Over-40 women, you’ve given birth to a healthy facet of modern life, reads the headline. Quite simply, there is no best age to be pregnant.

Hell. Yes. For once, a story about older mothers that isn’t full of won’t someone think of the children! hand-wringing or if you wait too long, you’ll be infertile! scaremongering.

The number of children born to women over 40 in England and Wales hit a record 27,000 last year, and has trebled in the last 20 years – a trend that has alarmed medical experts. Philip Steer, a professor of obstetrics, said: “There are two big problems with [postponing children]. First, you are less and less likely to get pregnant. Second, the physical risks of pregnancy, such as pre-eclampsia, diabetes, kidney problems and tiredness, go up from the age of 30.” Nobody would argue with any of that; but nor does a simple deduction follow that women over 40 should avoid getting pregnant.

I’ve written before about the rush to judge women who use fertility treatments to conceive postmenopausally. The condemnation of women who have children later in life—by whatever means—is simply another visit from the uteri police, along with an implicit condemnation of women who have the nerve to de-prioritize reproduction, if only temporarily.

Williams writes:

The judgmental tone is all rooted in a timeless anxiety that women are too feckless and/or stupid to be left in charge of growing children – an anxiety I have an ever growing awareness of, the more background misogyny I realise there still is. Propagation is the main work of any species, and if you seriously believe women to be inferior, it must be incredibly aggravating to see them in charge of it.

It’s always aggravating to the Patriarchy when women want something other than all babies all the time, even though men often make the exact same choice to delay having children.

You can easily discredit any of the usual arguments condemning older mothers by pointing out that they apply equally, if not more so, to older fathers. Most of the anti-older-mother arguments are irrelevant, or part of a double standard, as Williams points out:

Furthermore, it’s quite true – women are feckless and/or stupid, but only to the same degree as the rest of the population. Some women will have a baby at the last possible moment, just as some people will file a tax return the day before they get fined. Some women will get breast cancer as a result of late-age births, that’s just a fact. Some men will get bowel cancer because they don’t get enough exercise, and maybe 40 years ago they would have been working manually and got plenty.

But in a chauvinist world, older dads tend to get a slap on the back and a fond ribbing about how their guys can still swim, whereas older moms get the side-eye from their neighbors, the media and the medical establishment, (unless they’re Sarah Palin, who’s used her over-40 pregnancy to burnish her reputation as an anti-abortion crusader and Good Christian Wife).

But even if you play by the rules and have children young, there’s still no guarantee you won’t be smacked with a different double-standard:

The people who hector mothers in the 35-plus bracket would be (indeed, are) the same people who berate mothers living on benefits because they had children young and can’t afford to go back to work.

Mega-bestselling author J.K. Rowling experienced exactly that backlash as a young single mother and attacked it in a recent op-ed:

Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown.

If you have babies too young, you’re a disgrace, and a burden on society. Have them too old, you’re unnatural and a bad mother. It’s the classic double bind. It’s worth noting that J.K. Rowling got caught in both sides of the double bind, as she is also one of the “35 plus bracket” moms, having had two children after that age, with the younger born shortly before her 40th birthday.

The conclusion of Williams’s essay is the best part:

Mothers over the age of 40 may have swelled in numbers…but they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s savagely annoying to see them presented as a social problem. All these reports should start with a simple word: “congratulations”.

Hear, hear. If those over-40 moms represent “a social problem,” what about their mates? A small percentage of those women may have conceived via artificial insemination, but the vast majority got pregnant  the old-fashioned way: with middle-aged men who are somehow magically exempt from being labelled a social problem, even as they do exactly the same thing as the women.

The take-home lesson here? Have children whenever you’re ready. You’ll get blowback regardless of your choice, so you might as well prioritize your own health, finances and well-being, because the one thing that’s certain is society won’t do it for you.

Social networking sites like Facebook have provided, along with the chance to get back in touch with people you haven’t seen in 10 or 20 years, an entirely new realm of the baffling, weird, and offensive that in early days would have flown under our radars.  I’m filing this one under “Hmmm.”

