I realized that I have not blogged in four months. It is truly appalling. These are the reasons:
1. I got married. Thanks, send money.
2. I have had really really really bad writer's block.
3. Facebook and Twitter are a little easier to maintain.
4. I'm lazy.
5. I'm about to go through a major move, so most of my free time has been given over to stress.
There. And even though I am facing a time where I am potentially dealing with a very long loss of internet, I feel like I must blog a few more times.
Plus, the angry is back. It's back in full force, for many reasons. Would you like the reasons? Here they are:
1. The shooting of Dr. George Tiller. At his fucking CHURCH, no less. How fucking low do you have to be?
2. Even lower: Operation Rescue's reaction to the shooting of Dr. Tiller. Really, Randall Terry?He just brought it on himself? REALLY. Wow. I just wonder what compels them all.
3. Of course we all know that they upheld Prop. 8 in California. Fucking fuckhole fuckers. This makes me so angry I can't even articulate. Seriously, all that's in my head is AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHFUCKERSAAAARRRRRGH. It continues to blow my mind that people who are NOT EVEN INVOLVED in other peoples lifestyles CONFUCKINGTINUE to interfere in them.
4. Fucking religion. I move closer and closer to total atheism every day. I think you can be a spiritual atheist. I might just start calling myself that.
5. An article written by one Carol Sarler of the Daily Mail about how childfree people are inhuman. I will link to the article. But I'm also preparing to take the piss out of it. Here's your length warning. And if you're childfree, here's also your warning that you will feel insulted, offended and upset at this woman's choice of words. It's by far the most disgusting anti-childfree article I've ever read.
This is not someone's blog, now. This is actually a column, in a well-known publication. The obvious hatred this woman feels for us shines through in every sentence. She's green (with envy, you know it) and I am red (with fiery bloody anger.) I've also edited out some superfluous paragraphs, so if you want to read the article uncut, click here.
Much as I like to trumpet the importance of a woman's right to choose all things at all times, there's one choice I simply cannot understand: the choice of an otherwise sane and healthy woman not to have children.
Well, it's good you got the hypocrisy out in the air, lady. I can choose to punch you in the face, and you're okay with that, but I choose to live my life the way I see fit and you can't get that? Is that how it works?
If a would-be mother is a singleton of 40 who decides to have a baby without a partner, I might wish she'd thought of it sooner and prepared for it better - but I understand.
If she's half of a lesbian couple who 'borrows' the wherewithal, I might cross my fingers that the child is not teased at school - but I understand. Even if she's a 66-year- old pregnant pensioner, threatening to turn motherhood into a freak show, I might (indeed, I do) think she's monstrously selfish and dangerously wrong - but again, more or less, I understand.
This is just mind-boggling. Mind-boggling. She's more understanding of someone turning motherhood--something she considers sacred--into a freak show than she is of someone who decides to divorce themselves from said freak show?
Yet if she says she hasn't a shred of maternal feeling in her, moreover, if she says she would prefer to concentrate on her career and that a child would only get in the way of it, then my head might acknowledge her right to do so. But my heart whispers: 'Lady, you're weird.'
My head understands your feelings on this subject. After all, it's amazing to me that anyone would want to squeeze something the size of a watermelon out their vagina and then have to clean up its poo and vomit for years. Hey, I clean up after my cat, so I understand. But you know what my heart whispers? "Lady, you are a nosy, judgemental, interfering sack of cunts." My heart has a pretty blue vocabulary.
It was welcome news, therefore, to discover this week that I am not alone. Research conducted over six years shows that far from bosses and colleagues always being suspicious of a working mother, the opposite is becoming true: it is the childless woman who is regarded as cold and odd.
What research? Care to cite that? Oh, wait, YOU NEVER DO DURING THE COURSE OF THE ENTIRE ARTICLE. So you'll pardon me if I find your facts and statistics and assumptions to be just a LITTLE one-sided. Now it is true that childfree women are regarded as odd if they're in a workplace full of childed people. Because they don't have a whole lot of say in an office conversation about poopy fucking diapers, do they? So because they don't coo over baby pictures and feel up the preggo bellies of their co-workers, they're considered odd and standoffish by their cliquey co-workers. Not a whole lot of effort is made by the mommies to include non-mommies into their little world. And if you can't, that's not a bad thing. CF people don't necessarily want to be included in a conversation about soiled nappies and toddler vomit. But something we also don't want is to be vilified because we don't fit in. Which is pretty much what this self-described "VERY outspoken mother and former boss" does over the course of this so-called article.
