What Is It?

36 thoughts on What Is It?

1. I mean, it’s an awful thing to say,” said Ms. Walker,

   Yes, it really is. Nobody ever explained to this woman that there are things it is absolutely okay to feel, and also okay to say to a close friend who can keep a secret, and even okay to say and write publically but anonymously, but shameful to say out loud under her own name and saying that you love one of your children less than the other one(s) is one of those things. Does she not think her stepson can read?

2. Definitely, what sophonisba said.

   Which is a bit of a refreshing change from the usual Dawn Edenish refrain of the woman ambivalent about kids who then finds Twoo Wuv with her baby and writes a book about it: that because she’s changed her mind, your decision not to have kids is a result of false consciousness and you will also soon change your mind.

   I’ve never met a woman who was absolutely adamant about not wanting children who changed her mind. I was ambivalent, and OK about the possibility of never having kids, which is entirely not the same thing at all. So me changing from ambivalent about kids to really wanting them aged 25 is nothing at all to do with what an 18 year old who is totally sure she never wants kids is going to do.

3. That was a very sad article, because it comes across that she’s trying to make up for her mother’s mistakes with her own parenting. That can sometimes work, but it can also backfire on you when you decide that anything your mother/father did was automatically wrong so you have to do the opposite. (You know, kind of like our current “If Clinton did it, it was wrong” foreign policy.)

   It’s also sad that she would announce to the world that she never really loved her ex-partner’s son, though it sounds like the breakup was a lucky escape for the poor kid. I’ve heard too many horror stories about kids stuck with hostile or indifferent stepparents to shrug that off.

   (Disclaimer: I have a stepmother who has helped raise me since I was 10 (I was 7 when my mother died) and though we drive each other crazy at times, I have never, for a moment, felt that she loved me or my brother less than her own kids.)

4. Reactions in order of occurrence:

   1. wtf, lady?
   2. What a fucking asshole
   3. Good thing my brother doesn’t read newspapers.

5. i was impressed that the NYT was able to put aside it’s usual striking concern for feminist matters to report on the in-house feminist cat fight between Alice and Rebecca.

   something about all this smacked of entitlement on rebecca’s part. i don’t think she realizes how much economic privilege and book-deal access she gains from having an overly careeristic mother.

6. Well of course it’s in the style section! Babies are the new chihuahuas!

   Now, it’s not offensive to have children. I mean, my mom is a feminist, and she had me, and I’m pretty glad that she did. I think all children should be raised by feminists At the same time, I just can’t dig on the idea of women “sublimating” some “natural urge” to have children. It goes along with the idea that it’s somehow our duty. I really, really don’t have any urge to procreate. I mean, I’m not saying that I might never change my mind, I do it on a daily basis. But I don’t like the idea that we’re not “complete” until we’ve pushed some screaming baby out of us or something.

7. My parents made it abundantly clear, through words and deeds, that my brother and I are exactly the same in their eyes. My brother is adopted. You have to really want an adopted child because they don’t happen to you by accident. You have to deal with an adoption agency, my dad had to go to the Philippines, there is a lot more work in terms of language and medical care, etc. So the idea that parents would love an adopted child less is ridiculous. Utterly fucking ridiculous. And from my point of view, it’s just how a family is. To me, adoption is what is natural and having a slew of my own babies is something weird that I would never consider doing. It’s what I grew up with, hence I want to adopt if my husband and I ever decide we want children.

   So, in short: Shut yer piehole, lady.

8. Another example of Dawn Eden Syndrome:

   I thought Dawn Eden Syndrome was a chronic form of catlady disorder, where on top of being a lonely old woman who obsesses constantly about getting married to a platonic ideal of husbandhood, the sufferer also breaks into cake shops and steals the little bride and grooms off of all the wedding cakes.

9. I’ve never met a woman who was absolutely adamant about not wanting children who changed her mind.

   I have. It’s just the ones who think that means everybody will change their mind that are loud and annoying.

   What’s terrible about Walker’s comments is that she is, presumably, still a mother to her 14-year-old stepson. So she’s telling him “Sorry, kid, I don’t love you as much as if I were related to you.”

10. To be fair, the book was reviewed in the Book Review section yesterday, so it’s not like the whole thing was just relegated to the Style section. That said, it is a bit irritating the way articles that could be interesting and important are stuck in Sunday Styles where the quality is so haphazard.

