It's About Choice

Oh yay, it's the Mommy Wars redux! This time with added false Republican vs. Democrat dichotomy!

To recap, in case you hadn't heard: a Democratic strategist I never heard of before, named Hilary Rosen, is taking some heat because she said of Mitt Romney, in a CNN interview, “Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of women in this country are facing.”

What Rosen was saying, I believe, is the arguably true statement that Ann Romney, married for most of her adult life to a very rich man, doesn't exactly have experience with the pressing financial problems of parenting that many of us do. Instead the media picked up "Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life" and ran with the "stay-at-home moms don't really work, according to top Democratic strategist" angle.

So Hilary Rosen had to issue an apology, saying that as a mother, she knows “raising children is the hardest job there is.” OF COURSE SHE DOES. Any mother who is raising her children and doing even a half-ass job knows that parenting is a shit-ton of work. I sincerely doubt Rosen meant to argue that Ann Romney didn't work hard and likely do a fine job of raising her five sons.

Obama campaign advisers were quick to distance themselves from Rosen, of course, calling her comments "inappropriate" and "wrong." I would say, however, that they weren't wrong. Ok, fine, "never worked a day" was a cheap shot. But is it wrong to say that Ann Romney has "never dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of women in this country are facing?" I don't think that's wrong at all. I think it's spot on.

There's also the argument that, as President Obama said when he got dragged into this manufactured controversy, "I don’t have a lot of patience for commentary about the spouses of political candidates." Well, fine, but that's a little unrealistic. Ann Romney has been active in her husband's campaign, and Mitt Romney brought her into it when he said she was his "top adviser on women's issues." Since women are a pretty damn big part of the electorate, Romney's position on women's issues is important. And if his top advisor on women's issues has little experience with the type of issues most women are facing -- well, I think that's fair game for the Dems.

So when Ann Romney says on Twitter that she "made a choice to stay home and raise five boys," I can't imagine any mother -- up to and including Hilary Rosen -- who would argue that was not hard work. The point both the Romney and Obama campaigns, as well as the media in general, missed, or chose not to address, is that Rosen wasn't criticizing Ann Romney's choice to stay home. She was criticizing the Romney campaign's portrait of her as an expert on the economic issues facing women.

Ann Romney told Fox that her "career choice was to be a mother" and "we need to respect choices that women make." Again, true. And again, beside the point. Some will disagree, but again, I don't think Rosen was disrespecting Romney's choice to stay home. She was pointing up that unlike a lot of us, Ann Romney had the means to MAKE a choice.

See, however the campaigns want to frame it, this isn't WOHM-vs-SAHM. It's Ann Romney, or her advisors and strategists, pretending she can relate to any mom, working or not, who has ever had to prioritize buying groceries over paying the electric bill, or feel ashamed that her child is going to school in outgrown hand-me-downs, or who has to explain to her third-grader that he can't go on the field trip because Mom doesn't have the ten bucks to send to school that day. It's any politician, parent or not, thinking they know how that feels if they haven't been there. Don't tell me you understand me because you're a mother and so am I. It's not that easy.

The media might want to cast this as a working-outside-the-home versus a stay-at-home debate, but the truth is, most moms I know fought that war a long time ago and have achieved, if not peace, then some kind of wary détente with it. Most of us are working outside the home, or working at home, or not working at a job we get paid for at all, with the knowledge that we are doing what we need to do for our families.

We might have "chosen" to work because even though our spouses make decent money, we find it fulfilling to go somewhere people are wearing shoes and having conversations with multisyllabic words. Or we might be working because kids do, after all, need to eat and wear clothes and have somewhere to sleep. We might be staying home because we can't imagine missing out on a moment of our progeny's childhood -- or maybe it's because we know that whatever we might make at a paid job wouldn't cover what it would cost to keep said progeny in halfway decent daycare.

I'd wager that among the moms I know, most of us have a lot more in common with each other, whether we work outside the home or not, than any of us do with Ann Romney, or Michelle Obama for that matter. What I would really like is for politicians to stop creating fake media wars that distract us from actual problems, and get back to work making this country a place where more of us actually have the choices they all take for granted.

In which I ramble somewhat incoherently

What kind of effed-up world do we live in where people are telling us that we should be more scared of a kid in a hoodie than a maniac with a gun? Where "slut" is apparently a perfectly acceptable thing to call a woman who happens to enjoy sex, and people in long-term loving relationships are told they are what's wrong with America? Where people just go on shooting rampages because they are mentally or emotionally crippled from seeing their friends blown up or because they are indoctrinated by a certain worldview that says some people don't even count? Where if you don't agree with someone you don't ignore them them or sit down and listen to there side but instead call them every filthy thing you can think of because it's all anonymous on the internet? How did this happen?

I cannot stop thinking about the completely and utterly arsed-up state of the world and hoping that at least we are starting some kind of resistance and change by talking and protesting and making ourselves heard, which is easier than ever because hey, retweet, and I've done my part. But then I become paralyzed by my inability to comprehend and articulate how truly horrific it is that someone just shoots a child, here or in France or in Afghanistan, and I just want to protect my children from ever finding out about any of it; and then I think that if I do, I'm part of the problem because they need to grow up and be the people who make this sort of thing stop.

And if my kids are going to change the world they have to eventually become aware that not every child grows up happy and healthy with their only concerns about why we don't have their favorite Pop-tart flavor and how unfair it is that Alyssa got her ears pierced at NINE and why do I have to wait until I'm TWELVE. But how do I tell them that, and when?

Not right now, obviously. I'm not going to sit my kids down like that dumbass in the Kony video who is explaining, unprompted, to his 5-year-old about a crazed madman who kidnaps children and makes them kill other people, showing him pictures of "the bad guy," like, thanks, Dad, when I wake up screaming for weeks I hope you are there to reassure me that no one is going to come kidnap me out of my bed and make me shoot you. But I will always tell my kids the truth when they ask.

And maybe they won't want to change the world, but dammit, I hope that they do, even though I'm sorry that we've screwed it up enough that they need to change it. I hope that we are doing something right now, between the Occupy movement and marriage equality finally being a thing that can really happen and people sending knitted lady parts to their congresspersons and people speaking up, finally, about how shitty it is that we have so much and do so freaking little, but there will be so much more they will have to do.

There are things we can do but I am starting to think that the best thing we can do, in this generation and the one just behind us, is to try and raise fewer assholes, racists, misogynists, and xenophobes, and more people who speak up and speak out and are willing to listen, not just talk.

Don't pretend to your kid that skin color doesn't matter and we're all the same inside, because it's not true; don't let them think that civil rights and the feminist movement are just something in history class because if recent events prove anything, it's that it's not enough that our great-great-grandmothers got the vote; we have to keep protesting and talking and working to protect what they put themselves on the line for. It's not over.

I don't know the point of what I'm typing here, I'm just typing because the first line of this started out as a Facebook status, like "I'm so horrified about the state of the world right now that I just want to lock my children inside forever," but then I couldn't stop typing so I just kept going. It's Friday and I've had less than five hours of sleep for the last four nights in a row and that's probably a big part of the reason I can't actually formulate a constructive and supported argument or opinion, but am just typing until it seems like a good place to stop, but really, world, cut it out.

Stop being assholes to each other. I want my children to grow up and I want them to see the beautiful parts of the world and not have to deal with this shit. So stop it. Is that really so much to ask?

Extremely Local Politics

On Tuesdays, Boo has gymnastics. (Wednesdays Mimi has soccer, Thursdays we all have therapy. It's always something.) After gymnastics, because Tuesdays are also "kids-eat-free" days at several area restaurants, we usually go out to eat. This past Tuesday, though, I can only assume the kids were a little burned out on eating at sit-down restaurants after last week and requested McDonald's. I was too tired to argue the point, and also did not want to MAKE dinner, so we went to McDonald's.

Yesterday was also Michigan's Republican primary, and the giant flat-screen tv in the McD's dining room was tuned to CNN. The girls were paying no attention until they saw a map of Michigan appear, at which point they were all "hey! That's us! What is up with that?"

This is how I ended up explaining democracy (the Cliff notes version) over a Filet-o'-Fish.

I should have just shown them "America Rocks" instead.