Although we only swap vague good wishes, I am in touch with the woman who was my very first friend (that I remember…age 4 or so) via FB.  Recently, she changed her profile picture to what appears to be a company logo that reads something like “Stayin’ Home is Awesome!”  (I’m purposefully paraphrasing.)  Not the greatest name for a company, but I was curious what sort of business it might be, so I snooped around a little, and best I can reckon it, it’s a somewhat dubious* sell-from-home kind of deal that trades in “natural” cleaning products, and appears to have been founded by and aimed at mothers of young/school age children.   Okay, do the Avon/Mary Kay/Amway/Passion Party thing, make a few bucks that you don’t just turn over to the daycare center.  I get that.

But the “Hmmm” part is the name.  And not just the super-casz dropped “g” and forced cheerfulness of the exclamation point.  Stayin’ home may be awesome!, but you’re not just “stayin’ home.”  You’re working.  You’re generating income.  And I bet you’re still “makin’ dinner” and “runnin’ carpool”  too, among a whole host of other stuff.

Why not “Bringin’ Home a Paycheck is Awesome!” or “Bein’ an Entrepreneuse is Awesome!”? Why not “Workin’ Twice as Hard as the Huzz is Awesome!”?  Why soft-pedal (not petal, or peddle, or dear merciful jones, “pettle”) the WORK part? Is that to assuage the guilty consciences of mothers who want to stay at home, but need the dough or the stimulation (“I’m still Stayin’ Home!”), or to ease the minds of breadwinner husbands who don’t want their wives careers to outstrip or outearn their own?

Even besides the sketchiness, I’m not thrilled that a company is trying to woo women by lying to them and effectively discounting their time and effort in both the private and public spheres as simply part of “stayin’ home.”  It’s work.

Just like “stayin’ home” is.  (And frankly, like blogging is, too.)

*Dubious because they don’t make it clear what they’re selling or how the system works on their website, instead, they use a lot of weird-beard, feel-good sentiment about “living your values” (what values?) and “creating balance” in your life.  Extra sketch:  they ask you to call them for info, “because of the number of requests we get on a daily basis, we do NOT send information out via email.”

No, not this Betty. But speaking of her... Via cliff1066 @ Flickr.

I think some folks don’t want to know the truth – about their moms or grandmothers or even their wives. The truth is that stifling and silencing women can make them downright unlikeable. A lifetime of infantilization can make a woman childish. Motherhood is not every woman’s “calling.” Putting women in a prefab box can make them small. People want to think their maternal figures were honored and excited to wipe their asses and make dinner for daddy day in and day out, not that they might have been unfulfilled, frustrated and wanting more.

Or are people – the people watching Mad Men, at least – beyond that now? Is Betty-hatred just a simple case of a double-standard?

…today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

That behavior may be the norm in affluent, Times-reading enclaves, but it’s certainly not how a whole generation of Americans parent their children. Besides, parents have been yelling at their kids since time immemorial–that’s hardly new news. In classic Times-ian fashion, Stout starts out by pouring it on thick with the generalizing, then blithely assumes her own generalizations are facts worthy of reportage.

It’s also significant that 100% of the parents quoted in the article are moms, and they all feel guilty about yelling at their kids. Is this because only moms yell?  Or only moms should feel guilty about yelling?  Do dads get to indulge in guilt-free yelling? We may never know–dads were apparently not interviewed, nor were parents who yell without guilt. It was your typically poorly researched, un-nuanced Times trend piece–a sweeping generalization that’s really just a narrow view for a narrow readership.

I grew up in a highly educated, affluent white family–although we were loyal to the Washington Post, not the Times–but my parents did not helicopter me to death, and they definitely were not of the so-called “generation that yells.” MamaSharper believed in the “loving disciplinarian” approach, both with the two kids she raised and the thousands she educated. She didn’t have to scream–a tone change and glare was almost always enough to snap us back into line (on very rare occasions, she might also deploy a swat on the bottom, but always without yelling). BigStepdaddy yelled at us maybe once or twice. Each time it was so unusual–and so LOUD–that my sister and I automatically burst into tears, which immediately made him feel terrible. 

At my other home–DaddySharper’s house–there was also not much shouting, even when dealing with my three little brothers. While I understand that powder-keg, flash of white-hot fury that bratty kids can cause–believe me, I understand it–it doesn’t always mean one will wind up melting down like the guilt-ridden yuppies the article describes. My parents didn’t express anger or frustration by shouting, so neither did we.

