more stuff i hate
Posted: July 1, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized 11 Comments »It was brought to my attention AGAIN that NYC parents may be a tad bit More! Uptight! And! Crazy! than your average everyday parent, which may indeed be true. Add to that my crazy skewed private school lens and you can see why I may tend to inflate the maybe-not-such-a-big-deal parenting trends and their bad bad detriment to society. Oh, Internets. I wish I could share with you all the crazy-making things the parents around me have said out loud. Alas and alack, I do enjoy my ability to earn a living, so some things are better untyped.
My point here is that maybe I live in such a freakazoid Park Slope world that what I think is rampant and infuriating may be bizarre and unknown if you live somewhere else. Maybe people are rather even-keeled where you live and know enough to ignore their offspring once in a while and not worry at QUITE such a fever pitch over that 31st minute of television viewing for the day. Buuuuttt…. I do suspect that it is not just NYC. And one reason that I suspect this is the existence of national magazines. Particularly Attachment-ish ones like Mothering.
I really can't stand Mothering. I know. I know that a lot of you probably like it quite a lot. I know that it espouses so many of the same things I myself care deeply about – what a lovely spread they did on cloth diapers, truly, and what hearty articles they write on all things breastfeeding and babywearing and healthy food making and…
Yes. I often agree with their general position on things. Generally. But maybe not militantly. And I find them to be tiresomely single-minded in their stances. And I grow weary of all these parenting "philosophies" being grouped together willy-nilly, as though all people who cloth diaper are non-vaccinating non-circumcisers. Or all formula feeders are also filling the landfills with disposable diapers and inflicting rigid schedules on their newborns. People are a wild spectrum of difference on each and every issue, not lockstep philosophy-swallowers. I am annoyed when there is absolutely no give and take.
All that said, this might have been merely irritating to me, not a dealbreaker at all – I think they often have good articles and I think their heart is in the right place. IF ONLY THEY HAD JUST DONE THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT MAGAZINE TASK CORRECTLY.
Anyone want to guess what drives me totally apeshit about that magazine?
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Yeah.
If you guessed THE TITLE, you win… the Close Reader award! You win the Vaguely Able To Read Briar's Mind Award (and I would appreciate it if you would give Wes some tips)! Huzzah!
WHY WHY WHY, "Mothering" Magazine? Why must you be called "Mothering"? Why, when even those hideous rags Parents and Parenting and Parental Units Unite or whatever the eff managed to use an inclusive term, did you limit your readership in this way?
Maybe you were thinking about how many more women than men read magazines regularly? Or that breastfeeding is (almost) solely done by women? These are mild forms of excuse, and bf'ing is but one (tiny, of only the briefest of importance) detail.
By writing about parenting and giving it such a narrow title, you are just prolonging the crappy anti-feminist position that mothers are the primary parents. While our job as enlightened humans is to try to help humanity as a whole stumble ever closer to more global enlightenment, you instead have distanced fathers and proclaimed the females the baby experts, entrenching more firmly the idea that women are natural care-givers and men not so much. Great fricking job.
It seems to have been named in 1976. Fine. I still don't like it. I still don't like to think of my son ever for a moment thinking mommies are more important than daddies. Change that tired name, crunchy granola friends.
Briar, At the moment I’m thinking that you are my long lost twin. Or maybe Lyn’s long lost twin. Or at least we should elect you as an honorary family member. Neither Lyn nor I can read Mothering because it makes us way to crazy. And, while you might think that we subscribe to an attachment parenting philosophy (after all we do things like cloth diapering and baby wearing), AP drives me insane also, and I think it’s the anti-feminism of it that gets me, that mothers should be velcro-ed to their (bio) babies and that anything that gets in the way (like another parent) is just wrong. There’s nothing about the actions or activities of AP that imply this (after all men make great babywearers), it’s more of the philosophy that the bio-mom and baby body is holy and worth enslaving the entire family to. And while the majority of parents who subscribe to an AP philosophy are open-minded, there are a few very vocal folks who loudly proclaim anyone with more barbaric practices to be little better than child abusers.
OK, I’ll stop ranting now. I have lots of AP friends that are really great people and terrific parents. And I think there are lots of good ways to be a parent, and AP-parenting is one of them (just not the only one!)