Yeah, it gets worse.
As a result, it is these single-track careerists who are increasingly likely to be vilified, refused jobs and denied promotion because many employers believe them to lack what the study calls 'an essential humanity'. And I know exactly what they mean.
Yep. Not only are we cold and odd, but we're also inhuman. That's lovely, isn't it? It's a wonderful thing to be called. She goes on. It sickens me to copy/paste it, but you've got to see it to believe it.
In the little hothouse of my own trade as a hack (I must at least mention that I appreciate the honesty and integrity of this statement, because by dog, you are indeed a hack), I play a game with myself. Reading all the other female scribblers, sometimes with grudging admiration and sometimes none at all, I try to guess from their expression of their world view whether or not they are mothers.
I haven't - yet - been wrong. Now, with MPs so much in the headlines, I've extended the game and started to guess about the women among them, too.As far as I can tell, my score is also pretty high there - even though it's just a feeling. On both sides of the political divide, as with the writers, it's not what MPs say or do, so much as how they go about it.
'Mothers bring something extra.'
And if that touch of 'essential humanity' - or its absence - colours such notably tough professions, it's hardly surprising that employers are starting to notice that the same applies across the spectrum of workplaces.
Wow. My only reaction to this self-righteous smug-fest is wow. Because what it pretty much implies is that the people who are mothers say things that Mrs. Sarler likes, and finds to be morally sound. The things that the inhuman, incomplete, barren and bitter childfree and childless do and say, however... well, she sees those things are very bad indeed. Let us be further enlightened by her amazing superior mind, shall we? For the mind of a mother is always resting on a higher moral plane. Oh yes indeed.
Besides which, in my experiences both as a colleague and an employer, I have found that mothers almost always bring something extra to the job, to the benefit of all.
It's not the mothers, for a start, who are going to turn up late and hungover after a night on the razz; they'll have been up, dressed and alert for hours, having cooked a family breakfast and delivered their children to school. On time.
What fucking June Cleaver fucking dimension are you living in, lady? Because--and no insult to my own mother, who did the best she could and I love her--that shit never happened to me growing up. And how fucking insulting, to just assume that ALL childfree people are out partying every night? We're not all twenty years old, you know. You think just because we don't choose to take on the responsibility of raising another human being, we're just naturally irresponsible people? Amazing. Way to generalize, bitch. Not only about the childfree, but about parents as well. Not every mommy is up at the crack of dawn scrambling eggs for her babies, just as every childfree person isn't out partying till the crack of dawn every night without a care in the world.
It's not the mothers, usually, who run the office bitch-fest.
Really. Every situation I've been in suggests otherwise. You know who runs the office bitch-fest? The bitches. Both the mommies and the non-mommies. That's why they call it a bitch-fest, because it's a festival the bitches run. I'm sure you know, because you must have run a few yourself, Mrs. Sarler.
They're not there to compete for the attentions of the male executives; they're there to get out of the house; they're there because they genuinely enjoy some adult company; and they're there because they have mouths to feed other than their own and shoes to buy for someone else's feet.
Oh, of course, because all childfree women are cock-hungry bitch-festers, right? First of all, a great deal of CF women--in fact, most of the CF women I know--are in committed, stable relationships and aren't looking for an office fling because they're perfectly happy at home. They get to have sex whenever and wherever they want in their house because they won't be interrupted by or disturb their children. They have time to spend with each other and devote it to strengthening their relationship. Even to assume that a single CF woman has nothing more on her mind than chasing office cock is insulting in the extreme. We do have households to support, too. Granted, our expenses aren't as high as those of someone who has a few extra air-breathers running around, but they do exist, and we do have motivation to get to work so that we can maintain them. So that argument is pretty fucking weak, lady.