My family seems to be the exception, though. My childhood friends were all yelled at–particularly my non-white friends, who came from cultures where parental authority is strongly, and loudly, enforced. Even in my own family, my cousin–a devoted SAHM– has told me more than once that she struggles not to shout at her (usually very well-behaved) daughters. Still, she does it more often than she’d like and feels guilty about it. She blames her upbringing for her tendency to shout: “My dad used to yell at us all the time, and when I yell at my girls, I can almost hear my dad in my head. I was yelled at as a kid, so I yell at my kids. I hate it.”

According to the Times:

Psychologists and psychiatrists generally say yelling should be avoided. It’s at best ineffective (the more you do it the more the child tunes it out) and at worse damaging to a child’s sense of well-being and self-esteem.

“We are so accustomed to this that we just think parents get carried away and that it’s not harmful,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Murray A. Straus, a sociologist who is a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. “But it affects a child. If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.”

Having been raised in a no-yell environment, I didn’t learn to tune it out, and now as an adult, yellling instantly evokes a strong negative reaction in me. I always perceive yelling as hostile and aggressive, and it immediately triggers my fight-or-flight response.

When I first worked for the boss from hell, her frequent shrieking totally threw me for a loop. I was stunned. WTF? Couldn’t she control herself? When she yelled at me, I shut down. It wasn’t that I was intimidated, I simply was not having any of it. I gave her the icy cold stare of death and, once just walked out of the room. I didn’t care that she signed my paycheck. If my mother didn’t yell at me, this bitch damn sure wasn’t going to have the privilege. It was a textbook hostile workplace, and I didn’t stick around for long.

It irritates me that the Times article skates around the obvious fact that habitual yelling creates a toxic environment, and is often a form of psychological abuse. Parents inflict it on children, spouses inflict it on one another. It’s always felt wrong to me. To be fair, some people are just loud by nature and yell excitedly about everything. I tend not to seek out those people, but I’ve learned to recalibrate my responses to them so I don’t cringe when they up the volume.

Despite all its quotes from shrinks and child experts, the author of the Times piece doesn’t conclude that we shouldn’t yell at children.  But I can testify that not yelling teaches children how to handle situations without losing control. If you model calm and restraint for your kids, they will be calmer and better behaved. If this sounds suspiciously Zen, believe me, I’m about the least Zen person you’ll meet. But reading this article reminded me again that my parents did me a huge favor by not yelling at me. I’m convinced that because of it, I have better self-control, and kinder, healthier interpersonal relationships. I also think it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever be part of “the generation that yells.”

I have no idea why this proposal has to be framed as an “equivalent” to maternity leave.  I’m childless, but actually, in my sort of general feeling that Capitalism Is Bunk, think we all need more leave time.  In my highly corporate day job I get four weeks’ vacation, plus a lot of side time if I need it and my hours are up to speed – this is the one joy I derive from being a so-called “professional.”  And yet, on a recent trip away, I said to a friend that when I do eventually quit this job (ETD: sometime between April and June 2010, if all goes well) I’m gonna need like a month just to sleep.  My body is run down; I have three separate stress-related medical conditions I’m currently treating.  And yet I’m the kind of person who is considered a “slacker” at my job and have, most years, taken much of my allotted vacation time.  This year I have taken three trips!  Which makes me wonder how other people are doing it.

All that said, my vision of more flexible workplace policies that would allow us all to be healthier, less crazed people has very little to do with some kind of quid pro quo with my child-bearing sisters.  While I will admit to occasionally being annoyed when one workplace colleague on Facebook (who gave birth a few months ago) posts statuses like, “hmm, soap opera or nap?” I’m mature enough to recognize that my twinges of jealousy in no way negate that she probably spent three months locked indoors with no adult conversation for her pains, and also, like, pushed a watermelon out of her hoo-ha.  Which!  Annoying as my job is, I did not do.  So probably she’s entitled to more quality Price is Right time than I am.

Nonetheless, being on the childless side of the fence as I am – and likely ever to be – I can’t say I don’t watch the whole maternity leave debate with a bit of irritation at times.  First of all, while I am totally on the moms’ sides here as detailed above, I can’t help but feel, viscerally, devalued in this debate.  This has a lot to do with how parental leave tends to get framed as a “women’s” issue – as though it were of universal concern to us.  This is of course a second-order question – in some sense it is a women’s issue because it affects a large number of women, and that needs to be enough, a lot of the time.  But it is yet another way in which I am reminded how much I have removed myself from the “sisterhood,” so to speak, simply by choosing not to procreate.

