From Jennifer Weiner's blog, Snark Spot:
So I’m having my own little Kanye West “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment over on the New York Times’ book blog...
...Things started on Tuesday TBR senior editor Dwight Garner posted a roundup of what other newspapers were reviewing: Michael Chabon, Woody Allen, your typical assortment of Living Dead White Men who the Times routinely covers to death and beyond, leavened with a review of Tina Brown’s take on the ten-years-dead Diana.
I posted a comment pointing out that it was interesting that the Times itself has reviewed all of those titles (in Chabon and Brown’s cases, twice), and wondered whether book review editors the world over got some kind of top-secret list as to which books to write about each week...
To find out what happened next, follow the thread here. You can read my comments on Jennifer's MySpace blog here. I was incensed, yet humorous. It sounds like something catherine would be interested in, since she "of course [she writes] romance novels."
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Next. From Salon via Racialicious: The other mothers, by Lynn Harris.
Separation anxiety, race and class, our very identities as women and parents: This is precisely the bumpy terrain that Lucy Kaylin explores in her new book, "The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies." Said "truth" -- refreshingly -- is not, say, research twisted to assert that mothers who employ nannies have higher rates of self-hate, or that their children tend to grow up to be sociopaths. Kaylin's book -- her own nanny story, woven into interviews with other mothers and nannies, too -- shows that, actually, it's messier than that.
Kaylin's responses to the interview questions said more about her than I think she intended:
"I see what a cliché I've become, you know, when I come in the house with my hard shoes and dark clothes and I'm hugging my kid with one hand and working the BlackBerry with the other. You see yourself like that and it's awful; you're exactly the person you have long decried or felt superior to. A nanny can give you a really clear perspective on what it looks like to them...
...[My nanny Hy] is very frank, and if she thinks something's wrong she'll say it. And there was this one day when my husband and I were being so harried, doing that "two ships passing in the morning" thing, and she literally gave me a command: She said, "Kiss your husband." I was about to run out the door without doing so. And I thought it was great because she has a really macro sense of our operation. It's not just "I've got to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches this afternoon and make sure they have their bath by 6." She really cares about the health of the whole family. She cares about people getting kissed before they go out the door. She knows that it matters. And God bless her, it does matter."
Thank goodness Kaylin's nanny can function as her therapist and personal assistant, in addition to taking care of her kids. I wonder how her husband fits into the "operation." I'm not sure. In response to the question, "How do fathers feel about nannies?", Kaylin stated:
You'd think in this day and age that fathers would be as affected by the presence of a nanny as we are, that they would be as involved as we are in child rearing -- since we do have these great, well-adjusted feminist dads these days, wearing Snuglis and going to play dates -- but the reality is, the brunt of the childcare still falls to the mother. If something goes wrong with the kid, [people] are going to look to the choices the mother made to see what went wrong. And there's just no sense in which a father is hiring someone to be his proxy when he brings a nanny into the home. The nanny is a mother figure. So as a result, it's the mother who's overseeing the relationship and managing it.
Did Kaylin consult any fathers who may actually be the primary caregivers in their homes? Did she even ask her own husband how he felt about the nanny in their own home? Nope, she made a sweeping generalization without referring to any research at all.
My favorite part of the article was the comments. Some people were ticked off. An excerpt:
Add me to the "Who Fucking Cares?" Camp
I can't believe that there is an entire book industry dedicated to the minutia of motherhood. Every little aspect of being a mother/working mother/stay at home mother has been fetishized to a point beyond ridiculous. So now there is a book that dedicates at least 100 pages to dissecting how upper-middle class mothers FEEL about their nannies?
I don't care how these women, who have all the choices in the world, feel. What interests me more is how the illegal Mexican nanny who has had to leave her own children behind feels about being paid subsistence wages? Or how the working-poor mother feels about not being able to work at all because of the lack of daycare, period. Or how another working-poor mother feels about having to work nights at a corner store while her husband works days, and then having to haul yourself around all day after not sleeping. So to complain that you feel JEALOUS of your Nanny is whiny and self-indulgent.
Incidentally, I am working-mother who has more choices available to her than almost 90% of working Moms. I pay 45% of my take-home for childcare costs. I pay my childcare provider 25% more than the going rate to insure that she'll stick around, and because I really believe that my commitment to feminism and social and economic equality starts with me and my bank account. The endless navel gazing of upper-class women does little to alert our consciousness to the class implications of hiring other women to mind your children for subsistence wages.
Your thoughts?