I hate the “philosophies.” Most of all because none of them involve anything that parents haven’t been doing on their own since the dawn of time, just without the label. It’s not rocket science that it’s good for babies to be held and nurtured by their mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and basically anybody who loves the child. People were doing that long before it was called “babywearing” or “attachment parenting.” Mostly they did it because that’s what kept the baby quiet and happy. Parents who grew frustrated with non-sleeping children have been either hauling them into their bed or shutting the door and letting them fall asleep on their own way before there was a co-sleeping vs. CIO battle. If there is anything our generation is good at, it’s over-complicating things and turning everything into a debate. I use disposable diapers but I also co-sleep and am still nursing my 2-year-old. What’s my philosophy? Path of least resistance. The kid sleeps better (and therefore we all sleep better) if he’s next to me, and we’ll have to take the boob from his cold, dead hands like Charlton Heston’s gun, and neither of those things bother us, so we go with it. I don’t have the patience for cloth diapers, so Pampers it is. I didn’t make any of those choices based on an expert or a philosophy – just plain old instinct.
Also, I couldn’t let this comment pass without saying something: “bf’ing is but one (tiny, of only the briefest of importance) detail.” I beg to differ that breastfeeding is a tiny, briefly important detail. It has been a huge part of our lives for the past two years, one that I struggled mightily with in the first weeks after my son’s birth and, I believe, one of the primary reasons he has only been sick once in his life. Not being sick means fewer doctor’s visits, fewer doctor’s bills, less time missed from work, less contributing to the “parents are less productive because they always have to take time off for their kids” mindset, etc. It has also reduced my risk of getting breast cancer and in general given my son a healthier start in his life. Not a tiny detail to me. Just sayin.
Ack! The Slope! Come to my neighborhood. Jackson Heights is way less crunchy and uptight.
This was well-said!
Breastfeeding was hugely important to me, too. Two and a half years of awesomeness. I say that coming from the perspective of parenting of a teen and a toddler. It was a big deal and I really hope it decreases my chances of breast cancer and helps Beck in some way, but my kid is already showing signs of the asthma that plagues our family and it certainly didn’t feel like he got sick less often during this year in daycare. Mostly, I am just talking long haul. It may decrease our kids’ occurrences of illness or it may not. We may still get breast cancer or we may not (can you tell I am also skeptical of pretty much all medical studies, since it always seems like the news changes a few years later?). But I can guarantee that the breastfeeding will be but a blip during the loooooong teen years ahead because I am living that, too.
Oh, Mothering, the magazine we love to hate. My mom gifted us a subscription to Mothering — because for her, it really was a voice in the wilderness when she was breastfeeding/cosleeping/babywearing/vaccine-questioning in the ’70s. Even she is kind of horrified to hear what it has become.
We keep it in the bathroom and it gets flung against the door pretty often.
There was a letter? article? I forget which that actually addressed the issue of the name….and someone (probably the editor) actually defended it, saying the magazine was not about fathering or parenting, it was about Mothering. That whole Earth Mother thing is wholly intentional; if you’re not home breastfeeding/home schooling/cloth diapering/making foot baths with flower petals for your kids, you are not, in fact, Mothering. All the pictures of little girls breastfeeding their dolls and making their own baby wraps by hand disturb me disturb me, too, because clearly the idea is to indoctrinate little girls into Mothering, as well.
(Also the magazine is laughable from an urban perspective…all the articles about what to do with kids in your backyard, and the recent article about Living In A Small Space, that is, 1200 square feet, with pictures that made me swoon because of all. that. elbow room. And there was a recent cloth diaper article that had a list of something like “answers to all the reasons you thought you couldn’t cloth diaper” and I was kind of excited because I do *want* to cloth diaper… and “not having a washer/dryer in my mothereffing house” was NOT ON THE LIST. Thanks but no thanks.)
Last part of long comment: a good friend of mine actually wrote them a letter after the article that suggested, in an article about “green winter holidays,” you could decorate an evergreen to celebrate Chanukah. WTF?????
Oh, Briar, your post really makes me not miss Park Slope. (Sorry – I know you love it there.)
I love your posts lately. It is nice to read something on a blog that makes me think.
hahaha – I dare you to send this post to them as a letter to the editor!
(written from my WORK computer)
PS – personally, I would enjoy more crazy Park Slope stories – you can just tell them to me if you don’t want to blog them.
You should move out to my neighborhood. A whole lot less Slopatude.
I agree on “Mothering” on all counts. Did you see the letters to the editor after the issue in which they profiled a lesbian couple? People were asking why they wrote an article on such an “unnatural” subject, when they were a magazine with “natural” values. Yeah.
Also? It just makes it an easier target for my husband to make fun of….SMOTHERING. And that’s from the guy who was so sold on elimination communication.
But, yes, it is everywhere. Even out here in the sticks. Or maybe especially out here,
Despite our dislike of Mothering we’ve also had copies several times in our house as well — handed down from others. We had to pitch them because they made Lyn too mad!
And we should start our own mag with small-space-family tips. With our 650 square feet and a family of four, I feel desperate for ideas, but most of the small-space stuff assumes you don’t have kids (or deals with kids but assumes 1200+ is small!)