That sounds melodramatic, of course, and yet it is how I feel, often, in the company of women who do have children.  They will talk formula and mat leave and they will complain about not having enough time to spend with children, and I will say something about what’s going on in my life and they will smile and change the subject.  And they do not have to do this in the underminery way that is caricatured on television, they can just be uninterested, separate, apart, inaccessible.  In my heart of hearts I do not really think my life is lesser than theirs, nor do I think they would phrase it that way if I asked them, of course.  But the sense is there, anyway.

And of course I find all too often that maternity leave has become the sum total of “women’s issues” in the workplace.  At my own workplace, for example, the women’s committee spends almost all of its time talking abou how to balance motherhood and career.  On Meet the Press this weekend, parenthood was discussed as the major feature of womanhood without much challenge.  Other issues – sexual harassment, coping strategies for mansplainers and male silencing techniques (which I think are HUGELY important if women are to become equals and yet are almost never addressed) – are treated as less important, less crucial to womanhood in the workplace.  Some of this has to do with living in a society that regards itself as post-sexist, certainly.  But a lot of it also has to do with that in certain fundamental ways, mainstream feminism continues to concede that women are, by and large, heavily focussed on procreation.

I’m not interested, particularly, in declaring war on mothers.  But where I get annoyed with them, to be perfectly honest, is the point at which they don’t seem to be particularly on my side.  I mean, sure, many will give lip service to these things, but at the end of the day – and this is maybe just a function of how parenthood works – the well-being of women with children is more important to them.  This is of course not true of all women with children – I doubt many of our commenters would self-describe this way.

But as I grow older I am having a harder and harder time with this particular point of solidarity.  I do think, for a variety of reasons that are no fault of their own, mothers are valued in a way that single, childless women are not.  Motherhood is viewed as definitionally selfless, when I think, in fact, it is more complicated than that, and I think most women know that, but I don’t know how to get beyond this place where women continue to clutch at their roles as parents.  To make it central to female identity.  Obviously one of the solutions is to have men become more involved in parenthood, granted equal leave – I am personally of the opinion that nothing will be better for women than the day when men are expected to share equally in the care of progeny.  But then, as far as the childless go, we are still at square one.  We are still the people missing some fundamentally human feature.

Thoughts?

But perhaps, when applied to women’s reproductive decisions, “selfish” has a separate connotation. Perhaps doing what you want, period, is bad, destructive to the community, and deserving of scorn. Although that does not seem to apply to straight, able-bodied white women who want to have children – most all of whom do so to fulfill some personal desire that could qualify as “selfish” (in either sense of the word).

My guess is that the busybodies who accuse child-free women of “selfishness,” having not thought about it too deeply, are simply going with an attack that (they believe) will hit women where it hurts. Women are supposed to be selfless and obedient, not following their own paths. Accusing a deviant of “selfishness” might snap her out of it and convince her to make babies, or it might inspire her to ask, “wtf?” and write about it.

And, starting a couple weeks ago, I started to see a lot of FB statuses that went something like this:  “Mama Bear can’t wait for school to start again so I she can have some peace and quiet.  Does that make me a bad mom?’  Or “I Have Kids let her girls stay up watching cartoons until late o’clock so she could get some stuff done!  Bad Momma!”  Or “Mrs. Chaos is a bad mother.  She didn’t make a special lunch for Little Darling’s first Day of school.”

Obviously, these statements are tongue-in-cheek, intended to skewer the very idea of the Bad Mommy, like the funny/smart mommy-blog Her Bad Mother.  After all, their self-proclaimed peccadillos are minor.  I’ve never seen a post that would actually make me think someone is a bad mother.  There are no comments like “Resentful Lady just slapped the crust off her toddler.  Does that make her a bad mommy?”  or “Party Gal is leaving the kids with Larry the Dubious Boyfriend while she’s off to Vegas for her Bad Mommies Weekend!  Ta!’   Such women would probably not choose to announce these things in public.

