I get hate mail. Not as much as Dooce, I’m guessing, but enough. I get hateful e-mail – and comments, and Facebook messages, and tweets – about how depressing I am, about how I’m exploiting my children, about how I whine too much, about how I’m encouraging women to take anti-depressants and so contributing to the global drug problem, about how it’s terrible and selfish of me to look for my long-lost brother, about how nobody wants to hear about my Frankenvulva, about how I’m setting the feminist movement back by complaining about motherhood, about how I should just stop writing about my grief over the death of my father already, about how I only write about Tanner to get attention for myself, about how I’m an attention-whore who really should just shut up already, because, please.

I get correspondence that addresses one or another or some combination of those issues and others left unmentioned with some regularity. It’s why I sometimes close comments; it’s why I sometimes just don’t look at my e-mail: because I know that at some point I’m going to read something really hateful. Something like this: