When Zeke was a fussy newborn who loathed all systems of transportation, especially his stroller, I was once walking home from running errands. I had been holding him all day, and my back felt like it had been worked over by a squad of foul-tempered ninjas wielding nunchakus. I put him in the stroller and began pushing as fast as I could in the direction of home. Hoping to distract him from the fact that he was separated from my body by a full foot and a half, I kept up a constant patter. On the final, uphill leg of the trip I said something like “Yes, yes, the world is a terrible place, and you are the saddest baby in it.” A woman walking in front of me spun around, stopping in her path, her hand clutching her mouth in horror. “How dare you!” she said, lips white with rage. “How dare you impose your negative view of the universe on that child?”
I’m sure that there are women who circumcise their sons, who use disposable diapers, and who feed their infants formula who are smug, snarky, and unpleasant. But there seems to be a particular brand of sanctimony practiced by those who choose to exclusively breast-feed, use a family bed, and wear their babies in slings—choices generally associated with attachment parenting. Proponents of attachment parenting nurse their babies, wean them as late as possible, wear them in slings, co-sleep, and reject any discipline that is not “positive.” There are eight principles of attachment parenting, developed by Dr. William Sears and his long-suffering wife, but they are, frankly, too dull to enumerate. Suffice it to say that I have been informed by at least one attachment-parenting adherent (and not as the punch line of a joke) that a baby’s body should be in constant, uninterrupted contact with that of one of her parents for her entire first year of life. Anything less is child abuse.
Of course, the majority of devotees of Dr. Sears are marvelous, generous people whose sole interest lies in doing the best they can to raise contented, secure children. But why are there so many others who are so very self-righteous?
The twelve-thousand-member Berkeley Parents Network is an online community founded and directed by a woman named Ginger Ogle. The advice posts are some of the site’s most popular—hundreds of people post every month seeking guidance on everything from potty training to how to deal with a philandering spouse. There are hot-button issues on the message board—moderators are warned that discussions of breast-feeding, co-sleeping, immunizations, spanking, stay-at-home moms, circumcision, and television have a history of generating “emotional responses.” One issue in particular seems to draw out people’s ire. In September 2003, in response to a desperate mother’s plea for advice on how to sleep-train her wakeful baby, an anonymous poster referred to all non-Sears-sanctioned mothering styles as “Abandonment Parenting.” Here was a mother driven to distraction by the fact that her baby had not allowed her more than a couple of hours of sleep in months, and her attempt to seek succor and support was greeted with an accusation of child neglect.
In a letter to subscribers, Ginger responded, “[W]e seem to have an ongoing problem on the newsletters with some of our attachment-parenting subscribers making the assumption that the rest of us have missed the boat and need to be instructed on the proper techniques of parenting—for whatever reason, it is not a problem we have on the newsletters with those who hold other views—just the attachment-parenting people.” Things were quieter for a bit after Ginger’s note, but soon enough the scolding resumed.
I have seen women on the sites (and it is always women) accusing one another of practicing “detachment parenting,” of traumatizing their babies by allowing them to cry, of dooming their babies to lives of “insecurity and confidence problems.” I’ve read posts that inform mothers who don’t sleep with a copy of Dr. Sears’s Baby Book tucked under their pillows that they will never have children who are as healthy, well developed, and independent as those lucky ones born in “non-Western” cultures. Your baby misses the womb, these women shrill. The first nine months of life should be considered the second stage of gestation! Don’t put that baby down!
A woman named Julie, who writes a blog called A Little Pregnant about her struggles with infertility and the premature birth of her son, received a similar tongue-lashing when she posted about how her pediatrician had recommended a mild sleep-training regimen that included allowing the baby to cry for a short period. One reader told her that her son “feels abandoned and his primal instincts kick in for self-preservation (I’m alone in the world, I must conserve energy or die).” “On message boards I got called everything from negligent to monstrous,” Julie told me. “I was accused of everything from lying about his neonatologist’s advice to not loving the child I’d worked so hard to have.”
When I asked Ginger Ogle why she thinks attachment-parenting adherents in particular can be so strident, she said she thinks it’s because this kind of parenting is a belief system, nearly a religion. “Some of these parents sincerely believe in attachment parenting, homeopathy, cloth diapers, breast-feeding, baby wearing, not vaccinating, et cetera, in exactly the same way that Southern Baptists sincerely believe in the death penalty, a strong military, the right to life, heterosexuality, and the Bible as the Word of God,” Ogle said. While many baby wearers surely care little about what anyone else is doing, it is inarguable that certitude generally does not tolerate dissent. It responds to it with fury. Those of us whose parenting style can be described as “a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments,” as Julie of A Little Pregnant puts it, rather than as a philosophy, are less invested in our own practices. What we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. What we need to remember is that there is no need to apologize for that, even when confronted with the most red-faced outrage.
