Mommy maddest. Oh, preach it, sister.

You know what I'm talking about. The above is a splendid response to this grotesquerie. If you read about this first through Lileks, be warned that he delicately refrained from excerpting the really obscene parts. My fave:

We now have a situation where well-off women can choose how to live their lives—either outsourcing child care at a sufficiently high level of quality to permit them to work with relative peace of mind or staying at home.

Wow. Money expands one's choices; lack of money restricts them. A savage inequality never before seen in human society. But the next line is just unbelievable:

But no one else, really, has anything.

Got that, all you middle-class class women, born between 1958 and the early '70s, living in America in this year of grace 2005? You got nuthin', you hear me? Nuthin'! '58? That's me, that's me! I make the cut! All my dreams have not come true and all my material desires are not satisfied! Commence whining! People who are richer than I am need to fork it over to the IRS because I deserve to live exactly like they do!

Aren't Ms. Warner and her interviewees the very models of distasteful self-indulgence that we associate with the worst of the Boomers? Life is soooo hard, it just hasn't turned out the way I thought it would when I was twenty, I don't have everything I want, and sometimes I have duties and responsibilities that are boooring, and stressful! I'm often frustrated and unhappy, life is just such a bitch, it must be the unfairness inherent in the system!

Uh, I think one generation of this sort of thing has been enough, no? At least, it ought to skip a couple, and not drone on seamlessly.

The Under Control blogger's post pretty much covers the territory. (With some good lines - ex., re babysitting co-ops: "Frankly I'd rather pay the nanny than have to pretend to enjoy being around other people's kids. I don't really like other people's kids." Who does?)

I'm a bit bummed, though, that Slacker Mom stole my idea. When the kid was a baby, I roughed out the plan for a self-help book, Cruel Mom, Free Mom. (But, you know, motherhood just demanded every second of my devotion so I just couldn't get it together.)

Posted by Moira Breen at 17 February 2005 02:58 PM