    Actually, what I found most irritating about the article was this paragraph:

    “Mine is the first generation of women to grow up thinking of children as optional,” Ms. Walker writes in the new book. “We learned that children were not to be pursued at the expense of anything else. A graduate degree in economics, for example, or a life of renunciation, devoted to a Hindu mystic.”

    ‘Cause, yeah, that’s the choice most women make. Graduate degree in economics or ascetic life of Hindu mysticism. The class bias in this is literally overwhelming. The assertion of middle-class privilege blocked out whatever useful Walker was trying to say.

    To go back to the Sunday Styles issue, though. It’s actually among my favorite sections because it so often tackles cultural questions that don’t get to be in other parts of the paper. There was an article a few weeks ago about everyday violence against gay people, even in Chelsea. There was that irritating article in Modern Loves by the woman who still loved her rapist boyfriend. There was the article a few months ago about fat studies. All flawed, yes. All marred by having to be “lifestyle” articles. But all interesting articles about important cultural questions that sparked more discussion and debate than they would have if they were straight news articles. Frankly, I’m glad that whoever is running the Sunday Styles section has the gumption and curiosity to run these kind of stories, and I’m glad the Times has a style section that’s so serious.

11. re: what #8 R. Mildred said-catlady is NOT a disorder!!! Catlady’s appreciate the splendor and gorgeosity of kitties that’s all!!! And not all catlady’s long for marriage some of us are contented loners . It irks me how people always diss catlady’s. One day catlady’s WILL rise up and silence our detractors! You will all be sorry.

    that said-I was adopted as a baby and I find the comment unbelievable-what bugs me about it is that it makes it seem like motherhood is purely biological. I can’t imagine thinking of my mother as anything less than my mother simply because she didn’t biologically give birth to me. Same with fathers.

12. You know, it’s people like her that always made me question how my step-parents felt about me. My mom remarried when I was 3 and went on to have three other children with my stepdad and everday I questioned if he treated me differently because people would say shit like that to me.

    Where do you get off, lady?

13. All good parents respond to their children (biological, adopted, just hanging around their house because they can) as individuals. So many stepchildren end up the short end of the stick because these sort of statements colour their own interactions with their new parents.
    Ms. Walker sounds like an addict who has just found a new addiction- mommyhood. I hope that she grows into it or she may find herself understanding her own mother much too well.

    (Before I ever had children I would put myself into absurd situations to protect children. What has biology to do with loving things?)

14. I found that interview profoundly irritating too. The article also mentioned that “Ms. Walker was saddened by what she called her mother’s lack of enthusiasm to the news that she was pregnant.” Hmmm, maybe that was because of the kinds of things RW would say about her partner’s child? If I had a daughter who talked that way, I would be a little nervous about her parenting abilities. Then RW went on to torture her mother with emails demanding apologies for how she was raised. I get the feeling that RW is just pissed off that AW didn’t find giving birth quite as “transformational” as her daughter did. (And did she demand apologies from her father, too?)

    I suppose I should read the book before getting all judgmental based on one interview, but I just can’t bring myself to put down money for a pastel-colored book with the title “Baby Love.”

15. Thismis rediculous. To say that someone cannot love one who is not biologically related to them as much as they love someone who is, is the biggest line of crap I have ever heard. I’m my mothers only child, and my fathers youngest of 3. I have a step-mom and a step-dad, and I know for a fact that although I am not biologically theirs, they love me all the same. That is something that has been stressed throughout my family my whole entire childhood- and now it is just a fact. I have a half brother and a half sister, and do I love them any less then if they were my full brother/sister.. absolutly not. This woman needs to think before she opens her mouth, and realize that not everyone is as cold as her.

16. It’s also gross and fraught with baggage to put “dying for him” as the measure of a mother’s love. Nothing less than total and utter self-abnegation qualifies, apparently, such that her stepson is only okay (in her mind) because he does have another woman in his life who would lay down her life for him.

    I don’t know if my mother would die for me, it wouldn’t surprise me if she wouldn’t, and I know she’d certainly prefer not to. But she does love me. Everybody should love their kids enough to, I don’t know, give up a kidney for them, and certainly love them enough not to publically insult them like Walker has. But dying for them? Eh. Maybe it’s just so much posturing, since pretty much nobody is ever going to have to put their money where their mouth is. But it’s still a creepy and annoying thing to require mothers to ritually say — and I say that as a child, not a mother.

