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Like the Proverbial Hole in the Head
Generating all kinds of ire and defensiveness is today's article in Salon about some odd new niche magazine for stay at home mothers called Total 180!. I can't blame Rebecca Traister for wanting to write about it and talk to its creators because its message is so fascinatingly conflicted and seems, to me, to speak of an unpleasant side-effect of becoming a parent: the "I'm Suffering But I Love It and You Should Suffer, Too" phenomenon.
The magazine is chock full of "humorous" articles about how these stay at home mothers never have sex, are kept at home by their husbands and "let out" occasionally, how their children are bloody nightmares, but that parenting (all together now!) is the hardest and most important job anyone can choose to do (Traister happily takes issue with this statement).
And, really, isn't this a lot of crap? Before I became a parent, I hated, hated, hated all the smug clubby language one sees in magazines like this one that people with kids would invent for the ways in which they feel victimized by their circumstances, and never understood why in the next breath they are urging everyone else to take on this burden of suffering.
My kid is young, and I didn't choose to drop out of my pre-baby lifestyle, so maybe I'm talking out of my hat, but there is something wrong with this "joking" language of suffering and sacrifice and sexlessness and "my husband is such an idiot-ness." It's stupid.
Of course being a parent isn't easy, but nothing is, and contact with other people involves a certain amount of conflict, which is why I tend to get migraine and heart palpitations around this time of year. (At least I hope that's the reason.)
It won't happen anytime soon, and maybe it can't happen because the big stupid statement is always going to be eye-catching and generate all sorts of anger and debate (I notice that by 11:20 this morning, Traister's Salon piece already generated 43 letters to the Editor.) But I wish someone would applaud the subtleties of being a parent, how the pleasures are so potent and the problems that are most savage are not so easy to quantify. The Total 180! women surely believe in what they write, but they're doing a total disservice to everyone.
I didn't have a kid to join a private club or make myself feel included in anyone's agenda but my own, so while these articles claim to be "amusing," I can only see them as toxic and frankly elitist, and if I'm picking up a magazine for pleasure, I'm much more inclined to look at Vogue, where I don't have any trouble understanding that I am not like the people on those pages.
posted by Elise at 8:32 AM
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said...
Wow. I read the article. That woman seems to assume that all SAHMs or WAHMs have the same depressing relationship with their husbands as she has. I felt so uncomfortable reading the interview because I was so embarrassed for her assumption that her experience is universal.
Unfortunately her important (albeit superficial) comments about the need for coporations and gov't to accommodate dual-income families gets drowned out by her stupidity.
12/08/2005 5:43 AM
Elise said...
Indeed, that is the case, and that is the danger, I think, in creating this "jokey" kind of shorthand - oh husbands are stupid and need to be spoon fed, but they are also "jailors" who let stay at home mothers out for good behavior periodically. There are ways to be amused and amusing about ones domestic relationshipw, but to count on this lazy language does everyone a disservice.
12/08/2005 5:48 PM
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