But the fact that I see these low-level confessions regularly, and witnessed a particularly heavy spate of them at back-to-school time makes me think they’re not only tongue-in-cheek; there is some real concern among young mothers (mothers in their early 30s or younger and/or mothers of young children) about being a “bad mother” simply by not loving every single waking moment of your life as a parent.

I’m sure some of this sort of posting is about seeking affirmation from one’s peers.  Certainly, after such posts, a flurry of comments appear reassuring Mom that she is not, after all, a Bad Mother for doing X or not doing Y, along with the occasional “but I’m even worse!” admission thrown in for good measure.  Mom invariably responds with gratitude and further details of her so-called infraction.  It’s a virtual kaffeeklatsch.  I get that.

But I think there are a few other things going on here.  It may be that my mom-friends make their maternal “sins” a matter of public record as a way of assuaging their private guilt, or that they want to head off criticism from others by pointing out their failings first.  But really, this performance of confessing to Bad Mothering is a way, I believe, to prove that one is actually a Good Mother.  A Good Mother questions herself.  A Good Mother knows that she could always do more.  A Good Mother recognizes her errors and endeavors to improve.   Not like those Bad Mothers, who are thoughtless and eg0-driven and who probably don’t really love their children.  A Good Mother just needs a little break every once in a while, and a place to vent feelings that Good Mothers aren’t supposed to have.

Let me be clear:  I’m not mocking my friends’ insecurities about their mothering nor hinting that their parental skills are in any way subpar.  Nor am I trying to re-incite the Mommy Wars (saints and angels protect us).  What I’m doing is wondering aloud about a trend, among a certain subset of moms, of commenting in this passive-aggressive way about their failings as mothers.

I don’t have kids, so all I can do is wonder aloud.  But I bring this up because I see parallels in other groups of women–childfree, career-focused people like me (who worry about dropping one or more of the many balls we’re constantly juggling), college-age women like my students (who preface their in-class comments with “I might be wrong” or “well, I’m not sure, but…” at least 80% of the time), even women like my mother (a woman with a Masters + 30 and a nearly 40 years of teaching special education students, who has told me half a dozen time in the last several months how she never could have gotten a PhD; my brother and I are just so much smarter than she is, etc.).  We’re all going through the same rituals of  disclaiming our work, undercutting our efforts, and asking forgiveness for sins we never committed.  Knocking ourselves down and hanging ourselves out to dry over things that almost nobody else cares about.  We’re asking, constantly: Am I Bad Wife?  A Bad Student?  A Bad Employee? A Bad Friend?  We’re begging: “please don’t be mad.”

I’m not immune to this, either.  I’ve been struggling not to preface this post with a little comment about how unripe my thoughts are on this subject, how I’m trying to suss them out in words now, how tired I am from the upheaval of the last month, et cetera.  (Am I a Bad Blogger?)  Though I’ve written previous posts on not being sorry, women are coached to please and placate, and it manifests in nearly every aspect of our lives.  Since mothers are arguably held to an even higher standard, it makes sense that they would feel an even greater need to disclaim and qualify and self-flagellate, to prove that at least they know better and are appropriately ashamed of their failings.  (This is all feeling very Catholic to me…)

Of course I’m not just talking to the mothers out there, although I’d be interested to hear from our mom-readers about this behavior.  Do you see or hear it?  Do you perpetuate it?  And for those who aren’t mothers:  how often do you ask forgiveness for for (likely imagined or at least teeny-weeny) missteps?  Are you aware that you do it?    And most importantly, for all our readers:  how do we stop it?  How do we unlearn this behavior?

The Diane Schuler case–and other media meltdowns over women and alcohol which we’ll talk about in a minute–has enormous personal resonance with me. A majority of the women on one side of my family are addicts, including two who have suffered from from life-threatening alcoholism. One of them was a stereotypically abusive, rage-y drunk, but the other is like Diane Schuler–the seemingly perfect suburban mom who was a secret drinker. Her husband never saw her drink. Her children never saw her drink. But for a couple years she was downing a half pint of vodka in the wee hours of the morning as her family slept. No one was the wiser, although her children noticed that she “drove funny” when she took them to school in the morning. By God’s grace and blind luck, her drinking never killed anyone, although it damn near killed her.*

So when Diane Schuler’s family expresses complete disbelief that she was a closet drinker who went on a deadly bender, I know how they feel. It’s very possible that they didn’t know–it can take a while for alcohol abuse to register if the drinker is secretive and quietly high-functioning. And, of course, denial is infinitely easier than having to admit, as one of my family members did, that “I thought we had this perfect family and now we don’t.”