But rarely have I encountered a mother who did not offer to make up time lost, often in lunch hours. As for leaving on time, put enough mothers together in one workplace and you'll get rid of the ghastly ethos of 'presenteeism', whereby people vie for plaudits based solely on how late - albeit often uselessly - they hang around the office.
Yes, because the childfree women of the working world have nothing better to do than just hang around the office late racking up extra hours so they can pay for all the martinis they imbibe when they're out partying all night. Like a fucking mom wouldn't do that if they could get away with it. We're all at our jobs to make money. And the childfree are just as likely to be staying late, getting the work that the mommies couldn't stay and finish because they had to go pick up Bratley Junior at daycare. That's right, bitch, generalization works both ways.
You cannot be a mother without knowing something about selflessness, compassion, generosity, commitment, fierce loyalty and plain hard work. You cannot - surely - be a boss and not value assets such as those in your staff.
Oh, you can be a mother and still lack all those qualities. I mean, it would be nice if everyone's mom had these qualities, but I could link you to a million stories that prove otherwise. And surely a lot of employers out there realize that if a person, male or female, has these qualities, they are not exclusive to parents. Except for you, of course, Mrs. Sarler. I expect you wouldn't have hired someone like me, despite my record of being dependable, loyal, hard-working and selfless (damn right I'm tooting my own horn here, I know how fucking good I am) because I've never gotten knocked up. And I'm therefore inhuman and incapable of truly being in touch with humanity.
But, more than all the things we want, we actually need our children; they complete us as women, they are our light and our love and our legacy.
We feel desperately sorry for those who yearn for children they cannot have; the unwilling barren, if you will. But when we meet a woman who chooses her childlessness in the belief that there is something out there worth more, we smile politely even while - once again - our guts whisper: 'Lady, you're weird.'
Last time it was your heart whispering. You mean your guts whisper, too? How unique. You must be the Internal Organs Whisperer. Hey, you know what? I'm not weird. I'm myself. I'm me. I have my own individuality, I choose not to play the role of breeder and let my offspring define who I am. And you're jealous as hell about it because you played the game, you didn't think you had the choice, and you are fooling yourself into thinking you're the greatest thing since cable television just because your body performed a biological function and you popped one out. Not only that, but because some women choose not to have their body go through this biological function, you claim that we are not really true women, that we're incomplete. If we can't have babies, we get your pity and sympathy, but if we don't want babies, you somehow think that we're less human than you are. You know what? I think that's pretty fucking weird, lady.
So three cheers for the employers who are catching on, the ones who don't want to people their workforces with the cold, the calculating, the sad and the mad. The only question is: what took you so long?
Oh, well, I don't know... maybe they were busy trying to hire people who would show up for work on time, work hard without starting office bitch-fests, and stay loyal to their company. According to you, of course, only a mother can be this kind of person. Guess I might as well give up trying to be a good employee, then, because only a mommy can really do my job.
I can't even begin to describe the hurt I felt in my heart when I read this article. I got pretty fucking pissed off, too, but honestly I'm more upset and offended than anything else. The thought that there are more people out there... shallow, soulless judgemental people like Mrs. Sarler who feel this way about someone else's life choice really, seriously hurts my heart and soul. All this judgement about a life that they are not going to live, about a life that is not even going to affect their own. To me, that's pretty fucking sad. I am really really sorry for you, Mrs. Sarler, you and all your judgemental, small-minded ilk. You can't look at someone who is different from you, who thinks differently from you, and tolerate it. You might say you can; you can go on and on about a woman's freedom to make a choice all the livelong day, but in the end, if you can't accept the childfree, then you can't make the claim that you're open-minded. You certainly can't make the claim that you are compassionate and understanding.
If you made the claim that you're a giant sack of cunts, though... well, that's something I can agree with wholeheartedly.
***UPDATE***
Heh, apparently I'm not alone in denouncing this deplorable article. And not the first. Which in my mind is a very good thing. So I feel like I should mention that this subject has been mentioned over at Childfree Clique, Childfreedom, By Choice, and Like It Is. Any other blogs that have mentioned what total bullshit this article was will be gladly linked here, as I find them, and as you give 'em to me. Yeah.
