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Mommy Diarist
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Who Do You Love?
It's Easter Sunday and the Fashion and Style section of the New York Times is asking you to pick who you love most, and feel guilty about the soul you didn't put at the top of your list. Worrying is a delicate art. I grew up among world-class worriers and married into a family that also wrestles with concerns both fussy and dark. But in spite of my healthy acquaintance with the neurotic, I do know what it means to look for trouble and I know better than to exert myself too much. Trouble will find me, whether or not I'm searching.
Ayelet Waldman has an article in the often annoying New York Times article series "Modern Love" today that makes me wonder if she (and others) aren't working a little too hard to feel guilt and shame. The essay "Truly, Madly, Guiltily" discusses whether Waldman is somehow criminal for being so deeply in love with her husband, for loving him more than she does her children. She compares herself to the women she knows from "Mommy and Me" classes and seems to feel at once superior (her sex life is great and theirs isn't) and inadequate (they have given themselves over entirely to their children and she hasn't).
I have a seven week-old son, and words fail me when I try to describe the ways I feel about him. I don't, however, feel conflicted about the feelings for him and for my husband, and I wonder what worm in Waldman's mind twists to make her worried that she is failing by loving her husband more than her kids. Why does she even feel she must place these most important relationships on some kind of hierarchy?
This seems like madness. I don't sit around trying to contemplate which of my vital organs I prefer, since I depend rather fundamentally on all of them. My son and my husband are just two more vital components of my life. They are not comparable, not interchangeable.
And yet Waldman's worries make me queasy even as I feel inclined to mock her brittle, self-congratulatory hand wringing, because she pokes at herself so hard in a way that I fear is symptomatic of American mothers. There is so much public judgment leveled at every choice, every thought and private impulse. How could mothers not feel self-conscious about their feelings when all around them are (apparently) smug martyrs implying that they have reached some higher plane of existence in becoming self-sacrificing mothers, too superior for sex, too dedicated to their children to maintain other deep connections.
If asked who I love best, whom I would choose above all others, I wouldn't answer. The question would be stupid if it weren't so savage and mean. Perhaps I'm just greedy (the chocolate menagerie – big pig, monkey, and chicken - on the dining room table would support that notion), but I don't believe in love hierarchies and I wish the culture didn't want us to make them.
(You can read the article in question here. The New York Times requires registration:
posted by Elise at 12:24 PM
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Elise, you've bought into her thesis by asking "How could mothers not feel self-conscious about their feelings" when surrounded by martyers who are too evolved for sex. Please. I have also been a part of the mommy groups, and I can assure you (and Waldman) that any of the mothers who don't have the passion she claims to share with her husband feel only envy, not superiority, and if she's had a single conversation with these moms she knows that. She has what everyone wants. Therefore, I can't help but conclude that she isn't self-conscious at all; she's smug and, as you note, self-congratulatory--she has it all, and a column in the NYT to boot. I don't believe for a second she is conflicted, and why should she be? She'll never have to make a choice between her loves. Her manufactured guilt may make for interesting (albeit cringe-inducing) reading, but it lacks resonance because the supposed conflict is so, well, artificial.
3/29/2005 8:03 AM
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Not to mention that any person who can imagine joy after "God Forbid" losing their children is seriously not OK.
4/01/2005 11:29 AM
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HelloFor instance, Leff (1978:663) defines business group as a group of companies that does business in different markets under common administrative or financial control whose members are linked by relations of interpersonal trust on the bases of similar personal ethnic or commercial background a business group. Encarnation (1989:45) refers to Indian business houses, emphasizing multiple forms of ties among group members. Powell and Smith-Doerr (1994:388) state that a business group is a network of firms that regularly collaborate over a long time period. Granovetter (1994:454) argues that business groups refers to an intermediate level of binding, excluding on the one hand a set of firms bound merely by short-term alliances and on the other a set of firms legally consolidated into a single unit. Williamson (1975, 1985) claims that business groups lie between markets and hierarchies. Khanna and Rivkin (1999) suggest that business groups are typically not legal constructs thou
gh some regulatory bodies have attempted to codify a definition.
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2/10/2007 5:24 PM
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