But there’s also an unmistakeable whiff of sexism to this denial, and to the condemnation of Diane Schuler, who, as PhDork noted, was branded “Monster Mom” as soon as the autopsy results came out. Sympathy was replaced with hard-nosed condemnation, both of Diane Schuler, and of mothers–and women in general–who have drinking problems. In a much-reprinted AP article, the blame even spilled over to–you guessed it!–feminism:

“Younger women feel more empowered, more equal to men, and have been beginning to exhibit the same uninhibited behaviors as men,” said Chris Cochran of the California Office of Traffic Safety.

Kjerstin Johnson of Bitch Magazine rightly notes that this

“does seem to be coded language for “Feminism drove Diane Schuler to drink and then to drive,” an anti-feminist myth with dangerous repercussions.”

I completely agree with Johnson. It’s thinly-veiled anti-feminism, with an additional shot of ignorance: it also sounds like Cochran believes women never drank to excess until recently, which is completely ridiculous (The most severely ill female alcoholic in my family was born in 1918 and attending AA meetings with other women in the 1960s).

Women abusing alcohol is not a product of feminism, nor should feminism ever be mistaken for an invitation to get wasted in the name of empowerment. And yet it does, often thanks to women themselves. I once got temporarily banned from commenting on Jezebel.com after I confronted an editor there who was quoted in New York Magazine as saying:

“I don’t think that the drinking in and of itself is feminist, but I do think that it comes from a feminist place, that it can bolster one’s sense of herself as liberated,” says Jezebel editor Jessica Grose. “You know, the whole point of Third Wave feminism is that individual choice should not be judged…if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.”

I said at the time that this was a big, reeking bag of bullshit, and it still is. Getting so drunk that you “drink yourself unconcious in some random guy’s bed” is a dangerous, self-destructive thing to do. If that happens when you drink, you have a problem. It’s not “paternalistic hand-wringing” to say so, it’s common fucking sense.

This kind of ignorant glorification of heavy drinking as a quasi-feminist, liberated act crops up in the mommy blogosphere too, including blogs like mommywantsvodka. Blogger and writer Stephanie Wilder-Taylor, author of Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay and Naptime is the New Happy Hour, made a good living publishing wink-y books about mommies who tipple, saying of drinking:

“It was a way to express that we’re still fun people. Just because we have babies doesn’t mean we can’t have an adult side.”

She and other pro-drinking mommies used drinking as shorthand for Hey, we may be stay-at-home moms, but we’re not stodgy! We can still hang the way we did in our twenties! We choose our choice!

Because of my own experiences with moms who drink, I always found these blogs and books more alarming than fun or subversively clever. I was not at all surprised when this spring Wilder-Taylor–who the New York Times dubbed the “heroine of cocktail moms”–admitted that she was an alcoholic and had quit drinking.

“I was drinking to be kind of present, just not all present…[Wilder-Taylor said in an interview] “The drinking got progressively worse.” Whenever her husband questioned her nightly routine, she would retort, “I’m fine.” On May 23, she awoke on the couch, fully dressed. “I thought, ‘I have these kids who are depending on me,’ ” she said, weeping over the phone, “and I have a bad problem.” She called a sober friend and said, “I need help.”

All of the sudden, the aging-hipster cuteness of “Mommy needs a cocktail!” was revealed for what it was: “Mommy’s drugging herself to deal with stress.” The New York Times article about Wilder-Taylor even referred to the Diane Schuler case, saying it caused an explosion of “outrage and bafflement over mothers who drink to excess.”

That “outrage” and “bafflement” is pure, double-standard sexism. There’s nothing baffling about why women drink to excess: they do it because are in pain, they are stressed, they suffer from depression, they are genetically pre-disposed to alcoholism, they are compulsive–all of which are exactly the same reasons men drink. I would also argue that because of the injustices and expectations of our patriarchial society, women are more likely than men to be stressed, depressed, in pain, etc. Society just wants us to pretend it’s not happening, the way they want us to ignore so many of the ugly realities forced upon women. If there’s any outrage here, it’s the outrage women should feel about the chauvinist image of mothers as household saints who couldn’t possibly be tempted by demon liquor, or the even more chauvinist (and sadistic) idea that a woman’s lot is inevitably going to be hard, so she should suck it up and suffer instead of seeking comfort in the bottle.

