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• Saturday, January 28, 2006 08:39 AM

  Salon reports on motherhood. This is hardly a new trend.

  I'm guessing the 20-somethings who are whining that they are sick of Salon's recent emphasis on parenting have no idea that Salon has had an emphasis on parenting since 1997, since they'd have been 14 at the time, and probably more interested in reading Teen Beat.

  I started reading Salon in 2000 because I had just become a stepmother to two toddlers, and was desperate for something that affirmed that, well, mothers think. Much of our popular culture emphasizes the notion that the mother vanishes into her offspring once they are born, and I believe that at least some of the reason for the recent prevalence of the Child-Free movement (and their incredibly, insanely hostile attitude toward children in general, because of course they sprang to life fully grown like Athena from Zeus' brain) is the belief that if you are a woman, having a child destroys your self and your personhood and makes you into a cipher, the Mother. Obviously if you're a woman with a strong sense of self and you fear that motherhood will destroy it, you will be hostile toward the social attitude that you should have kids, because you'll see it as a social attitude that you should just cease to exist as a person. I *wanted* kids and I struggled with this. When I hear people whining about how they really don't want to read stories about how mothers act just like people (or, worse, that such stories are whiny and self-obsessed, because of course stories about twenty-somethings trying to Find Themselves in a confusing world or middle-aged men Coming To Terms With Mortality are great literature, it's just mothers that whine), I am reminded that most Americans (and, guessing from the recent article in Broadsheet re Germany, possibly many Europeans as well) don't want to believe that mothers are human. No wonder so many women don't want to have kids. Who wants to stop being human in the eyes of the rest of humanity?

  Salon has never been solely about the news. You want nothing but lefty news, all the time, go read Alternet or something. Salon has always featured a mixture of political news, technology articles, book reviews that explore some aspect of politics or technology, movie reviews that are overly snooty and don't like anything that the average person might possibly enjoy, and articles about sex, gender and parenthood. This has been the mix since *I* started reading in 2000, and it's my understanding that it was the mix since Salon was founded. If you don't like it, go read something else, but stop complaining that Salon has changed. It hasn't.

  —alarajrogers Read alarajrogers's other letters
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