Letters to the Editor
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anecdotally, Jane Goodall raised her son among the chimps...
...and by all accounts he turned out pretty well-adjusted.
A lot of the letters in response to this sound like sour grapes to me. Yes, this writer has financial means that most mothers do not. Yes, a lot of writers for Salon seem to be white and upper-middle class.
But this article was about HER PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, and her personal experience wasn't trying to make ends meet while mothering her young children and feeling trapped; it was merely mothering her young children and feeling trapped.
Go for it. It's not forever. If it doesn't work out, you can go home again.
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The "personal"
is political, of course--need I point this out? Furthermore, surely the point of a column such as this one, or indeed, any public piece of writing, is not merely to record one's personal experience (those navel-gazing meanderings can safely be confined to one's diary), but rather, to intersect with larger concerns--to resonate with big issues that many people experience. This COULD have been that piece--a piece about the ambivalence of motherhood, the desire to be with one's children and the simultaneous grief of losing oneself, and so forth. Surely this kind of writing is possible across class lines. Kate Chopin did it in The Awakening, and while class is an issue in that novella, the work is rich enough that it can't be dismissed as the narcissistic chatter of a spoiled and affluent woman; Tillie Olsen did it in her work, which was from a decidedly working class perspective, but all of these writers touched on the difficult and conflicted role that mothers play. This piece is absolutely personal, and is therefore a failure. If Amanda Eyre Ward's point in writing the piece was to solicit rah rahs or cautions from readers, she would have been better served writing Cary Tennis. This was supposed to be the sort of article that intersected with something real, with something larger than itself. Instead, it comes across as therapy.