This brings us back to the drunk driving issue, because obviously, if women have problems with alcohol, it’s inevitable that they will get in a car drunk, particularly suburban and rural women who necessarily spend a great deal of time in their cars. The Washington Post ran an article this past week about the uptick in the number of women being arrested for DUI.

“Sadly, the number of arrests of women driving under the influence is on the rise,” LaHood said. “This is clearly a very disturbing trend.”

No, what’s “sad” and “disturbing” is not that more women are being arrested, but that that DUI arrests are going up, period. The idea that it’s sadder or more disturbing when the drunks are women rather than men is simply old sexist attitudes being imposed on a new-ish trend. It also evokes shades of Barbara Ehrenreich’s old chestnut that:

“Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation…none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.”

Alarming to us feminists, maybe, but probably more alarming to men, who have to face the reality that when it comes to abusing alcohol, their saintly wives and mothers are, after all, just as vulnerable –and dangerous–as they are.

*I’m deliberately being a little obscure about exact identities here, in order to respect the privacy of these family members. NB: I am NOT writing about MamaSharper, who has never had any kind of substance abuse problem. One of the relatives I mention has been sober for almost a year now, thanks to help from Bill W. and his friends. The other, despite occasional periods of sobriety, continued to drink until her death last year.

Via quacktaculous @ Flickr.

I’m home, and since school is about to begin, I thought I’d get out my No. 2 pencil and write that time-honored back-to-school essay.  My next few posts will be related to the concerns that arose during my vacation, away from the feminist /progressive /urban /pointy-headed /bo-bo milieu in which I live, and which protects me from many daily gender inequities others experience (although I have quite enough of my own as it is, thanks).

As expected, the Dude and I had a good time on our trip to the Midwest, visiting and feasting and playing card games and such.  But crammed in there at the odd moment were spells of rumination, wherein I puzzled over the gender-related issues that regularly punched me in the face in ways to which I am unaccustomed.  I mentioned in my last post that the Dude’s family, while kind and fun and generally loveable people (five of us, between the ages of 30 and 60, ended up going to a waterpark without little kids and having a blast), is not exactly progressive. The Dude grew up in a pretty traditional family, as far as gender performance goes. Men mow lawns (except when the women do), lift heavy things, and change oil, and women do everything else: cooking, cleaning, shopping, errands, social organizing, and so forth.  Men scowl.  Women worry.  And they also raise children and work outside the home, just in case there were any spare minutes in the day.  I highly doubt that any would identify as feminist.

The Dude was in this family, but not particularly of it, at least in that way. Unlike most males of the clan, he was into music and art, not sports. He was introverted, not brash. He liked the subtle, usually verbal humor of his grandmother, not the blustery teasing that his uncles subjected him (and everyone else) to. During family gatherings, he would linger in the kitchen after meals, listening to his mother, sister, aunts and grandmother visit while they cleaned, rather than sitting in front of the game with his dad and uncles.

When we were first dating, I remember learning about his close relationship with his maternal grandmother and sister, as well as a briskly affectionate rapport with his mom (they are not a terribly demonstrative people). I thought that was pretty great, especially since I had more tempestuous relationships with my family.  It’s not just that he respected them, or shared a lifetime of memories and customs with them: he liked them. A lot. He enjoyed their company. He thought they were interesting, valuable, downright cool people.

I don’t have children, and I’m not even terribly good with them until they’re in middle school, but to our readers who are moms raising boys (and for all the laydeez out there looking for a decent, feminist-friendly fella), I would say this: men who value the women in their lives will value the women in their lives. That reads a bit reductively, I know. But there’s a lot of truth there. If a man cares for his mother’s feelings, speaks well of his sister, sends his aunts holiday cards and has a long list of inside jokes with his devilish, twinkly grandma, he’s much more likely to care for, speak well of, communicate with and take joy in you and other women as friends, co-workers, and partners.