It’s also important to acknowledge that the impulse to tsk-tsk has probably been indulged in, at one time or another, by all parents. I remember grocery shopping once, not long after my oldest child had been diagnosed with mercury poisoning as a result of eating no more than a single tuna salad sandwich a week. When I saw a pregnant woman tossing a few cans of tuna into her cart, I barreled over to her and launched into a diatribe during which the words “You really shouldn’t” were repeated more than once. Only when I finally noticed that she was sidling away down the aisle did it dawn on me that, whatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.
What is it about parenting that allows us to indulge our inner scold? Normally most of us don’t feel particularly threatened about the choices other people make. You live in a split-level ranch, I live in a Craftsman bungalow. I might like my house more than yours—I might even tell a friend I think your house is ugly—but I’d never stop you on the street and tell you to do something about your aluminum siding. Sure, each issue (even architecture) has its fanatics, but parenting seems to have more, and they’re more vocal. Perhaps it’s because there is so much at stake. Another parent’s different approach raises the possibility that you’ve made a mistake with your child. We simply can’t tolerate that, because we fear that any mistake, no matter how minor, could have devastating consequences. So we proclaim the superiority of our own choices. We’ve lost sight of the fact that people have preferences.
As a parent, I am absolutely certain of only one thing: my own fallibility. I used disposable diapers because it’s easier. I circumcised my sons because we’re Jewish (though I cried wretchedly through both ceremonies). I breast-fed my babies for as long as they would agree to it. I sleep-trained two of my children, Ferberizing one and Weissbluth-izing another. I feed my kids organic food and milk, but Abe consumes only two food groups—meat and candy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he eats a pound of chocolate a week. My kids are not allowed to watch TV during the week, but on weekends even the little ones veg out to The Simpsons.
I have tried to learn to accept these “failures,” to inure myself to those who are so confident that they do it all so much better than I do. But still, eleven years after my second C-section and five years after Abe’s adventures in breas
t-feeding, there is a defensiveness about the way I tell those stories. I tried really hard, I seem to be saying. It’s not my fault. Forgive me.
There is little I do as a mother that can’t be criticized, not least by myself. Parenting is incredibly hard work, even without having to look over your shoulder to make sure you’re doing it the way the neighbors (actual and cyber) think you should. Let’s all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. Failing that, let’s just go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another’s backs.
5. Tech Support
When I realized I was pregnant with Zeke, the first thing I did—even before making a doctor’s appointment to verify the accuracy of the two pink lines—was join an online support group for pregnant women due in the month of June. It was back in the dark ages of 1997, and there were no Yahoo or Google groups. Hell, no one had even heard of Google. Those were the days when we relied on AltaVista and Ask Jeeves for navigation through the ether. People were only just beginning to talk about this thing called the World Wide Web, and we had yet to reap the benefit of 112 million blogs sharing information about the genesis of toenail fungus or whether Number Six is a figment of Gaius Baltar’s imagination. Those were more innocent times, before the proliferation of mommy blogs and online parenting magazines, when BabyCenter was in its infancy and Anne Lamott still posted essays about her young son, Sam, on Salon’s Mothers Who Think.
Most of my friends were not using e-mail as regularly as I was—probably because they had yet to quit their time-consuming and intellectually satisfying careers for the more mundane pleasure of killing time while the baby napped. But there was a group of us, thirteen women in all, some of whom I knew from college, others whom I had met at journalism school, who began a regular correspondence. I’m not going to share with you the humiliating name we gave ourselves, but suffice it to say that it was an era when the prefix “cyber” still had a cachet of cutting-edge and the literary genre of chick lit had not taken over the front tables of bookstores in swaths of Pepto-Bismol pink.
My online buddies were already regular e-mailers, sometimes shooting off as many as ten a day, but if you are a fast reader and suffer from graphomania, thirteen correspondents, no matter how prolific they are, are not enough to fill even a short nap. Also, although I could e-mail with those friends and talk to my live ones about what my toddler might have eaten to turn her shit that particular shade of Easter egg blue, none of them was pregnant, and, more important, none of them was due in June. I wanted companionship from women who were experiencing precisely the same quantity and quality of nausea and first-trimester narcolepsy as I was.
By the time I joined toward the end of my first month of pregnancy, the Listserv for expectant mothers due in June had at least fifty members. The group fluctuated in size over the course of that first trimester, increasing as more women discovered us and ebbing at the eight-week mark, when we had our first ultrasounds and some heartbeats failed to be detected. Members came from all over the English-speaking world, although most of us were American. The group included women of all economic classes: single mothers on welfare and the wives of investment bankers, waitresses and pediatric neurosurgeons. There was less in the way of racial diversity—with a few exceptions, the women were white—but in other ways we were as various a group as could be assembled from the multitude of women who got knocked up in September or October and also happened to own a computer with a decent modem.
