Mother's Day

Every day in America is Mother's Day. Individual children, husbands, and sperm donors may not appreciate them daily, but our entire society revolves around mothers. It's intensified over the last several years. Every magazine in the checkout aisle has a pregnant celebrity, or a celebrity and baby(ies) on the cover--this never happened during the 90s. Every non-beer TV commercial is pitched toward mothers. Workplaces gear benefits and attendance policies to benefit mothers (and fathers, somewhat; it's the non-parents who get stuck with the extra work).

Most legislation these days is slanted toward "helping mothers"--the nanny-state stuff is all about making the lives of mothers easier by restricting people's choices and behaviors. Hillary Clinton claims motherhood makes her qualified to be POTUS; Barbara Boxer couldn't make fun of the color of Condoleeza Rice's background without being called a bigot, but it's completely acceptable to the Secretary of State because she never had children (thus contributing nothing to the world, and making her utterly unqualified to have tea with heads of state).

Which is fine--except for Barbara Boxer's remarks--because without mothers there would be no society. I'm tired of living in a society that believes Joyce Dahmer made a better contribution to the world than I ever will, and that I can never rise to the level of respectibility of Jamie Lynn Spears. [Tangent--I think people were less unsympathetic to childless women less back when motherhood wasn't a "choice" to be vacuumed out at a clinic. Discuss.]

I don't even know what I did wrong, or what I could have done differently, other than being born with a different face and brain.

But back to my point: how fucked-up IS it that our society treats unmarried women with kids by different dead-beat dads better than unmarried women without? How fucked-up is it that my life would be better today if I'd gotten pregnant and dropped out of college?


I hope everyone enjoys their brunch/cards/etc (I also hope Bill Hall hits some HRs with his pink bat). I'm headed back to bed with the cat and a pot of cacao mit Schnaps. I'm too cheap/stubborn to turn on the heat in the middle of May. This is not a complaint about the weather, 50 is better than 85 any day. :)