There’s always the chance that such care might be coming out of a sense of ownership (“I treat my women right, the rest of you bitches are prey”), but if the Dude family had anything to teach me, it was that Oscar Wilde was wrong on this one: 

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

The Dude is his mother’s son, inside and out.  And I thank my magic pixies every day for it.  Moms, you’ve got so much power.  No mother is perfect–nor need she be–but knowing how the Dude was (and wasn’t) raised, and the kind of man he’s become, I would suggest the following things:

Don’t do too much for your boys (or girls, but since I’m addressing, as requested, mothers of sons here…). With? Sure. But keeping them ignorant of how to be an independent adult, with basic cooking, cleaning, banking, and shopping skills, along with a sense of purpose and community, will lead them to learned helplessness and a belief in “women’s work.” Give them responsibilites inside and outside of the house.  Help them build and maintain friendships with girls. Calmly but consistently question whatever sexist drivel they’ll pick up in the world and bring home to you. Check your own thinking on appropriate gender behavior, and the kind of language that polices those lines when you speak without thinking, as we all do. Encourage your boys to be “on the same team” with their sisters. (This did not happen in my home, more’s the pity.) Expose your kids to older women—neighbors, aunts, friends—who can demonstrate that women are not Woman, and that they are just as funny and interesting and capable and fallible and everything else as men.  Employ a male babysitter, if you can.  Try to make sure your boys’ male role models—dads, uncles, “big brothers,” etc.—demonstrate healthy, egalitarian attitudes toward women, and won’t undermine all the hard work you’re doing to give your boy a bigger, better space in which to be a man, and as the result, to give the world a bigger, better man.

It’s not revolutionary, but it is concrete. Dads can do these things too.  And aunts (I am one) and uncles and twinkly grandmas and babysitters and all the rest. Good luck.  It can happen.  I know from personal, if not maternal, experience.

In our anniversary thread, a reader asked for Harpy thoughts on raising feminist sons.  I think I speak for us all when I say that it would feel rather odd to opine on that myself, since the experience of raising sons in this culture is not one any of us have had.  We might have brothers, we might have thought about it.  But this is the kind of thing it’s very hard to talk about as an abstract experience.

Never fear, however.  There is always, somewhere, some feminist who has set out their thoughts on any issue you might be curious about.  And in this case, that feminist is Audre Lorde.  In her essay, “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response,” available in the excellent Sister Outsider collection, which addresses her experiences raising her son, Jonathan, she offers the following anecdote about her reaction to his being bullied at school:

My fury at my own long-ago impotence, and my present pain at his suffering, made me start to forget all that I knew about violence and fear, and blaming the victim, I started to hiss at the weeping child. “The next time you come in here crying…,” and I suddenly caught myself in horror.

This is the way we allow the destruction of our sons to begin — in the name of protection and to ease our own pain.  My son got beaten up?  I was about to demand that he buy that first lesson in the corruption of power, that might makes right.  I could hear myself beginning to perpetuate the age-old distortions about what strength and bravery really are.

And no, Jonathan didn’t have to fight if he didn’t want to, but somewhere he did have to feel better about not fighting.  An old horror rolled over me of being the fat kid who ran away, terrified of getting her glasses broken.

About that time a very wise woman said to me, “Have you ever told Jonathan that once you used to be afraid, too?”

The idea seemed far-out to me at the time, but the next time he came in crying and sweaty from having run away again, I could see that he felt shamed at having failed me, or some image he and I had created in his head of mother/woman.  This image of woman being able to handle it all was bolstered by the fact that he lived in a household with three strong women, his lesbian parents and his forthright older sister.  At home, for Jonathan, power was clearly female.

And because our society teaches us to think in an either/or mode — kill or be killed, dominate or be dominated — this meant that he must either surpass or be lacking. [...]

I sat down on the hallway steps and took Jonathan on my lap and wiped his tears.  “Did I ever tell you about how I used to be afraid when I was your age?” [...]

It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents.  But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear.  It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins.

I do see a lot of parents I know encouraging children to fight bullies – even as they raise them to be progressives – and the kill-or-be-killed ethos does seem to be wrapped up in a lot of parental mores and so-called “helicopter parenting.”  But is it possible to raise children differently?  Feel free to discuss in the comments.