17. One day catlady’s WILL rise up and silence our detractors! You will all be sorry.

    You will know us by our minions!

    (I really wish the store would make a t-shirt with that image on it. I’d wear it every single day.)

18. Really, how often do you have to take a bullet for your kid here in the US of A?

    I guess my question about this article is why on earth I should care how much Ms. Walker loves either of her kids?

    I mean, people KILL their step-children all the damn time. What does THAT say about Parenthood?

    I dunno, I think our conviction that we are the template for the rest of the universe is one of our biggest flaws as humans.

19. You know, my mother grew up in the Third World, and she never says, “I would die for my children.” She doesn’t take death lightly. Maybe because where she grew up, it could potentially happen.

    She DOES say that she would rather have us little brats around than trade us for millions of dollars, though.

20. Oh, for the love of…! I couldn’t even read the article, the sum-up pissed me off so much. Not love your non-biological kids as much as the bio ones, indeed! What a fat, steaming pile of utter crap.

    I don’t even know how to put into words how thoroughly this annoys me. It totally denies my relationship with two of my kids, just because they floated in someone else’s womb for a bit, and denies those two kids’ mother her relationship with my kid that floated inside me. This isn’t all that coherent, but egads! Me, my ex-husband, and his long-time gf all have three kids, and any one of us would throw ourselves in front of a train for any one of them. I don’t love Lil’ Bro or my Tori-Rose any less than the Boychilde, just because they don’t “share my blood.” They share my heart, and that should be enough.

    To insist otherwise….GAH!!! My heart isn’t that cold, and I don’t really understand how someone else can be.

21. I’m adopted and I really wanted to slap her for that comment. I hope like hell the kid in question never, ever finds that article online, because he’s going to wind up with not just issues, but entire bound volumes. I know my parents really wanted me; they had to work harder to get me than most parents do. They may not be ultra-thrilled with the person I turned into at times, but they’re like as not partially responsible. *grin*

    I sure as hell hope my parents would have more sense than to die for me; I’m not sure I can think of a scenario where a one-for-one self-sacrifice between one of my parents and myself would work out at all well for any of us.

22. People like her need to stop ascribing their own brand of Assholism to others. I mean, Jesus, lady, maybe it’s not some magical intrinsic thing with biological children. Maybe it’s just that you’re a bad person.

23. BTW a recent study showed that by nearly all measures adoptive parents spend more time with their children than biological parents: more time talking to them, more time reading to them, more time eating meals with them.

    The only thing they don’t do is spend time socializing with other parents and children. Is it any wonder with idiotic attitudes like this floating about?

24. Adoptive parents don’t socialize with other parents and their children? Huh?

25. Yet another annoying thing about the article was the whole ‘She as young and wild and slept with women, but then she grew up and found herself a good man!’ subtext. Because being in a heterosexual relationship is a sign of maturity. Grrr.

26. This seems to be a whole burrito of social conflation and mixed messages that ends up in a nauseating series of assumptions and behaviour.
    1. The idea of choice was just that, choice. Not a mandate to chose a profession in or outside the home, but to see oneself as a professional person, instead of someone whose roles were defined by the organization of their erectile tissue. That motherhood is a revolution against feminism is bizarre. Heh…the best way to educate people is to do it from the very beginning. Raising feminists is just as powerful as educating adults about feminism. The conflation is artificial, and is an artifact of anti-feminism.

    2. The idea of genotypic inheritance seems tied to patriarchal ideation. Absorbing that as relevant to an emotional interaction is just kinda wierd. I wonder what she’s defining ‘love’ as in this case, and what children represent to her.
    Nurturing a life is pretty intense, and if she’s engaging in that fully, then there is likely a fully engaged emotional bond. If there are caveats due to her preconceptions, then there will likely be barricades. I have a personal irritation for people who have children to assuage some personal needs, vs those who fully understand that these homunculi are going to be sovereign people with needs and (hopefully) self determination that will likely diverge from their caregivers. Parenthood is not therapy. Pregnancy is not a magic bullet, and it is not automatically a celebrated thing by everyone.

