Just over a year ago, I got an anonymous e-mail that said, among other things, this:

You honestly make me sick. Keep making money off your dead dad, your dying nephew and your kids. Keep taking trips for free while your 15 minutes are still here, because eventually, people are going to see the scum money grubbing famewhore that lies underneath the fake exterior, and you’ll be yesterday’s news. Here’s hoping that’s sooner than later. Go take another Ativan, cause that’s how you cope, right?

I get hate mail from time to time. That one was one of the worst. Usually the nasty comments and the angry mail and the snide posts and whatnot don’t bother me – I’ve been around awhile; I’m used to them; I know that I’m supposed to ignore them – but this one, it hit me hard, because it took aim at things that I was doing to try to achieve some good, things that I was doing in an effort to scatter gathering clouds, to find hope. I was trying to wring some good out of struggling with depression, with grief, with the shadow of illness and inevitable death. I was trying to use this platform to work through the challenges of helping my family navigate a dark valley, and to use that story to make some larger difference. Somebody decided to tell me that they thought what I was doing was offensive, horrible, sick-making.

It was the first time that I faced that. It wasn’t the last. The more that I wrote about Tanner, the more that I accepted help from the community in raising awareness of Tanner’s story and raising money for research into muscular dystrophy, the more I received or heard about nasty remarks from people who saw this as attention-seeking. After BlogHer hosted a charity run, last year, in Tanner’s name, someone wrote a post slamming the whole thing, lamenting that such a dubious, fame-whoring enterprise was condoned by an institution like BlogHer. They only did it because I was a well-known blogger, she said. They were totally willing to overlook the fact that I am a fame-whoring blogger. Such evil, such corruption.

When I went to Lesotho last year, with the Global Fund/Born HIV Free campaign, it got worse. I had never paid much mind to the term ‘poverty tourism.’ I certainly never thought that it would be applied to me.  But it was applied to me. So were the words ‘privileged’ and ‘self-absorbed’ and ‘willing to do anything to get attention.’ I’ve heard those words a million times in relation to blogging, so you’d think that they’d have rolled right off me. They didn’t. They hurt. They struck at a place that was already vulnerable, already raw. They struck at that part of my heart that was struggling to confront pain and heartache and injustice and so much that is just wrong with the world, with life – the stuff that makes you doubt, with Voltaire, the benevolent presence of God – and it hurt. It hurt badly. And it made me want to close up. It made me want to not write about this stuff anymore.

So I was angry when I saw that people had gone after Heather last week, with similar accusations, similarly snide accusations that her recent trip to Bangladesh had been just another example of ‘poverty tourism,’ that her efforts to use her platform to share stories and promote issues that would otherwise not get heard or discussed are just so much more attention-seeking and privilege-indulging. I was so angry that I couldn’t even weigh in on the discussion as it was happening. It made my head throb and my heart pound and my throat close and the couple of times that I put fingers to keyboard to say something about it I would end up just sitting there, trying to control my breathing. Not because I was worried that Heather’s poor heart would get bruised – this is heart-bruising stuff, it really is, but Heather’s a big girl and she can take care of her own heart – but because I am just so tired of it, all of this, all of this self-righteous posturing that happens online – that happens everywhere, sure, but it really seems to thrive here – all of this rampant assholery, this excessive douchebaggery, this meanness that dresses itself up as ‘critique’ and ‘analysis’ and ‘open discussion.’

That’s not what this is. This stuff that we’re talking about isn’t reasoned, respectful debate. This is bullies with stones. This is people being assholes. Tracey, last week, called them griefers. Jon Armstrong called them concern trolls. Plato might have called them sophists, but that would have been too generous (too generous an assessment of their skill, and their capacity for shame, that is; even Thrasymachus, his most famous example of a shamelessly, discursively deceptive sophist – who argued only for the purposes of boosting his own reputation – blushed when Socrates got the better of him.) I’m calling them assholes.

And that’s what needs to be called out, that’s what we need to just stop tolerating. There is absolutely a place – the Internet is all about this kind of place – for open discussion and debate and criticism. What it means when we try to use these platforms for good – how we understand our own privilege in the context of trying to do good, how we navigate the space between the benefit to ourselves and the benefit to others, how we understand what it even means to do good when doing good (as it always does) involves some personal gain, if only (if only!) in soul-expansion, in heart-lifting – is certainly well worth discussing. Critical to discuss, even. But when people take to these places to attack each other for sport or for thrills or to work out their own issues – when they use these discussions as pretext for throwing discursive stones – they make these places less hospitable to discourse. Nobody wants to play in a playground where bullies lurk. Nobody wants to share their stories when they fear being shouted down. Nobody but the bold and the brave remain in such hostile spaces – or speak up in such hostile spaces – and that’s a shame.

Heather will go on and continue to share her stories and the stories of others (worth noting, sophists, that this is not new territory for her) and do her thing, because she’s Heather. But other story-tellers and idea-sharers and do-gooders might not. Others might take their stories and their ideas and their causes to other, quieter, less public spaces. Others still might simply opt to not share them at all. Discursive bullying silences people. Maybe not a lot of people, but I don’t think that matters. If anyone chooses to remain silent – if anyone choose to not share the story that could help even one other person, if anyone chooses to not promote the cause that could make even the smallest difference – if any one, single person backs away, removes themselves from the conversation, walks out of the playground because someone else just couldn’t resist indulging their own desire to be an asshole, well, that’s one person too many.

I wish that we could get outraged about that. I really do. And then, when we’re done being outraged, that we could resolve to do better, to be more considerate of each other. You can be thoughtful and critical and still be considerate. Isn’t that what they teach our kids in kindergarten? Let’s try to be at least as civil as kindergartners. Or at least, you know, not assholes.

NOTE: I’m closing comments, partly because I’m not going to be around to moderate them, but also because I just don’t want to. I don’t know whether this underscores my point here, or contradicts it, but I don’t really care. I didn’t write this to stir the pot – I wrote last Friday, actually, and then went off in a canoe to the Canadian backwoods to forget that I wrote it – I wrote it to relieve my anger and frustration. And, I suppose, to make a statement. Well, it’s done. If you’re moved by it, be moved to go engage someone in constructive, civil, respectful dialogue, or, you know, to go say something nice to someone. Go say something nice to someone.

Before Emilia was born, I had a very clear plan about what kind of mother I was going to be. I was going to carry her with me everywhere in designer slings, I was going to hand-blend my own organic baby food, I was going to shun pacifiers, I was going to teach her sign language before she was six months old, I was going to lose the baby weight before she was four months old, I was going to forbid any and all toys that were not hand-crafted by Swedish artisans from entering my house, I was going to swaddled her bottom only in cloth diapers hand-laundered in eco-friendly detergents, I was going breastfeed her until she was two, I was going to not let her watch television until she was three, I was going to clothe her only in garments woven from pure cotton by Tibetan monks or, at least, certified Disney-character free. I was going to be master of my maternal domain! I was going to be the very best mother ever, and nobody would be able to deny it!

Then Emilia was born. You know where this is going. There was a pacifier in her mouth before we wrapped her bottom in some Huggies Little Snugglers, bundled her in a Winnie-the-Pooh sleeper and took her home from the hospital.

She refused to be carried in slings or Bjorns or Ergos or anything, really, other than arms or strollers, and even arms were usually disdained in favor of moving-moving-always-moving. She self-weaned just shy of nine months. She wouldn’t nap or sleep unless she was left to fuss it out for a while, or unless she was put in a stroller and walked around the block eleventeen times. She was bouncing around in a hideous red-and-blue plastic Exersaucer by the time she was six months old, and she never learned sign language. I never did get around to making my own organic baby food, and almost five years later, I still have the baby weight.

I agonized over all of this – all of these failings, as I saw them – for a very long time. I wanted to do motherhood right. I had very clear ideas, most of them conflicting entirely with the others, about what was involved in doing motherhood right. I had read all the books, was reading all the magazines, had found all the blogs. Angelina carried her baby everywhere. So did Jennifer Garner. And Dr. Sears was adamant that I breastfeed as long as possible, and that if it hurt, I was doing it wrong. Harvey Karp told me that there was no reason why my child shouldn’t sleep on a reasonable schedule, if I handled her properly (what was it again? Swaddle-Soothe-Swing-Swagger-Swill-Something?), and Christy Turlington was on the cover of Cookie Magazine showing off what yoga had done for her mom-bod. And don’t even get me started on Gwyneth Paltrow. Gwyneth Paltrow, it seemed to me, had her shit down. Everyone else could be a good mother, dammit. Why couldn’t I?

I eventually found a way to let all of that go and accept – finally, and with difficulty – that not only did I not need to conform to somebody else’s idea of a good mother, there was no such thing as a perfectly, universalizably good mother. But that was – and, if I’m honest, sometimes still is – a hard road to travel. We’re so invested – as we must be – in doing this motherhood thing right that we forget – we overlook, we are misled about the fact – that there is no one universal ‘right,’ that there is only ‘right for us.’ In forgetting/overlooking/being misled about the absence of a universal ‘right,’ we are left open to anxiety, panic, fear about falling into the vast pit of universally wrong. If we do this wrong we will harm our babies! If we do this wrong we will destroy lives! THERE ARE WHOLE UNIVERSES BALANCED UPON THE TIP OF OUR DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO BREASTFEED/CO-SLEEP/HOME-SCHOOL/SHUN-DORA!

It’s this, I think – this anxiety about being a good mother – that traps us and imprisons us, and not, as Erica Jong argued the other day in the Wall Street Journal, the dictates of specific styles of parenting (her specific strawman: attachment parenting.) Whether you attachment parent or Ferber-parent or Von Trapp-parent (you know, where you dress them in starched pinafores and make them sing at your parties), if you’re driven by anxiety to follow a style or adhere to a quote-unquote philosophy, and/or if you persist in following that style or philosophy regardless of whether it works for you and your child, you will be imprisoned. It will be hard. It will suck. Maybe not desperately so, but enough, and when it comes to parenting, even moderate suckage is too much suckage. Why must we be so hard on ourselves? Why is it so hard – why does it seem so hard – to just follow our instincts and experiment and allow ourselves to fail from time to time without beating ourselves up and to just, you know, simply do what works? Which, no, is never going to look exactly like what works for your neighbor or your sister-in-law or that mom who you’ve heard about who works full-time and has ten children and yet always has her hair perfectly blown out and her nails manicured, but whatever. You are not that mom. Repeat: YOU ARE NOT THAT MOM.

You are you. You will only and can only have your own style. What makes you a good mother is whatever it is that you bring to mothering your own children, whose needs and preferences are always and necessarily going to be different from the needs and preferences of other children. Emilia was independent from the get-go: attachment parenting didn’t work with her. Jasper was and is the opposite: he wants and needs to be fully attached. The strategies that I worked out for Emilia – for comforting her, for getting her to sleep, for boosting her confidence, for distracting her – simply did not and do not work for Jasper. I’ve adapted my style, and I’ve adapted my style to him. There is, I think, an underlying consistency (for lack of a better word) to my style, which was informed by my experience with Emilia and by my beliefs about parenting (yes, I do have some), but it is, let’s say, a flexible consistency, one that’s more akin to thread running through fabric than steel girding a building. And at the core of all this, there resides this one idea: that only determining factors in whether or not I am a ‘good’ mother are whether I meet their needs – their basic, general needs, and their unique, idiosyncratic ones – and love them well.

Erica Jong is right that we trap ourselves and imprison ourselves with unnecessarily rigid ideas about parenting. But it’s not, as I said, the style of the parenting that necessarily forces that rigidity: it’s our attitudes toward those styles, and the spirit in which we adopt them. Attachment parenting is only restrictive if it doesn’t work for the parent or child being attached; for some it works, for some it doesn’t, and there’s no right or wrong about it, except inasmuch as we try to impose the beliefs gleaned from our own experiences onto others, which is what gets us into trouble in the first place. Erica Jong and that too-French-to-be-believed French woman who wrote that book on le conflit! de la femme et le mere! (merde!) recoil at the idea of carrying around babies and giving up coffee and what have you; that’s their prerogative. As Jong herself states, there’s no one right way to do parenting that’s been handed down through the ages and shared across cultures. Which means that – apart from obvious cases involving abuse and neglect and the withholding of love – there’s also no wrong way. Attachment parenting is only wrong (or restrictive or oppressive or whatever negative term one wants to apply) for those for whom it is wrong. That might be you. That might be me. It is not for anyone other than you or me to say. It is certainly not for Erica Jong to say.

As I’ve said before, that we even debate and dither over these things is a marker of our privilege, and something that we shouldn’t take for granted. We do, many of us, have the luxury of choosing, of surveying the parenting landscape spread before us and debating and deliberating over which roads to take, of wandering down one path and then veering off to another if the first is too rocky or too steep, or of forging our own paths in between the established roads. Parenting, for most people in most of the world, throughout most of human history, has only ever just been parenting, with no qualifying adverb – just whatever works, whatever is necessary, whatever is possible for best ensuring the survival (and, in the best case, thriving) of child and family. We are fortunate to have choices – those of us who actually do have such choices (it is important to remember that not all of us, even in the so-called developed world, do) – and those of us who would condemn any of these choices – regardless of whether we are condemning on the basis of what we think is good for mother or what we think is good for child or what we think is best for feminism or whatever – are doing all of us a grave disservice. We are the lucky ones, we who get to define the terms of our own motherhood. Why on earth would we – do we – get in each others’ way, try to prevent each other from doing so?

The answer is obvious, of course, and obvious even in Jong’s own argument: because this motherhood thing is so loaded, and we are so anxious about it, we get sensitive about it. We are afraid of doing it wrong, and so we look to each other, constantly, asking ourselves – sometimes asking each other – is she doing it wrong? Is SHE doing it wrong? Is SHE? Or is SHE doing it right? If she’s doing it right, and it’s different from how I am doing it, does that make me wrong? I MUST ASSERT MY WAY AS RIGHT. Jong herself admits, quietly, to worrying over her choices. “I hired nannies,” she says, “left my daughter home and felt guilty for my own imperfect attachment.” But, she adds,  “I can’t imagine having done it any other way.” So why could she not leave it at that, admit that she did it the only way that she could, that she did the best she could, and sure, maybe she made some mistakes along the way – one cannot mother without making some mistakes along the way – and maybe she wished that there had been other alternatives for her, but end of the day: she did her best, full stop. Isn’t that what we should all aim for? Isn’t that what ‘good’ motherhood should be about? Not about how or why or what are the socio-cultural-politico-economic implications of how everyone else is doing it – just about how you are doing it, and whether it is serving you, and your children. FULL STOP.

That’s what I’m aiming for. As best I can, anyway.

Friday’s as good a good as any for promoting a cause, right? How about two?

Cause #1: If you’re a Canadian woman, and you’ve had surgery, you might have been been given – while you were under anesthetic, without your knowledge, without your consent – a pelvic exam by medical students in training. It is, apparently, standard practice in Canada, and no, they don’t actually want to ask for your consent, because you might not give it. So they’ve settled for insisting that when you go in for surgery, you’ve implied that you consent to letting them do anything to your body that they like. You know, just like that time you accepted just one more glass of wine and got a little too drunk: you implied that you were just fine with whomever doing whatever to your body while you were passed out.

Gives new, sinister meaning to the phrase, trust me, I’m a doctor.

I ranted about it over at the Bad Moms Club yesterday, and posted an open letter/petition there in the wee hours this morning. Please leave a comment in support (and pass the link along!) – we (all women, and everyone who supports women – not just Canadians) need to raise our voices and say loudly and clearly that NO CONSENT means NO.

Cause #2: Most of you know about Tanner. Tanner is my nephew, my sister’s son, and he’s living with, but dying of, Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. He’s really begun to decline in recent months. Our hearts are breaking while his stays strong – in love and hope, if not in muscle – and I’ve been feeling a powerful need to honor his strength and to meet his strength and to use that strength to move and to act, now, while he’s still with us. So I’ve decided to run for him, in the hopes that I can, by the end of a year, run in a marathon with his mother in his honor, to celebrate him – and, of course, to raise money and awareness for Muscular Dystrophy. I’m calling it 100 Miles For Tanner, and it starts with the Tiarathon at Walt Disney World in March (GM Canada has graciously lent sponsorship support so that we can make a road trip of it and really make it an adventure for the cause.) Find out more about it at Their Bad Mother, where I’ll be posting about my progress. And maybe think about clicking through the links to support the cause.

Thank you, always, for your awesome.

When I was pregnant with Jasper, I asked my doctor for a c-section.

Can I have a c-section?, I asked.

No, she said.

I had been going through early labor for weeks. It was three weeks or so before my due date, but bio-physical ultrasounds were logging me at well over a week overdue based on Jasper’s size. Jasper, according to ultrasound measurements, probably weighed close to nine pounds. And I still had three weeks to go.

I was a little freaked out.

I’m serious, I told my doctor.

– We’re keeping a close eye on you. If he gets to an unmanageable size, we’ll talk about it. But you can do this. Emilia was big. You’ve done this.

But…

– We’ll talk about it again next week.

The following week, I informed her – my tongue only lightly in cheek – that I would perform a c-section on myself, if I had to.

I’m sure that’s not necessary, she said.

A few days later, I asked again. The most recent ultrasound had put Jasper’s weight at about 9 and a half pounds. I was having painful contractions every night. My body, I told my doctor, wants this child OUT.

– And it will get him out. But if he doesn’t come this weekend, we’ll talk c-section next week.

Jasper arrived that weekend. Oh, boy, did he arrive. All nine and half plus pounds of him, and in a hurry, and through an exit that he made himself, with his head. It was the most terrifying experience of my life, and mine, I’ll have you know, is a life that has seen life-threatening house fires, horrific car accidents and being held hostage on a Greek island. None of that holds a terror-candle to precipitous labor with blast-exit effects.

My doctor asked me, later, whether I was glad that I’d let Jasper come out on his own.

No, I said. No way.

I was glad – thrilled, grateful, ecstatic – that Jasper was out and that he was healthy. But if I could have had the delivery go differently, I would have, no question. With Emilia, I’d been in active labor for nearly thirty hours, with an epidural that only worked on half my body and pain so bad that I hallucinated my twelve-year old self hovering in the room and laughing at me. I’d have swapped Jasper’s mode of delivery for that one in a flash, hallucinations and all.  I’d also have swapped it for a c-section. I didn’t ever say that out loud, though. I knew from experience that this is a sensitive subject. And end of the day, I was just glad that Jasper and I – after a delivery that, in an earlier time, would have, no question, killed us both – were fine. So I wasn’t interested in – and didn’t see the need for – debating the subject.

Still, whenever some well-meaning person has made a comment or a joke about wishing that they’d had a ninety-minute natural labor – instead of their own ten hour/twenty hour/thirty hour labor, or induced or vacuum-assisted or medicated labor,  or c-section, or whatever – I’ve bristled a little. Not unless you like being terrified out of your mind thinking that you and your baby are going to die and having that baby crown while you’re speeding down the highway and then blast his own way out tearing you so badly that the doctors can’t see through the gore to give you a local before they stitch you up and even then it’s so messy that one of them stitches his finger to your hoo-ha and they’ve only given you a Tylenol 3 and THERE’S SO MUCH BLOOD and OH MY GOD THE PAIN and you can’t walk for nearly six weeks and then you’re left with post-traumatic stress disorder and a frankenvulva, I think. Not unless you’re mother-effing crazy.

But I never say that. I’ve always just said no, you probably don’t, made a little joke about frankenvulvas, and left it at that.

Because, end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s a cliche, but it’s one that is firmly rooted in truth: what matters in any birth is the baby. Not you, not me, not the midwife or the attending physician or one’s partner or anyone else. The baby. If the baby comes out okay, then it’s good. Which is not to say that you or I or anyone else might not be disappointed or upset or sore or post-traumatically stressed – I was sore and stressed in the extreme – or that we shouldn’t strive to advocate for our own and others’ best births, whatever that looks like, only that how the baby arrives in this world and in our arms (hello, adoptive moms!) is far less important than that he or she does.

This, too: although it seems that birthin’ babies is an experience with which all mothers can identify in some common measure (stick two or mothers in a room together and odds are good that at some point they will compare birth stories), it simply isn’t, not least because not all mothers give birth. Not all mothers give birth – some adopt, some are in partnerships or marriages with the birth-mothers of their children, some foster, some surrogate – and not all mothers view or experience birth in the same way. Some regard giving birth at home and/or giving birth naturally, without medical intervention, as the best possible kind of birth; others want a full team of doctors at their side with an epidural drip that kicks in at the earliest possible moment. Some want soft lighting and soft music, others just want it OVER WITH LIKE NOW. Some would very much prefer if stork deliveries could be arranged. End of the day, the birth experience – indeed, the experience of getting your child into your arms by whatever means, birth or paperwork or Stork Express – is a profoudly and necessarily personal one, one that only we, each of us, as individuals (and, I suppose, couples, although that might be another topic entirely) can judge as good or bad or acceptable or whatever.

What I wish is that we could talk about these differences – in all of their awkward glory – without falling at each other’s throats. Yes, I have – like some others – thought that getting a c-section would have been a lucky break. I’ve  joked about it. I’ve certainly joked and heard the jokes and cringed in response to the jokes about squeezing jumbo watermelons out of one’s nethers. But I’ve also listened with sympathy to stories about pelvises breaking during labor and complications after c-sections and heartbreak over needing to be induced or rushed away from home birthing nests to hospitals because intervention was needed, and I’ve commiserated countless times with other women who had their nethers shredded and are still – weeks, months, years later – a little bit traumatized by it.  I’ve listened to heartbreaking stories about failed adoptions and lost children and to heartwarming stories about children delivered safely to their mothers’ arms. These are personal experiences of the life-changing event that is welcoming a child into one’s life and one’s heart and none of us, none of us, can say whether another’s is anything other that what she professes it to be. And none of us should decry how another professes that experience or articulates her feelings around that experience.

