Letters to the Editor
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Jesus, Emily,
You always make me feel ashamed. I'm quite serious. Thanks for the reminder. Some of us are farther behind on the path to enlightenment but still learning.
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Aw shucks...
...don't feel ashamed: I don't know shit, really.
I just like to type.
I also like to argue without real consequences, so I haunt the internet.
Seriously, though...once upon a time, it WAS considered funny to grouse about how irritating your children are. I mean, did anyone ever read Erma Bombeck?
And on TV sitcoms, it's still considered funny for Dads to be fundamentally annoyed at their offspring most of the time, and as a corrective we get the occasional Very Special Episode to "prove" that the irritable are also capable of love.
I guess I just find it offensive that people require some sort of sugary antidote to any expressions of honesty about negative feelings toward children.
The accusation of being a bad parent is THE most shaming insult you can throw at a normal person, and people around here seem to fling it like so much Cranky-Cosby Approved Jell-O Pudding.
I find it a bit ghastly, so I'm using rhetorical exaggeration.
Sorry.
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Jesus,Emily
I thought "rhetorical exaggeration" was your middle name.
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Ha!
Actually, it's a surname: "Rhetorical-Exaggeration."
In case anyone would care to further blame my queer-loving baby-killing pinko heathen feminist attitude problem on the evils of Hippie Parenting.
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Emily again
I don't disagree with you at all. When I really think about it, I am quite sure that if this piece were better written (imo), like really funny and witty, then I'd have no problem with the content. I like Anne Lamott's work, where she spends half her time being self-deprecating and horrified at her bad impulses and the other half picking on her son Sam. There's something about the WAY she does it that I find unoffensive.
But back to your second to last post, the truth is, it's just fluff, not terribly thought out writing, and I have kids of my own and would be devastated if they would have to feel like a thoughtless piece of nothing that i threw together meant that I didn't love them, so why i piled on, knowing that, I don't know. It's not like I didn't mean the things I said in my previous posts, not at all, it's just more like, why do I feel like I have to record every blessed criticism I have, even when I know that someone (his kids) might get hurt.
Anyways, thanks again.
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wow, so much yuppie scum with humorectomies...
EXCEPT FOR glenn greenwald, this will be the last time i darken the virtual portals of (not so) fair salon...
(not that the scolds, creepy closet-authoritarians, anti-free speechers, and limousine liberals who seem to dominate this place give a shit about anyone, much less a curt jester with a taser who is zapping your (metaphorically) fat asses...)
no, what rose is rose said HAD to be said; the idiotic and misguided reverence given to parenthood these days is weird... you fucked, she birthed, you've got a little nekkid ape... congratulations, morons have been doing that for millions of years...
the ongoing attempts to childproof the planet, raise the little monsters as if they are the alpha-and-omega of the universe, and totherwise have grown nekkid apes act as if their baby is the light of their life as it annoys EVERYONE else, is an ongoing BLOT on society, NOT a blessing...
senor rose was right, it is only a parents/grandparents (vain) love which keeps them from picking them up by their heels and flinging them over the nearest cliff about a hundred times before they 'grow up'...
('growing up' being a foreign concept in our infantalized society...)
YOUR kids are golden, everyone ELSE's kids are monsters...
sure, parents, that's right...
geezus, you scolds and asshats taking the writer to task for voicing what 99.99% of HONEST parents have thought, is quite openminded, tolerant, and intellectually not-defensive at all...
*snicker*
oh, one last time before i leave:
CENSORSHIP is antithetical to progressive values, PERIOD;
CENSORS are NOT progressives...
its real simple, but most pwogwessives find it too messy to adhere to as a principle...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Gotcha, lateagain
I respect your POV, and I don't have kids so, again, I really can't claim authority in regards to their treatment. I'd bow to your opinion before I'd go on my own.
But frankly, I think even PARENTS who shame other parents about their parenting, based on precious few facts, are doing more harm than they realize.
I don't have kids, but once upon a time, I WAS the kid of a public figure who wrote about me occasionally.
Sometimes my Dad would receive letters telling him what a horrible husband and father he was. He wasn't, of course. He's a little intense at times, but he's a hugely decent man who adores me and I always knew it. I was certainly never abused or neglected.
I once read a published "Letter to the Editor" excoraiting my father for being a disgusting human being, and my Dad actually let me write a reply to the guy telling him that HE didn't know shit and that my Dad was a loving, kind, wonderful guy so he should STFU (or whatever the non-cursing equivalent of that phrase was when I was 11.)
It was quite satisfying. After that, of course, I was sternly instructed to take the opinions of nutbars with a grain of salt if I insisted on reading "opinion pages."
I think when I chime in here it's usually only to balance out mob mentalities I disagree with.
This dude might BE an awful father, but this article didn't even indicate that to me, much less prove it.
Good talking with you. ; )
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20 years after...
...first wife, first set of kids, etc.
This is an almost amusing "been there, done that" story about kids and about that young wife who has now become young mom. She's mostly absent from the story because regarding young women's place in the home, the author has "been there, done that" already too. What did he think would happen when he tried to recapitulate his youth from the perspective of 50 years experience?
Not every parent, not every adult is charmed by children. The newness of everything so exciting to developing minds has, for grown ups, long since passed into sometimes jaded acceptance of reality. The patience and physical stamina required to cope with youngsters diminishes as we have to make choices about how to spend the limited resources of later life. This is called maturity.
What makes this discovery so earthshaking for Mr. Asa Rose is the underlying selfishness evident in his first sentence. It's wrapped in an insistence that the author loves all these people, that he "holds them more dear than life itself," but the story has to do not with his amusement at his expectations, but with his disappointment that reality is like the floor he falls on when he steps on toys, hard and difficult to rise above.
The thing is, life and love hardly ever requires Asa Rose's conflated sense of heroism. Mostly love is in mundane details, cleaning the kitchen after dinner and putting the kids to bed has exhausted you, working at a job for money just to keep the house or buy groceries. Love that survies dreary obligations is less easily discussed.
This article tries to justify an aging man's disinterest in youth except as it fails in his fantasy of regaining it through a second family. It's kind of pathetic that Asa Rose wasn't engaged enough the first time around to realize that child rearing has great swaths of boredom and a lot of focus on bugs.