically from hour to hour. What I will write, how I am thinking -- it often depends on the moment or the day, or the minute of the day for me. And after some forty years on the planet, I can honestly tell you this is exactly why I love being a woman and gratefully, why I love being a woman who loves to write.

What I don't love? The chronic bitch-slapping that makes so many of us go red in the face simply because we are doing or (snort!) writing ideas and thoughts and experiences that happened in that minute or day or fucking month. What went down at Belkin's Motherlode over the book Torn? It's not the symptom of our disease: it's the virus.

We have the choices we do because a bunch of women put aside their silly parenting differences, or sexuality differences, or any of the differences they might have had, and made a pact and plan to move the ENTIRE group forward.

They did this with what? Some leaky ink? A pony delivering letters? A train that took weeks?

Surely, we can and are obliged to do better. The frickin' interwebs weren't made for us to split into pieces with our anonymous throw-downs. What a goddamn shame if we can't use our culture's finest communication tool as a source of cooperative discourse and ultimately, progressive change for ALL women?

I write about my Small Town bullshit, my friends, sometimes my marriage, and wait?? What the? Oh yeah. I have kids who are funny and sad and I write about my kids too. You know why I do this? Because I can. Because I am moved to. Because for twenty sometimes sixty narcissistic minutes in my day, I tap tap tap on the keyboard what happened or didn't happen in my life and hit "publish."

Those commenters (years ago) on Jezebel are wrong: there is good in this (measured) telling. I am a stay at home mom and I am never sure if I am doing anything right for them -- or for me. As my children grow, there are things I will keep aside, but I can assure you that there are photo-filled baby books that can't touch what I have already written about my kids...

And there are lessons I have taught myself just by telling.

So, I tap tap tap because I believe that someday, this writing here? It will help us.

All of us.

ALL of us.

And who knows? That might mean you.