And why should we? Some us need to cry, some of us need to rage, some of us need to laugh and laugh and laugh some more. These are rich experiences; these are the terrible and amazing and awesome and sometimes very darkly funny stories – stories that make us cringe and squeal and cry and rage and, yes, laugh – that make up the rich narrative fabric of motherhood.

Let’s not stop it unfurling. Let’s embrace – or, at least, be tolerant of – each others’ ways and means of sharing these stories, and recognize them for the intensely personal stories that they are. And then let’s all remember to be grateful, so grateful, that so many of these stories, whatever their dramas, have happy endings – BABIES – and that we live in an age and a culture where the happy ending is the norm, and where we have the luxury of discussing how to give birth and not whether or not we or our babies are or are not likely to survive birth.

Many aren’t so lucky.

When I received the call telling me that my father had died, I cried. I cried loud, I cried hard, I fell to the ground and clutched at my aching chest and I wailed. And then, curled up on the floor, phone in hand, I tweeted.

I tweeted because it was instinct. I tweeted because it was the only thing that I could think of to do. I tweeted because I needed to get the words that were reverberating in my head and smashing against the walls of my mind out out out and into the world so that I could step back and see them/hear them/feel them and know that they weren’t just the narrative of some nightmare conjured up by that corner of my soul that holds and nurtures its darkest fears. I needed to face the words, and know that they were true. I needed to take control of the narration of the terrible story that was unfolding. I needed to speak. I needed to write.

So I tweeted.

My father is dead. My father has died. My father is gone.

Much has been said – dissected, debated, argued, asserted – in recent days about the impulse to tweet a tragedy. Some have said that tweeting during a tragedy is akin to fiddling while Rome burns, that it is evidence of a narcissistic soul. Others have said that it’s simply the virtual equivalent of calling out to friends  – by phone or by letter or over the garden fence – for help and support. I think that it’s a little bit of both.

The impulse to narrate any event, or one’s feelings in response to some event, is to some degree a narcissistic one, if we understand narcissism loosely (and perhaps literally) as focused self-regard, as a concentration of one’s attention upon oneself. It is to position oneself as author of the story that is unfolding, it is to take the first-person narrative role, it is to make the story about oneself. It is – contra Barthes – to become the source of meaning of the text. This needn’t be a bad thing. I asserted myself as narrator of the story of my father’s death because I needed to narrate that story, because I needed to assert my place within that story – grief-stricken daughter, confused grief-stricken daughter – in order to tell it to myself, and to the world. And telling the story was crucial to me surviving the first overwhelming waves of pain and sadness: I grabbed on to the story like a buoy and hung onto it for dear life. It was wet and slick and cold and I kept losing my grip, but it was there, and I kept myself afloat by reaching for it, grabbing for it, clinging to it when I could. There I was adrift, there I was battling the waves, there I was out and alone in a dark, turbulent sea with only the buoyant mass of my words to hold onto, to mark my place in that sea, to alert others – anybody, anybody – that there I was. I harbored no illusions that anyone could pluck me from the dark and save me. But I needed the world to know that I was there. I needed to know that I was there.

So: it was narcissistic of me, in some wise, to tweet my father’s death. Tweeting my father’s death made that death all about me. But it was all about me. It was my story, the story of my grief, and my tweets were the first painful lines in that story. I needed to say them out loud so that I could keep going. I also needed my community, my friends, and tweeting was my way of crying out to that community that I was hurt, that I was hurting, that I was in pain. But that, too, was part of the storytelling impulse: I needed someone to tell my story to. I needed my cries in the dark to be heard. I needed to know, I needed to prove, that the story was real, that this wasn’t just me talking in my sleep, singing myself a nightmare, narrating some terror from which I could not rouse. Is a story really a story if there is no reader, no audience? Even if I’d written the words down in a journal to read to myself, or whispered them into someone’s ear, the purpose would have been the same: to put the story out there, to get it heard. By one person, by thousands – the intent is the same. To get it heard. To make it real. To tell the story. To tell the story so that the pain and ache and gut-tearing grief become something other. So that they take on a life of their own, outside of one’s ravaged heart, as story.

The love, the hugs, the prayers, the good wishes, all of the things that come from the community when we cry out to it: these are precious, these are invaluable, these are necessary. But they are not what we are looking for – or, not the only things that we are looking for, not the only things that I was looking for – when we proclaim our tragedies, our hurts. We proclaim because we are storytellers, because storytelling has a saving power, because telling stories – telling our stories, telling our most difficult stories – saves us, or, at least, keeps us afloat. Twitter is a storytelling medium, and so it is understandable that some of us turn to it to tell our saving stories, in whole or in part.

Not all of Twitter’s stories are saving stories, sure. Some of Twitter’s stories are banal. Most of those stories, maybe, are banal. But, too, some are great and some are beautiful and some are terrible and the great stories and the beautiful stories and the terrible stories – all the saving stories – live alongside the banal stories and all of them, all of them draw us ’round the fire to hear and to share and – sometimes – to survive.

And that’s all that we need to know.

(On the question of stories that hurt – stories like the story that prompted my words above, the story that suggested that telling the story of a tragedy in real-time was a terrible thing, a deviant thing, a thing that we should not trust – we can, as I said last week, choose to not listen. We can choose to close ranks and not let such storytellers in. That particular storyteller stood outside our circle and narrated her hate and at first, only a very few heard her, and she would have gone away if we’d ignored her – she was outside, she had no megaphone, no speakers, no means of forcing her words upon any more than the few whose (Twitter) ears were tuned to listen – she had no way in, until we, some of us, responded to her and talked about her and pointed our fingers and said, look, look over there! and by doing so opened our circle to her and let her in. And drew everyone’s attention to her. We have to take responsibility for this. We opened our ears to her, opened our circle to her, we listened and by listening gave her reason to keep talking. And then we began shouting, and by shouting drew even more attention, and by drawing more attention we helped her bring her hateful story to life.

Next time, please, let’s not.

If a troll farts in the forest, does anybody hear? Only if we wave our torches in that direction and spark combustion. PLEASE TO REMEMBER.)

(Title from Ranier Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Elegy 1)

A few weeks ago, I said this about Hollywood’s defense of Roman Polanski:

What message does it send to our sons when the rape of a young girl is dismissed as something that is not that bad? What message does it send to the would-be Donalds of the world? To the would-be Roman Polanskis? To all the boys and men (and, yes, perhaps, women) who would grab and grope and hurt and rape, and to all the boys and men who wouldn’t? That sometimes, it’s okay? And that even if you wouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t necessarily condemn someone who does grab or grope or rape… who? Your sister, your mother, your wife, your lover, your daughter, your child?

I could not have imagined, when I wrote those words, that one might also have added this suggestion: that it’s okay to stand by and watch as a young girl gets gang-raped.