    3. Recognizing that you may be a bad parent takes courage, and facing the consequences of that takes even more. Rebecca Walker does neither of these things. She seems to think her emotional distance from her stepchild is justified, as a result of parturition, and that that is a defensible ideal. It’s good to self-define, to mandate your own worth and to respect yourself in an honest understanding of who you are….it’s not okay to redefine positive behaviour as a result of cognitive dissonance and misapplied logic.

    I particularly disliked the commentary by Baumgartner …

    “There is a tradition of feminist writing about pregnancy and motherhood, but not everyone had such a complex mother-daughter dynamic to process.

    Alice Walker “gave to the world this incredible thing,” Ms. Baumgardner said. “But what you want from your parents is parenting.” ”

    I agree that there are only so many things one can do well at the same time… but I disagree with her choices, and with her definitions of what feminism is, and what emotional responsibility is.

    Feminism isn’t an eradication of the rights or positive aspects of any gender. It’s a mandate that both genders are composed of equal people…wubbly bits aside, who have the same rights and equivalent worth. You can sleep with a person of any gender and be a feminist. You do no have to have a vagina to be a feminist, and you can be capable and responsible or a complete idiot, and still be a feminist.

    The assumption that Walker is a feminist is interesting to me…she isn’t speaking like a person who is prone to a great deal of self examination and personal responsibility, and I really doubt her qualification to represent a feminist approach to parturition and motherhood, and what that does/should entail. You don’t get philosophy from the womb.

    The Walkers seem to hav a very complicated and tumultuous relationship. I am sure that that’s interesting and indicative of many things…I’m just not sure that it is either entirely relevant to or an artifact of feminist philosophy.

27. Pingback: Is the Gray Lady a Feminist? « MilbyDaniel

28. Speaking as an adopted only child….. the fuck???

    Now, my mother’s absofuckinglutely INSANE, and I wish she loved me *less* at times. She takes stuff that’s “for my own good”, like grades and weight, a leeeettle too seriously, and her overwhelming *desire* to buy me expensive trinkets when she has trouble affording day-to-day life in LA is something I find creepy and unwanted and guilt-inducing as fuckall. Plus, the combination of a.) her type A, panic-prone personality and authoritarian parenting style that blend to form the single greatest source of stress and anxiety and confusion for most of my existence and b.) her occaisional random decisions that I need nothing more than to have her show up at my doorstep and “help” me manage things… is not a good thing.
    (And then there’s the phone call I got from the sheriff’s department at 4 am when at Disneyland with some buddies because she’d gotten drunk and reported an imaginary family living in her garage… yeah, Mom’s an interesting and unique human being.)

    And yet, while I wish she was normal, and while I frankly wish this wasn’t true, I have no fucking doubt she would take a bullet for me. Hell, she’s continuously sacrificed her career options, her social life, and most of the purpose for a human existence for really, really warped ideas of what she thinks I need or want. If I were actually in danger, she would do *anything*.

    The only difference between me and her theoretical biological is I escaped her family’s dominant trait of tone-deafness. My grandfather sang in an internationally-touring choir. When I was a kid, I thought it was special the way Mommy sang Happy Birthday and it didn’t sound like the way anybody else did. But, yeah, she loves me, and I don’t think it’s possible she’d love a biological child any more.

29. Oh, and my unmentioned dad loves me a great deal, too, and that’s despite being the normal, mostly-rational, successful, yet non-custodial parent. His girlfriend of 8+ years also recently claimed to love me like her own children, and I believe her.

    (And, no, my mention of custody isn’t meant as any form of MRA bullshit. It’s based on the fact that in my particular situation, my mother, though I love her, is bloody mad, and my post-divorce, pre-boarding-school years would have been much less stressful and much more normal with custody the other way around. I don’t think she got custody by any female default, I think it was a question of Dad not being able to take time from his corporate job to, say, drive me 45 minutes to school each morning or jump through the other hoops I “needed”, while my mom as a part-time accountant could)

30. * The thing with tone-deafness didn’t get written as clearly as I meant it to. My grandfather’s family is very very musical. My grandmother’s entire family is not. Full stop. Any musical talent genes that mix with the family are sucked into a giant black hole, never to be seen again.

    Also, my dad can sing Happy Birthday and have it be recognizable, but not much else, so there’d be no hope for me anyway. Hooray for adoption! 😀

31. To be fair, in my experience, you don’t love adopted/stepkids less, but you may love them differently.

    I have two stepchildren I have been raising with my husband since they were two and three. They are now nine and ten. I also have a biological three-year-old and a nine-month-old.

