Letters to the Editor
surprised
Published Letters: 141 Editor's Choice: 20
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Grateful for my dad
[Read the article: Once the kids are gone, I don't want them coming back]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Reading this guy's sad letter made me so grateful -- as I often am -- for my own warm, funny, loving and involved dad. He was a good provider, of course, but more importantly a good companion, adviser, role model and authority figure for me and my siblings. He died many years ago, and I'm sorry that my own kids missed out on meeting someone who would have been a wonderful grandfather.
I hope I NEVER feel about my kids the way the LW feels about his daughers.
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Mo -- Look away from the navel!
[Read the article: Yes, Maureen Dowd is necessary]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maureen Dowd is a brilliant writer, and I usually enjoy her work, but a couple of things annoy me.
First, she is SO dismissive of mothers and motherhood. In her view, a stay-at-home mother, or maybe any kind of mother (except her own) is nothing but a retro Stepford Wife who's ceding the important work to a he-man hubby. That attitude is just so wrong it's infuriating!!! Motherhood is very, very, very, very hard work, and important, too, because without mothers, how could we have any future generations of humanity?
Second, when I read her musings about Botox and so forth, I really wish she would apply her enormous writing talents elsewhere. Has she ever written anything about the environment and the Bush's slash-and-pillage policies, for example?
My advice to Maureen is to stop her naval-gazing fixation.
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urban vs. rural
[Read the article: Should cafes be kid-free?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Though I grew up in a big city, I've spent most of my adulthood in small towns and rural areas. Reading some of these letters, it strikes me that much of this pro-child/anti-child debate is a strictly urban issue. In the small towns I know, the idea of a child-free restaurant would be foreign. For various reasons, there just isn't the age segregation that you find in urban centers. Newborns, elderly people and everyone in between are accustomed to mingling everywhere, except maybe some dim-lit bars. To me, this is one of the positive aspects of small-town and rural life. I felt this way when I was single and child-free, and I feel this way now as a mother. I guess business owners and individuals have every right to exclude children from their presence. But I think that in the long run, that's their loss.
As for kids today being more spoiled and ill-behaved than kids yesterday, I doubt it. All through recorded history there have been complaints about "these kids today." There's a tendency to romanticize the past, including one own's childhood.
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cosmicmojo has some good suggestions
[Read the article: My awful sister-in-law just got pregnant and I didn't]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Also, I don't think we want to be thinking too much about who does and who does not deserve to be a mother. That's some scary territory, as history has shown.
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the hardest job
[Read the article: The stay-at-home mystique]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When people say motherhood is the "hardest" job, they're not necessarily saying it's harder than being an ER doc or a Mideast peacekeeper. It's more that it's the hardest job that a typical person is likely to take on in her lifetime. What makes it hard is the cumulative effects -- the around-the-clock responsibilities, the extreme isolation, the tedium combined with terror, the lack of mobility, the endless cleanups of poop and vomit, etc. Who would do this unless we were in love with our children? No wonder some moms joke that they have to go back to work to "rest."
Sometimes I think motherhood is more difficult today than it was in our mothers' time -- maybe for self-imposed reasons, and maybe for other reasons. I'm not sure if today's mothers are overly frightened or yesterday's mothers were overly lax about safety, but I do know I wouldn't recommend my own mother as a babysitter for anyone's small child. ("Car seats? We got along fine without them in my day. I'll just hold her in my lap. . ." Yikes! You get the picture). Maybe we have impossibly high standards, or maybe we have more crushing financial pressures, such as the much higher inflation-adjusted cost of housing. Schools, even public schools, seem to be making more demands of students' parents, financially and otherwise, than they used to. Suburbia seems much less pedestrian-friendly than in the past, causing a variety of problems. Or, as has been suggested, maybe we just overschedule.
Perhaps someone will do an objective study into these questions.
Although there have been a few hostile clunkers, most of the comments that I've read here have been quite good and insightful. Thanks for posting, ladies.