I don’t know if the boys who stood around and cheered while their schoolmate was gang-raped this past weekend were paying attention when the glitterati lined up to defend Roman Polanski for anally raping a thirteen year old, but in a way, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of whether one can point to a causal relation between the Polanski case and the terrible story of a homecoming celebration gone horrifically wrong, they both stand as evidence of the same thing: ours is a culture that has not done enough to demonize rape. A culture that refuses to fully deplore child-rape, a culture in which people make apologies for ‘misunderstood’ rapists, a culture in which teenage boys think that it is entertaining to participate in gang-rape: this is rape-culture, people, and it is sickening. Sickening.

As I said a few weeks ago, raising a daughter in such a culture – a culture that does not take the exploitation and abuse of women and children seriously (need more proof? Check out Gore Vidal’s comments on the Polanski case) – is a terrifying thing. But what is equally terrifying is the prospect of raising a boy in this culture. How do I explain to my son – how do I get him to really, really understand – that sexual aggression toward or sexual exploitation of women is deplorable when so much in our culture asserts that it is not? When women regularly appear in music videos and movies and video games as sexual playthings? When sexual conquest is presented, in the same media, as an enterprise that is by turns cool or funny but almost never troubling or problematic? When people still whisper and chuckle about assaulted women ‘asking for it’? When violence against women is a regular occurrence on primetime television? When leading figures in pop culture dismiss the seriousness of the rape of a thirteen year old? When a group of boys (and girls?) think it’s okay – fun? awesome? cool? – to stand around and watch a girl get gang-raped?

How does a mother fight against these messages? How does she assert – against the onslaught of visual and aural media telling a different story – that these things are horrible, terrible, wrong? How does she raise her son to respect women, and to deplore disrespect toward women in all of its forms, when so much of popular culture seems to snicker at the very idea behind her back, when it nudges and winks and whispers to boys, to her boy, that this whole thing about respecting women and girls, this whole story about how it’s wrong to make them do those things you want to do, this big idea that they don’t want it and it’s bad to force it and it hurts them and it’s wrong blah blah blah? Is just a bunch of crap. How?

How do we fight this? How? How do we stop this, here, now? How do we raise our own sons to be warriors against this? How do we make sure that they never, ever, ever stand in such a crowd?

How?

Now that the whole bizarre, decidedly non-Roald Dahlian saga of The Boy Who Sailed Away In The Balloon has been examined, investigated, and revealed to be a hoax – a hoax designed for the seeming purpose of securing a reality television deal – we can get down to the important issues. For starters: finally admitting, as a community, that putting families on reality television is a bad, bad thing. If the allure of getting cameras into one’s household compels even one deranged parent to fake sending their kid into the stratosphere in a duct-taped helium balloon aircraft, can’t we say with some confidence that this has all gone a little too far? Can we now start calling for an end to reality TV shows that feature families with children?

Richard Heene, apparently, wanted so badly to be Jon Gosselin that he contemplated launching his kid into space in a homemade aircraft. Thankfully, he settled for just pretending to launch his kid into space, but still: the fact remains that the allure of the lower-order fame and wealth that attend reality television notoriety proved so irresistible to this man (and, presumably, his wife, although the extent of her complicity remains uncertainty) that he recruited his children to participate in a scam that would make hardened grifters shake their heads in disapproval.

Heene is an outlier, we might say; an extreme example of what can happen when people get caught up in a desire for fame. And his children didn’t really get hurt or anything: sure, they got caught up in their dad’s scheme, but no-one actually sailed away in a balloon, and end of the day, all that happened was that they were induced to lie.

Well, no, and also, no.

Heene’s escapade might seem extreme, but is it really? Nadia Suleyman got herself fertilized so that she could have bucketloads of babies, the better (apparently) to emulate Angelina Jolie and get herself a TV deal. Jon and Kate kept the cameras rolling as their marriage disintegrated, broadcasting the dissolution of their family – children front and center as the walls came crumbling down – so that the TLC cheques would keep coming. Is there really so much difference between enjoining one’s kids to participate in a helium-balloon ruse and compelling them (because really, this is compulsion, given that young children cannot give meaningful consent) to live their lives as performances for television cameras? When our children become props for performances, can we ever call it anything other than exploitation?

It might be asked whether memoirists – among whom, bloggers – do exactly the same thing, and this, I think, is a reasonable question to raise. My children are characters in the narrative that I construct in this space (and this one), and to that extent, I can be said to be exploiting them inasmuch as I am using them for my own creative purposes. But – and this is a very important but – my children as they appear here, on the screen, or elsewhere on the printed page, do not appear as their whole selves. These are written characters, shadows of my real children, sketches, interpretations, flickering, contrived images upon a makeshift screen (there would be, if I had infinite space and time, a long digression here about Plato’s Cave, but I resist). My children live out their actual lives in the sunlit lifeworld that exists on this side of the screen, and it is a lifeworld that you cannot see. I provide here – among other things – a curated, edited, honed collection of stories about that lifeworld, and the movements of my children within it, as I observe these, but that is all.

There are no television cameras here, there is no stage, and that makes all the difference. My children are not forced to be actors. It is the compulsion to act that does the damage, I think: regardless of Kate Gosselin’s insistence that she and her children are just ‘leading their lives’ – the trailing TV cameras just a nuisance, a buzzing distraction that sometimes gets in the way with its wires and microphones and bits – there is no ‘just living’ when an all-seeing lens (and sound-recording system, and director, and producer) commands performance. Where there are cameras and crews and directors of photography and make-up artists and production assistants and Craft services people and producers and lights! camera! action! there is performance. Where there is a stage, there is performance – and putting one’s children on television puts them on a stage, full stop. Putting their lives on a stage puts their entire beings into the condition of performance and this, I think, is a form of abuse.

Everyone is appalled that Richard Heene compelled his children to lie – who wasn’t sickened by the news that little Falcon Heene repeatedly vomited when asked to repeat those lies? But there’s an argument to be made – it was made best by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Letter to d’Alembert on theater – that all theatrical performance (and reality television is, make no mistake, theatrical performance) is lying. Rousseau argued that actors compromise their moral development and integrity by making their lives’ work out of a sort of lived falsehood – they spent their working hours pretending, being inauthentic – and so they can never really develop virtue (as Rousseau understood it, at least). Rousseau makes the extreme case (and, for the record, as someone who once pursued a career in theater, I don’t agree with him entirely), but he has, in his broad strokes, a point, and one that must be taken seriously when we’re considering the case of children: in compelling children – and again, this is always compulsion with small children who cannot understand the implications of what they are being asked to do, and so cannot meaningfully consent – to live their lives in the mode of performance, are not we not risking corrupting them in some important way? In compelling them to act their lives – rather than really live their lives – are we not causing – possibly – some important existential (if not moral, qua Rousseau) damage? Falcon Heene vomited when he was made to lie – it made him physically ill – but what of the kids who don’t know that they’re lying? That significant portions of their lives are (or might be) series of performative falsehoods?

I’ve argued before that there is some good that can come (alongside the indisputable bad) of watching shows like Jon & Kate Plus 8 – such shows can serve to remind us that we’re not the only parents, the only families, that struggle, that we’re not alone in finding this gig so hard. And they provide some opportunity for us to interrogate, collectively, the challenges of parenthood and marriage and family, and to discuss, publicly, what it means to be a family, and how different and similar and strange and familiar and fascinating families can be. Parenting and family should take place, to some extent, in the public – we all suffer when it is tucked away behind the veil, in the private sphere. But keeping discourse about parenthood and family public doesn’t require that we turn parenthood into performance, that some families compel their children to strut and fret their lives upon the stage until they heard only by their therapists. There are other forums for such discourse – *cough*blogs*cough* – and so we don’t need the Live Extreme Family Show. We don’t need it, it doesn’t serve us, and the cost is too high. It should just stop.

So why don’t we call a stop to this? Why don’t we demand a moratorium on reality shows involving children? Why don’t we just say no? Do we like to watch just too much to turn away? Is fulfilling that desire worth the potential cost to the kids involved?

I’m just saying no from now on. Join me.

When I was thirteen, a boy named Donald approached me in the schoolyard and told me that I looked like a boy. “I bet you are a boy,” he said. “You have no boobs.” I flushed and moved to walk away, but he clutched my arm and held me there. “I’m going to feel them to see if there’s anything there,” he said, grinning, and then he grabbed at my chest and squeezed, hard. I pushed him, turned on my heel, and ran while his laughter rang in my ears. It still rings, even now, when I think back on it. I can still remember exactly what it felt like, that day; I can still feel my chest stinging, and the hot flush of humiliation on my cheeks, the tears burning a trail down my face and dripping off my chin, the lump in my throat choking me, making it hard to breath. Boys are terrible, I thought at the time. Boys are terrible, awful, horrible things and I will never let one touch me again.

I was thirteen years old. I got over it, sort of, just as I kinda sorta mostly got over being grabbed and touched and groped by other boys and men in the ensuing years of my girlhood and young womanhood and not-so-young womanhood. How many times did some guy get too aggressive? How many times did a stray male hand wander across my chest or my ass or my thigh? How many times did I have to shove some man away? How many times did my cheeks flush and throat constrict and heart pound as I shouted or croaked or whispered, no? Too many times. This, too, for almost every woman I know: too, too many times. But the worst still remains that first time, in the schoolyard, when I was thirteen, when I didn’t know, yet, what attention from the opposite sex was supposed to feel like. When I was still a child. When it had the power to ensure that I would forever be made just a little bit uncomfortable by any but the most welcome male attention. When I was still a child.

When Samantha Geimer was thirteen years old, Roman Polanski drugged her and anally raped her. He did this when she was thirteen years old, when she didn’t know, yet, what attention from the opposite sex was supposed to feel like. When it had the power to ensure that she would forever be scarred, forever terrified by any but – maybe – the most obviously benevolent or harmless male attention. When she was still a child.

She did not, I imagine, get over it.

Roman Polanski, however, did get over it. He evaded full punishment for his crime by fleeing to Europe, where he continued to make films and live the life of a celebrated filmmaker and never express regret or remorse for his crimes, because, after all, “everyone loves to f— young girls!”

One would think, then, that Polanski’s apprehension, after all these years, would lead to wild applause and widespread gratitude toward anyone that anything to do with ensuring that he was brought to justice. One would think, but one would be wrong. Because for many people, what Roman Polanski did wasn’t a crime. Or if it was, it wasn’t a very bad crime. Or even if it was a bad crime, maybe, it’s not really important, right? Because he’s a brilliant man, and brilliant men shouldn’t be held responsible for things like, oh, say, child rape. So they – he – shouldn’t be punished.

This, I think, is a moral outrage of the most despicable order. It is a moral outrage of the most despicable order not (that is, not only) because the raping of children – the raping of anyone – is absolutely repugnant and indefensible on any grounds whatsoever (and it is that), but because such a defense of rapists sends the message that, oh hey, the sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children? Is not so bad! Not for everybody! Not all the time! Its badness is RELATIVE!

I have a daughter, and the idea that she might someday be sexually assualted in even the most minor, schoolyard-boob-grabbing kind of way sickens me. But I also have a son, and this whole issue sickens me even further on his behalf: what message does it send to boys when leading figures in popular culture and entertainment publicly proclaim their belief that what Roman Polanski did was, simply, not so very terrible? That he doesn’t deserve punishment for what he did? That there are distinctions to be made between rape and rape-rape and not really so much rape as just some guy making a wee mistake and oh, hey, also, he’s an ARTIST and BRILLIANT and RICH, so, you know, it’s different for him? That sexual assault – sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, rape – is ever, EVER, anything other than criminal, and morally repugnant?

What message does it send to our sons when the rape of a young girl is dismissed as something that is not that bad? What message does it send to the would-be Donalds of the world? To the would-be Roman Polanskis? To all the boys and men (and, yes, perhaps, women) who would grab and grope and hurt and rape, and to all the boys and men who wouldn’t? That sometimes, it’s okay? And that even if you wouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t necessarily condemn someone who does grab or grope or rape… who? Your sister, your mother, your wife, your lover, your daughter, your child?

Our sons deserve better, because our daughters deserve better. Our community deserves better. We owe it to our children, to the future husbands and wives and partners and lovers and employers and colleagues and teachers and neighbors and schoolyard knuckleheads of our community, to teach and preach and proclaim loudly, insistently, that it is never, never okay to interfere physically – sexually or otherwise – with another person without their meaningful consent. That, especially, imposing one’s self sexually upon another human being causes irreparable harm, that it is destructive and terrible and deserves every kind of legal and moral censure. That it is shameful, criminal, wrong. And that a good community, that good people, do not tolerate it.

Anything less is deplorable. It just is. And if the giant mutant puppets of Yo Gabba Gabba can grasp this while Bernard Henri-Levy and Peter Fonda and Debra Winger and MILAN FUCKING KUNDERA cannot? Then my faith in the good sense of thinking human beings is well and truly rattled.

And that just sucks.

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When I saw the headline, I rolled my eyes. “The Case Against Having Kids.” WHATEVER. Haven’t we heard this all before? That children are overrated, that parents have superiority complexes, that motherhood is an epic social scam, that children are more environmentally destructive than SUVs and air travel and Crocs combined, that life is just that much more pleasant without the stench of diapers and the din of Barney in the background?

Like I said, I rolled my eyes. These are not new arguments. These are not particularly interesting arguments. Some people don’t like the idea of having kids, so? They should just not have kids. I actually feel quite strongly that people who really, emphatically don’t like children and/or who believe themselves incapable of caring for children should not have children. And those who do like children – or who believe that they would like their own children – and who believe themselves capable of caring for them, well, knock yourselves out. To each her own.

But some people, it seems, feel quite strongly that the case for childlessness – and by extension, the case against parenthood, which, for all intents and purposes, is actually a case against motherhood – needs to be asserted more emphatically. Why? Because according to some, parents – which is to say, mothers – get undeservedly good press. Such undeservedly good press that unassuming individuals might actually get conned into motherhood without fully understanding what they’re getting themselves into. They might actually get tricked – by, say, seeing how good Kate Gosselin has it, or by noticing that Madonna became so much more likeable after becoming a mom – into thinking that this motherhood thing is the key to feminine fulfillment and social esteem. Because, you know, moms have it so awesome. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that?

This is where I stop rolling my eyes.

