Acts of Lèse-majesté

One of the things that I like best about the blogosphere is the fact that I get to read other peoples blogs. These incredibly intelligent people help stave off the "mummy dummies" with their insightful posts. They also bring to my attention issues of which I might have been otherwise ignorant. The other day, Her Bad Mother posted about a rather, um, interesting article. If you haven't read it yet, have a look. The gist is that us naive and, well, stupid women "fall for the motherhood trend, hook, line and pacifier, and are bewildered when the experience does not live up to (our) expectations." I'll save you from the majority of my problems with this article. HBM said it much better than I ever could with my limited literary skills, and you can read her post here. Suffice it to say that, as John Cage would put it, this article troubles me.

I won't go into the fact that this article is written by not only a woman, but a mother. I won't delve into how deeply insulting this article is to women in general and mothers in particular. I certainly won't go into the fact that someone who writes such hateful material obviously has deep-seated issues of her own. I will mention briefly that while motherhood is the most rewarding, and the most challenging, venture I've ever undertaken, I don't love all aspects of it all the time. And I resent the fact that to be considered a good mother, I am required to love every minute of every day and never once complain. It's human nature to complain . It doesn't mean that I don't love motherhood, or that I regret my choice to become a mother. Keeping things bottled up inside you is when you get into trouble with a capital "T". And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for "Poop". If you want to know what I really think about this article, that word pretty much sums it up. Poop. Juvenile, admittedly, but strangely appropriate. Motherhood is too complex to say that it's good or bad, fun or boring, fulfilling or draining. It's all of these things. It's vital. It's alive. It's human. It's not perfect, it's human. That's what's so great about it.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the author's assertion that motherhood is not cool. And that we're stuck in hell because we can't put the baby "into the Goodwill bag with the 80s hypercolor T-shirts and the side ponytails" when we realize that it's not the trendy new accessory that we thought it would be. Granted, I'm not the best person to discuss what is cool and what is not, but I have to say that Stajic really missed the boat on this one. In no other aspects of my life am I allowed to get away with the things that I do while I'm being a mum. I can walk down Bloor Street pushing a stroller singing "Here comes Peter Cotton Tail" at the top of my voice. I can laugh like jolly old St Nick in a posh food store. I can scream at an imaginary lion. I can eat pretend cookies from a book. I can say goodbye to cereal boxes, and goodnight to the Great White Shark bank. Where else in adult life can you do these things without looking nutty? Some may consider these acts of lèse-majesté. I consider them acts of love. And that, my friends, is pretty cool.