filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
Recently a friend told me that her colleague had once justified not pulling her weight at work by saying, “Well, you don’t have children, so it’s no problem for you to work late.”
Why is it that for some people no children=no life outside the workplace? Have you been in a situation where a colleague has used his or her children to justify preferential treatment? Or have you worked in a place where parents are expected to always put their work before their family. What are your thoughts?
I’m sitting in a quiet cafe with a pot of Jasmine tea brewing and a gentle breeze blowing down the valley and in the back door behind me, and I’m trying to write my Whiny Wednesday post. There’s no rush; I have plenty of time. I have no one to collect from school and no baseball practice to shuttle to and from. Nobody’s counting on me provide nourishment or even junk food snacks. Nobody needs me to change a diaper or resolve a dispute over a remote control. Right now, this minute, no one is relying on me, and right now, this minute, I’m glad for that.
So, let’s turn Whiny Wednesday upside down this week. Tell me: What are you grateful for today?
I’m tired of the media’s assumptions about women in relation to children. TIME magazine recently ran a special on Women’s Health and the front cover showed a woman (quite a tired-looking woman, I might add) laying in the grass, covered in children. Why is it automatically assumed that women come along with children? What about the rest of us? Do we women without children not count, too? Had it been a Men’s Health special would the photo have been of a wiped out, stressed out father? Probably not.
There’s no escaping the media’s assumptions—even on this site. If you’ve come through the main Life Without Baby site, I’m sure you’ve noticed the Google Ads. This morning’s ads included announcements for a sale at a kids’ store, a mommy support group, and how to adopt a newborn quickly! People, you are barking up the wrong tree.
So, along with today’ whine comes an apology: Please forgive the wholly inappropriate ads. This is a new site and some of the kinks are still being worked out, so please bear with me while I figure out how to make the ads go away, or at least be more appropriate for our members.
It’s Whiny Wednesday, time let loose your inner two-year-old. What’s your gripe?
Last week a Tennessee woman pinned a note to her 7-year old adopted son and put him alone on a plane back to Russia.
People, a child is not a purchase. You cannot get a refund on your child, biological or adopted, just because he didn’t turn out quite as you’d hoped. I understand how the desire for motherhood can taint a person’s view until she can see only what she wants to see when the chance of having a child is presented to her. But this is a human life we’re talking about here. If you choose to be a mother, you choose to be a mother FOR LIFE, not just until it gets too hard.
That’s my gripe. What’s yours?
“Why don’t you just adopt?”
People ask this question as if adoption is as simple as filling out a form and picking out a baby. But anyone who’s had a close friend or family member go through the process knows all about the drawn-out bureaucracy, the failed adoptions, the expense of going private, and the trauma of adopting from foster care.
So, don’t ask me why I don’t just adopt, unless you have plenty of time to hear my answer.
It’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s your gripe?
Coming soon to a theater near you: Two new baby movies. Oh joy.
The first is The Back-up Plan, starring Jennifer Lopez as a woman who decides to have a baby alone using artificial insemination, conceives twins, and then meets Mr. Wonderful (on the day she conceives, of course.) She then drags the poor guy through the usual array of baby-related gags—throwing up on their romantic date, passing out while watching another woman give birth—and ultimately, as the movie is slated as a romantic comedy, lives happily ever happy. It’s Baby Mama meets Knocked Up, as far as I can tell, and does the world really need to see this again?
Also coming soon is Bébé(s) (Babies), a French documentary about the first year in the lives of four babies from around the world. When I first saw this, I thought how refreshing it would be to see the difference in childbirth and childrearing in various cultures. I thought what a great opportunity it would be to highlight the difference in medical care between a country that schedules births for convenience and one where no medical help is available; to show the contrast between countries where a woman might remortgage her house to have a baby of her own, and one where a woman has no access to birth control and has no choice but to keep having babies she cannot afford to feed. This is a movie that could have a lot to say. But watching the trailer, it seems that this is a movie about how cute babies are, and how siblings squabble whether they’re sitting in designer onesies or naked in the African dirt.
Ah well, I guess life would be dull if every movie was made purely to convey a message. On the other hand, do they all have to be pure sap? And how about a positive movie about a woman who decides not to have children and has a happy and fulfilling life regardless? Perhaps Hollywood thinks that too fantastic a concept.
Why do some people think it’s perfectly acceptable to bring a toddler or baby into an adult-rated movie only to have them cry all the way through? Take that kid outside, please, if for no other reason than to avoid them being traumatized for life!
It’s Whiny Wednesday; time to get it all off your chest. What’s your gripe?
~ "a raw, transparent account of the gut-wrenching journey of infertility."
~ "a welcome sanity check for women left to wonder how society became so fixated on motherhood."