Moms (and dads) do have it awesome, of course, but not in the way that the ‘Children: Just Say No’ people think. The awesome of parenthood, the reward of parenthood, is the intangible and immeasurable joy of the children themselves. It is not increased social esteem (more on that in a moment) or some abstract sense of accomplishment (other than that which is contained in the aforementioned intangible joy); it’s the kids, dammit. The kids are awesome. Everything else is pretty much really f***ing hard. Maybe not for everybody, but for most of us, most of the time, parenthood is hard. Even when it’s awesome, it’s hard. Anything that involves cleaning up so much shit is hard. Anything that puts your heart so at risk is hard. Anybody who doesn’t have at least an inkling of this going into it deserves the shock that they get.

But the ‘Children: Do Not Want’ advocates must know this, right? I mean, they don’t want children, and they don’t want children, presumably, because they’ve looked in the parenting shop window and decided that nothing inside warrants the prices charged. Or they just don’t like children, full stop, in which case any discussion about the costs and benefits of parenthood is about as relevant to them as is a debate over cheeseburgers to a vegan. So why all the whinging about what good press parenthood – again, we should just resist playing coy and call it: motherhood – gets, and all the hard-selling on rejecting parenthood? Well, apparently, any positive attention paid to mothers, any social legitimation of motherhood, amounts to a delegitimation of the choice to not have children. Which is, apparently bad. Because this is a feminist issue, ladies: beware those who would praise motherhood, who would indoctrinate you into the cult of motherhood, for they would drag you back to the dark ages and shackle you to the hearth and force you to reproduce and bake bread until you die.

This, obviously, is where I call foul.

I call foul because a) motherhood is not, contrary to all appearances as represented on the covers of parenting magazines, revered in our society. It’s not, full stop. And b) even if it were, such a thing would not be bad for women. Any women. Yes, even women who choose not to reproduce.

To the first point: say what you want about ideals of motherhood and reverence for motherhood in the abstract – doesn’t everyone coo at pregnant women? don’t we all squee at the sight of mothers doting upon children? isn’t there a whole DAY for talking about how awesome mothers are? – that reverence, such as it is (and I would argue emphatically that it’s not as uncritical as some make it out to be), does not translate into social practice. Sure, we nod approvingly at Angelina when we see her and her brood on the cover of a magazine, but when was the last time you saw anyone nod approvingly at a mother dragging a gaggle of children behind her in real life? Never, that’s when. You try taking babies or small children on a airplane, on the bus, into a restaurant, to a shop, through a park (and let’s not get started on nursing those children) – anywhere, basically, that isn’t clearly marked CHILD LEASH-FREE ZONE – and see how many approving nods you get. ZERO, that’s how many. Not that you’d notice any approving nods, anyway, what with being all distracted by the stink-eyes and the grumbling and all. Public mothering doesn’t get a hell of a lot of social support, except from other parents. Most people would prefer that we keep our mothering private, just like they did in the good old days, when children were rarely seen and never heard and mothers kept quiet about nasty things like diapers and depression and Dora. (Is there an exception for representations of motherhood among celebrities? No. For every celebrity who gets what one critic calls the ‘motherhood whitewash,’ there are dozens of others who get their every maternal move scrutinized and deconstructed and held up as examples of their moral failing. Kate Gosselin, anyone?) Mothers, revered? Mothers, above critique? In what world does that occur? Because, seriously, I want to go to there.

To the second point: we would all -  women especially – be much better off if the art and craft and science and discipline of motherhood were better respected. Motherhood is women’s work. It’s the ultimate women’s work. Call me out for being a biological determinist, I don’t care: motherhood, in its barest biological outlines, is the only work that women do that only women can do. Making babies, nursing babies: it’s what we’re built for. Many of us don’t want to do what we’re built for, and that’s fine – but it doesn’t change the fact that women are built to birth and nurture children. To be mothers. Of course there is much, much more to motherhood than birthin’ babies – much that has little or nothing to do with pushing a miniature person through one’s parts – and so it would, in some respects, be fairer to talk about parenthood and to remove any elements of gender determinism from the discussion. But the fact of the matter is that when we talk about parenthood, we’re usually talking to or about mothers, and mothers – regardless of whether they birthed or adopted or foster – the people doing the work of motherhood – are usually women. So in disparaging motherhood you disparage women, full stop. And why disparage motherhood? Because it is so essentially feminine in so many respects? Is there something essentially problematic about anything essentially feminine (whatever that means)? Or is it just that nobody can help getting all Freudian and Leave It To Beaver and Carol Brady and apron strings and squick and – have I said this already? – Freudian when they think about motherhood?

There’s no reason, no reason at all, for motherhood to be inextricably associated with 50′s-style domestic servitude. There is nothing essentially retrograde or anti-feminist about motherhood. It’s attitudes about motherhood that are retrograde and anti-feminist. And I have news for you: the most retrograde and antifeminist attitude about motherhood is the one that holds that there is something limiting and unimportant and retrograde and antifeminist about motherhood. Mothers (and fathers, although I’m not speaking for fathers here) do the most important public work that there is: they raise citizens. We don’t always do it well, and we might argue about the choices that we make in carrying out this job, but it is nonetheless our job, as parents: to raise citizens, to nurture children into better-than-functioning human beings who will contribute to society. How on earth is that something that we should worry about over-respecting? In what universe should we be worrying about valuing that work too highly? Especially when the fact of the matter is that that work is, in our society, wholly under-respected and undervalued?

Excuse me while I catch my breath. Ranting tires me, after a full day of lashing children with my apron strings and reveling in my dizzying social status.

My friend Liz wrote, earlier this week, about feeling defensive about being a mom in a culture that so often turns up its nose at moms and the work of moms and – not incidentally – the discourse of moms. She said that being defensive about being a mom just makes her want to be a better representative of motherhood, that she wants all of us to be better representatives of motherhood. Which, yes. I wholeheartedly agree. But I also wish, wholeheartedly, that we didn’t have to be so defensive, that we didn’t have to say things like oh, I’m a mom, but! I’m also a writer! Who writes about being a mom, yes, but! Also other stuff! Important stuff! That may or may not have anything to do with being a mom, but still! Important! Important! That we didn’t need to worry about whether we were representing ourselves well enough (when was the last time you heard doctors collectively wring their hands about whether they were making it clear enough to society that they were useful and important and deserving of respect?) That we didn’t feel the need to constantly defend ourselves and justify our choices, to each other and to our communities and to the world at large.

Women have fought hard for the freedom to make their own choices. I chose to be a mother, and I’m happy with that choice. More than happy, actually: making the choice to have my children is hands down one of the very best things that I’ve done in my life. I’m proud of it. I’m deservedly proud of it. And I’m sick and tired of defending it.

I’m a mother, and I think that motherhood is awesome. I think that I am awesome, in all of my baby-slinging, preschooler-wrestling, breastfeeding-promoting, yoga-pant-wearing, diaper-bag-toting, bad-mothering, mommy-blog-spinning glory. Anyone who has a problem with that can suck it.

Her name was Laura, and I nursed her baby.

We had met, initially, at breakfast and immediately hit it off. We sat down with our coffees and immediately got swept up in a conversation that ran the gamut from the advantages of Twitter over Facebook to the challenges of leaving one’s baby for a night. Which is precisely what I had done: I had left my baby to attend a symposium on parenting. And it was, as I told Laura over coffee, in some ways profoundly liberating, and in others completely terrifying. Also, my boobs hurt. Badly. I had forgotten my breast pump and an hour of hand-expressing in the shower that morning hadn’t helped much. I didn’t mention that part, though. I just said, I miss my baby.

