Public Motherhood

I broke my own rule of never looking at Salon comments, since they generally tend to sap my belief in human goodness. I've fumed over the people telling Joe Lieberman to go back to Israel (Jews of course are only Americans when Christians agree with them), shuddered at the victim blaming responses to Kate Harding's columns, and felt ill at the blatant hate and misogyny that appears whenever a woman speaks, but particularly if she speaks about abortion or feminism. However, the comments on Ayelet Waldman's pieces reach a level of vitriol that I think might be unprecedented. What does it mean, when readers find depictions of motherhood to be more repulsive than even their usual strawmen of Jews,gays, girls who drink and/or are raped, and women who exercise control over their own bodies and voices?

I know that many of you might not like Waldman, for a diversity of reasons, and while I emphatically do like her, that's not really the point of this piece. I'd like to talk about one of the specific criticisms that usually gets lobbied against her and with which the Salon commenters truly outdid themselves. Most of the responses against her were not addressed to what she was saying in her individual articles, but rather were angry that she was speaking at all about Motherhood. Ironically, in an age of mommyblogs and mommy-driven tv advertisements, many people still seem to think that talking about motherhood at all is inherently inappropriate and immodest. People asked, "What if your children read this?" or called her an emotionally unstable oversharer. They responded to her piece with criticisms that her writing was filthy and should not be read and often prided themselves as having stopped at the first paragraph, as if that mechanism of self-censoring, of keeping themselves from the contamination of her prose, proved something not only about Waldman'their own mental, moral acuity.

It is this aspect of immodesty and immorality which particularly interests me. After all, in my own opinion, it would be less damaging for Waldman's son to one day read that his mother had hoped that he would be gay than for a child of Rick Warren's to one day learn that his father had helped craft legislation in Uganda that was used to deny human rights. Waldman uses her family as the plot and core of her writing; she has taken the domestic sphere and assumed that this traditionally female world nevertheless has insights and meaning for a greater populace. As I read it, her own family has become the microcosm through which her understanding of humanity functions. This is actually fairly common for writers, after all. Louisa May Alcott may have changed the names of her sisters for Little Women, but this device was only a transparent one. Saul Bellow showcased his ex-wives as the harpies of his novels. The idea that authors draw, often visibly, from life is one accepted broadly by the literary elite of our society.

However, the domestic sphere of motherhood remains a taboo one for mothers to speak provocatively about, both because it has traditionally been considered a private space (juxtaposed with the public, professional world of men), and because it is an environment of emotion and sentiment, also traditionally female and thus inherently insignificant . Takin on the latter first, many of the commenters in fact questioned why Salon would even be interested in Waldman's reflections on motherhood or why any "intellectual" would find value in such musings. Judith Warner, the "mommy blogger" for the New York Times has also faced similar questions and challenges for her own work. My guess would be that the entertainment sections of news outlets, with their coverage of American Idol and Dexter, don't face the same questions of relevance and greater significance that women columnists writing about women's lives, whether relationships, workplace challenges, health issues, or motherhood, face for every single publication. Of course, motherhood is something that every individual reader has had experience of, whether as the actor or recepient, yet despite its ubiquity, it is considered insiginficant and unnewsworthy, even in comparison to articles about fatherhood and paternity. The comments on the recent New York Times article about disputed paternity didn't ask "What's the point?" as at least one comment on every article about female life experience seems to.

Emotion and sentiment do show up as frequent themes within Waldman's work, yet I would argue that our very understanding of emotion and sentiment as unintellectual and pedestrian is a gendered one, harkening back to the Enlightenment's hierarchization of masculine-labeled Reason over soft, feminine, Feeling. Society has long had a vested interest in keeping the domestic sphere both emotional and private, as the place to which the professional men could return, relax the grim facades they showed to the world, and expose their hidden tenderness. When women start exposing the daily realities of life within a family, and not just the idealized models forcefed our society as acceptable pictures of maternity and womanhood, they expose not just the children, but also their own husbands' emotional "nakedness." They show the public something that our American Christian heritage has long told us was meant to be kept private. Thus, for the Salon commenter who asked a defender of Waldman if she allowed her small child to witness her giving oral sex to her husband, this is no leap of logic. The privacy of the child often seems to come back to the sexualized privacy of the husband, his security in maintaining his home as a non-public, distinct sphere.

This is not to say that children themselves don't deserve privacy. However, the extent to which Mommy blogging is perceived to threaten children as opposed to the very public behaviors of fathers across the country, seems to point to greater issues than whether or not a 20 year old will regret his mother publishing his seven year old thought that he might be gay. He might perhaps feel embarrassed. However, the actions of all parents, both fathers and mothers, have the potential to embarrass and humiliate their children. It is the potential of the mother to embarrass that seems to particularly haunt American readers.