Again with some exceptions, these were not women I was likely to come across in the course of my day-to-day life, which was then carried out on the playgrounds and in the Gymboree classes of West Los Angeles. There was the woman, for example, whose husband left her in the second month of her pregnancy, leaving her to raise all five of their children without any assistance, financial or emotional. There was the pediatric oncologist who left her practice upon becoming pregnant with her Junebug (yes, that’s how we referred to our yet-to-be-born DDs and DSs—darling daughters and darling sons, for the uninitiated) and became the first (and surely most overqualified) lesbian Brownie troop leader in her housing development. There was the Internet entrepreneur supporting her agoraphobic DH—who by the time her Junebug could speak was neither her D nor her H. And there was my favorite, the polyamorous frequent poster, who never seemed to understand why the father of her baby and his other partner did not greet her pregnancy with as much joy as she did.
I enjoyed communicating with these strangers, even as they occasionally drove me nuts with their whining about hemorrhoids and breast tenderness. I was doing my own whining about hemorrhoids and breast tenderness, and they were the only people who were willing to “listen” to me without their eyes glazing over in a combination of tedium and disgust at my soul-crushing self-absorption. I found myself rapt by discussions about whether it’s best to find out a baby’s sex or wait and “be surprised,”* how much spotting was normal, whether a bassinet was a necessary item. I’m fully aware of how vacant and silly most of these conversations were, but pregnancy is, at least in my experience, a time when intellectual stimulation often takes a back seat to literal navelgazing. When I was flush with the hormones of pregnancy or breast-feeding, far more of my free time was spent considering my condition and rubbing cocoa butter into my belly than engaging in any kind of productive behavior.
The members of the Junebug list were, by and large, sweet and supportive of one another. When the mother of five gave birth, we took up a collection for her; when someone shared bad news, we were always ready with sympathy. Most of us had yet to come across an Internet troll—there were fewer of them back then. But even in those halcyon early Internet days, we got into flame wars. They were over the usual subjects, familiar to any woman who has spent even an hour surfing the mommy Web. Breast-feeding versus bottle-feeding, cloth diapers versus disposable, the safety of anal sex during pregnancy (okay, that was just the polyamorous mom, although I’m willing to bet that there were many women with opinions on the issue who chose to maintain their dignity by not stating an official position). I tried not to start flame wars myself, but I have to admit that I was always the first to launch a spirited defense of a member who I believed was unjustly attacked.
Things never degenerated into true ugliness, however, because we were not anonymous. We used our real first names, and while it’s possible that Julie or Joanne was really a troll named Philip wearing crusty boxer shorts and a coffee-spattered wife-beater, sitting hunched over his laptop in a cockroach-infested studio apartment in Van Nuys, and getting off on pretending to be a twenty-eight-year-old Mormon woman from Salt Lake expecting her third baby on June 14, it seemed unlikely. And even if there was such a troll, Philip (or Brian or Ahmed or whoever) was such a good actor and generally such a supportive correspondent that it didn’t really matter if the Mormon mom was only a figment of his twisted imagination.
On the Junebug list, most of us got what we were looking for: reassurance that we were normal, that we were doing things well enough, that we were—or were going to be—Good Mothers.
It was when I expanded my Web communities beyond this fairly personal list that the level of discourse deteriorated, and what support was on offer began slowly to be outweighed by a toxicity that seemed designed to destroy my sense of well-being rather than encourage it. Web sites like UrbanBaby and Berkeley Parents Network, while still providing plenty of useful tips on where to buy discount Robeez and what you should pay your babysitter, seem to degenerate with surprising frequency into full-pitched battles, the subtext of which is not only that we disagree but that your opinion, in its utter and fundamental wrongness, makes you the worst mother in the world. It is in the poisonous sludge of the comments sections that you see the worst in people.
During 2005 and 2006, I had a column on Salon.com in which I wrote about all sorts of subjects ranging from my mother’s battles with Medicare, to the rights of juvenile defendants, to how much weight I gain every holiday season. I tried t
o be timely, and I tried to be honest, and I tried to write with humor about difficult subjects. By the time I’d published my second column, I had stopped looking at the comments. So many people wrote, and while many responses were complimentary or even just respectful in their disagreement, many others were laced with such venom, expressed such a loathing for absolutely everything about me, that I simply couldn’t bear to read them anymore. For someone who writes memoir, I am unfortunately rather thin-skinned, and respond to most criticism—at least the personal kind—by falling into a pit of self-loathing. “She’s right,” I think. “I am that bad, and worse. Oh, my poor, poor children.”
I’ve decided, in the interest of full disclosure, and because I am in the mood to indulge my masochistic streak, to include a few typical examples of the kind of response my columns received on Salon:
“[Y]et another article that reinforces my impression that Ayelet Waldman is, in layman’s terms, a FREAK. I hope Salon’s remittance goes directly into some kind of trust fund to pay for her poor kid’s future psychotherapy.”
Bad Mother Page 7