She said, I know. Her own baby – a dark-haired sprite, just one year old – bounced happily on her knee. I would find it hard to leave her.

Yeah.

I liked her. I offered to help her sort out her Twitter/Facebook conundrum, and introduce her to some New York area bloggers. She invited me to a parenting event in Albany later in the month. We chatted throughout the day. The chirps and coos of her baby reminded me of my own chirping, cooing baby, who had accompanied me in the previous month to two conferences, who I was unaccustomed to being without, especially in this environment. My heart hurt, and my breasts ached. They ached. I kept my arms pressed against my chest for most of the morning.

At lunch I fled to my room and tried, unsuccessfully, to hand-express. I returned to the symposium, and sat down near Laura, and another woman that I had met that day. We were supposed to have a conversation about our parenting successes, or something like that. I said, you’ll have to count me out. I’m in a lot of pain and don’t know what to do. I huddled on the chair, squeezing the rock-hard contours of my chest as tightly as I could without screaming. I explained about the missing breast-pump, the terrible ache of my engorged breasts, the hours remaining before I would see my son. The other woman asked, is there a store nearby? I shook my head – the concierge had told me that there were no pharmacies in the immediate area. Laura cocked her head thoughtfully, and looked at her daughter, who was beginning to fuss. Would you consider, maybe… I know it sounds sorta weird, but… I have no problem with it, and she’s hungry… She looked at me, and waited.

Really?

Really.

I paused. My head spun, a little. Would I do this, really? Would it be weird? And then I thought, no. There’s nothing weird here. Boobs are boobs. Breastmilk is breastmilk, in all of its liquid gold glory. I bond with my son when we nurse, but it is not because he is latched to my breast. It is because I have him in my arms, and because I love him. Our intimacy derives from that love, and that love would be just as forceful if I fed him with a bottle. So would it be weird if someone else fed him from a bottle? No, of course not. These are only acts of nurture, whether they involve the bottle or the breast. And this is what the breast is made for.

I nodded, and reassured Laura that as a nursing mom I did not take any substances or medications that might compromise my milk.

And so. I took Laura’s daughter in my arms and she smiled at me and I lifted my shirt and she happily bent her head and drank her fill.

(Was it weird? No. It was different. Describing the thoughts and emotions that accompany nursing another woman’s child requires more space than I have here. It was intimate, but not inappropriately so – no more inappropriately intimate than someone holding your baby and cooing in his ear, whispering sweet baby nothings. If anything, it brought me to a deeper, more visceral understanding of my body as a miracle of biology, as a work of nature that is built to do certain things, one of those thing being – in my case; this is not necessarily true for every woman, and no woman is lesser for not being able to do it – nursing babies. My breasts are not sacred or magical objects, they are not quivers full of milk-arrows that can and must only be directed to blood-offspring. They provide milk. They nourish. They are both utterly mundane and terrifically awe-inspiring for that fact.)

I was grateful – so, so grateful – for Laura and her child; their generosity and open-mindedness and open-heartedness saved me a great deal of pain. At the end of the day, a mother was released from some considerable discomfort, and a child was nourished. Wonderful, no?

Well, as it happens: no. Not for everybody. Someone was watching, and someone did not like what they saw. Someone was watching and decided that what I had done was deviant. Irresponsible. Disgusting. Eww. So she wrote a post describing, in entirely misleading terms (we were total strangers! we had no discussion about it! a lady just blithely and irresponsibly passed her baby to a total stranger without a word! and that stranger – me, if you’re keeping track – might have been diseased!) (she has since admitted to me that her representation of what happened was misleading), what she saw and explaining why she thought it was wrong. And it was wrong, from her point of view. Unsanitary. Dangerous. Wrong. Her commenters went even further: why, I might have AIDS! Be homeless! A drug user! Sexually loose! In fact, was what I’d done really any different from wandering into a bar and asking some strange man to grope my titties? Really? Also: AIDS! Or some other horrible virus. That, and my boobs – this helpfully noted by the author – were probably unsanitary, to boot. Also, I’d probably been drinking.

I can’t even begin to describe how hurtful it was to read these things. This was me they were talking about. And Laura, who was as lovely a woman as I had ever met. Laura and I had just met, sure, but I think that we both hoped that we were becoming friends. And we share a belief – a healthy, woman-affirming, baby-adoring belief – that we mothers are all in this together, that we’re all served and enriched when we trust each other and help each other. She had a hungry baby; I had excruciatingly painful breasts that needed to be released of their milk. We came together with our needs. You’re welcome to say that you couldn’t see yourself doing this; you are welcome, even, to cringe and shudder a bit in distaste. Whatever. We all have our issues. Just don’t flaunt your disgust. And certainly don’t use it to publicly shame mothers who make choices that you might not make. What I do with my boobs – what any mother does to ensure that her baby gets fed – is none of your business. And your public expression of disgust and alarm hurts. It hurts me, it hurts all of us. It reinforces the idea that breasts and breastfeeding hover on the very razor’s edge of shamefulness, that these things on our chests are somehow, in some way, dirty and icky and bad, unless we operate them under the very strictest rules of propriety (only if they’re covered up! only if it’s your own baby! only if it doesn’t make us uncomfortable! only if WE SAY IT’S OKAY!)

Memo to everybody: these? Are not your boobies. They are mine. And my babies? Also mine. I will nurture and nourish them as I see fit, and I will champion any other mother to do the same. Your disgust, your judgment threatens to undermine us, weaken us, take away some of our power as mothers who demand to make their own way and their own rules. Which, fuck that.

This is MY motherhood. These are MY boobs.

Hands off.

Memo to everybody: in case you missed what I said above – “You’re welcome to say that you couldn’t see yourself doing this; you are welcome, even, to cringe and shudder a bit in distaste” – I’ll say it again (it seems that I need to): you are welcome to disagree with I did, and/or with what Laura did. You are welcome to say that you would not do this. You are welcome to voice a contrary opinion. I encourage it. I’m fascinated by so many elements of this discussion (not least, something that one commenter brought up – trust and community. Under what circumstances do we choose to trust or not trust each other, to take each others’ words, or not do? Laura trusted me when I said that I was healthy and not taking anything that might compromise my milk. Perhaps this had everything to do with my appearance, or with the fact that I was obviously a nursing mother, or perhaps just with the fact that she had decided that I was simply worth trusting. I was moved by this. We need more of this kind of generosity of spirit in daily life) and I enjoy hearing different opinions. What I don’t like: inappropriately expressed judgment or shaming. That’s the whole point of the latter part if this post: shaming hurts everybody. If you’re here to express an opinion, respectfully – great. I’ll support and defend that. But if you’re here to call names or point fingers or say anything that you wouldn’t say to someone you loved, then maybe just turn back now.

Let’s be kind.

Which means, too – and forgive me if it seems hoity for me to take this on – that everybody is very welcome to NOT direct opprobrium at the blogger mentioned here. This has no doubt been hard on her, and although I remain hurt and (yes, am juvenile) angry, I do not want her to be put through any more of a ringer than she already has. Please. Both she and I deserve some peace around this.

Comments on this post are now closed. I’m happy to read other posts on the subject – yes, even they disagree with milksharing – so if you write about it, please do let me know.