    I *would* take a bullet for my older children. I have gone through a great deal to help them and raise them — my oldest has severe ADD and is a challenge to deal with, and his sister needs a lot of love and care precisely because his disorder gets him so much attention and I don’t want her to feel as if being normal and not difficult gets her ignored. I read them stories at night, I gave them baths, I kissed their boo-boos, I drove seven hours in one night so they could go to Six Flags like I promised even though it was logistically insane.

    But when I look at my baby girl, I see myself. And I see my mother before me. When I look at my baby son, I see my brother as well as my husband. And I feel connected in a way I can’t with the older two — not just because there’s a biological connection but because no one can take these two from me. Legally, unless their biomom terminates her parental rights, which I doubt she will, I cannot adopt the older two. If my husband should die, if we should divorce, I would lose them. It is a stress that lurks in the back of my heart, a stress I won’t be free of until they are 18.

    So I do love them equally to my bio kids. But that love is a source of stress that is absent in the bio kids, and the bio kids give me a feeling of being connected to the world genetically that the older two don’t, so it is a *different* feeling. (That, and my oldest bio-kid is only now getting to the age that I first met the older two at, so I never knew them as infants. That changes things too.)

    (Just to clarify when I talk about stress: this stress is entirely manufactured by society and the fact that a stepparent has no legal rights, regardless of how the child thinks of them. My kids call me Mom and I am the only person they think of as a mother; their bio-mom is more like a friendly aunt. But the law would not care. This is not the children’s fault and I don’t mean to imply that *they* stress me, simply that loving them is more dangerous than loving my own children, because it is much easier for society to take them from me.)

32. If I read one more thing this week that tells me what an awful awful woman I am for having placed a child for adoption ten years ago, I may throw up.

    See, no, I wouldn’t die for my “bio” child. I’m not her mother.

    I’m so sick of the way some people feel the need to tell women who have placed children for adoption how awful they are for doing so. When I was pregnant, I got the same crap thrown at me by people – adoptive parents don’t love their children the way “real” parents do, and I was assured I was placing my child in an abusive home because “all adoptive parents are abusive”.

    This sort of crap is just more of the same.

33. Yet another annoying thing about the article was the whole ‘She as young and wild and slept with women, but then she grew up and found herself a good man!’ subtext. Because being in a heterosexual relationship is a sign of maturity. Grrr.

    Totally agree. (Continuing from this, I know that if I put a wedding ring on, I would instantly be treated by everyone as a more responsible, esteemed citizen, especially if I were a man.)

    The whole article cements Walker as finally arriving and being in a state of completion now. Of course, this is never the case. And, as you point out, it makes her previous life (lesbian loving, third waver) the stuff of a tormented young person. Lesbianism and/or radical feminism is always the thing you do until graduation, isn’t it? (In part because of the lack of legal recognition and protection, which it also reinforces), these are always less respectable, tenous relationships.

    I’m not surprised that she continues to get this much media attention. This is the type of supposed feminism story popular media want (i.e., it criticizes other feminists, it kind of apologizes for the author’s previous choices, it reinforces traditional gender values, and it reinforces this idea of an intergenerational ‘catfight’).

34. I’m so sick of the way some people feel the need to tell women who have placed children for adoption how awful they are for doing so. When I was pregnant, I got the same crap thrown at me by people – adoptive parents don’t love their children the way “real” parents do, and I was assured I was placing my child in an abusive home because “all adoptive parents are abusive”.

    Holy shit, people say that? I’m so sorry you had to deal with that kind of crap. Just reading it makes me furious. If someone ever said that about my birth mother or my parents, I’d have a hard time not resorting to physical violence, because seriously, that is bullshit.

35. Long-time lurker, first-time commenter. Hi. 🙂

    I’m so sick of the way some people feel the need to tell women who have placed children for adoption how awful they are for doing so.

    As an adoptee, I can relate, sort of. I become absolutely FURIOUS when people claim that adoption is universally a bad choice. I’ve heard this in feminist communities, and it’s enraging! Yeah, some adoptees end up in less-than-optimal homes, but lots of people have less-than-optimal homes with their BIOLOGICAL parents.

36. nem0, there is no bottom to the stupid crap people will say when motherhood is involved.

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