There's something worse than posting pictures on the Internet of yourself giving the middle finger salute to your sleeping baby.
It's holding a pity party for yourself after people criticize you for posting pictures on the Internet of yourself giving the middle finger salute to your sleeping baby.
The "yourself" is Rebecca Schuman, grad student in German philosophy, education columnist for Slate, and mother of a 7-month-old baby girl. Here's what she wrote on Aug 28:
Wittgenstein said that the limits of his language were the limits of his world, but that jerk definitely didn’t have children, because the limits of my world—and my sanity, and my life force, and my will to continue existing—are the limits of my child’s wakefulness. Sometimes, it takes longer to put the little tyrant to sleep than she’ll deign to remain asleep. It is on those days that I celebrate her hard-won unconsciousness by taking a nice little selfie in which she’s conked out, and I’m flipping her the bird. Then I share that selfie on social media, because otherwise it doesn’t exist. We’ve now got quite a little gallery.
Did I mention how much I love my daughter, who is with me 20 hours a day and who co-sleeps with me and who is my whole life?
The reasons I take and post these pictures are varied. I crave emotional release after hours of increasingly desperate nursing, jiggling, rocking, walking, and, my personal favorite, walk-nursing (all wriggling, self-torpedoing 22 pounds of her). I’m also trying to amuse my husband, to diffuse what could otherwise be even more strain on two adults pushed to the boundaries of civility. And, of course, there’s the defiant gesture of Parenting Realness, an offshoot of the Go the F[*]ck to Sleep genre—that urge to fly in the face of decades of parenting decorum and admit that while we adore our children to smithereens, we’re not going to pretend to love the bare Sisyphean relentlessness that our days and nights have become.
Foisting obscene gestures upon my unconscious baby is also, if you can believe it, a lifestyle choice. It’s a conscious cultivation of my household’s gleeful and expressive cursing culture. I grew up in a relatively pro-swear environment, where my dad once sighed mournfully and said, “Can you please wait until you’re 12 to start saying ‘s[–]t’ and ‘f[–]k’ all the time?” “Damn” and “hell” were fine.
And just to prove that point about the selfies "existing," Schuman posted four of them to accompany the article, each showing either Schuman herself or her disembodied hands flpping that bird to the baby.
Ookay. While I'm an old-fashioned girl who believes in "parenting decorum" and who doesn't cotton up to the idea of a "cursing culture"–but who has to admit that the curse words do fall out of her mouth every now and then, such as when she can't get the pickle jar opened or when the printer jams for the 315th time in a row–I'm all on board with Schuman's feelings. Another philosopher whom I'm sure Schuman has read, St. Augustine of Hippo, said that babies were "reprehensible," what with their selfish screaming for Mom's breast every time they got hungry. And I say: If flipping the bird at your "little tyrant" once she finally gives you some peace makes you feel better, go for it.
Posting the photos online is another story, however. The Internet is forever. Perhaps when the little girl is 5–or 10, or 20, or 30–she'll think the images of her mom leveling at her the same gesture that drivers use when a car cuts in front of them are screamingly funny. Or perhaps she won't. Perhaps she'll think they're funny but wish to all f–k (sorry, Rebecca, but your "cursing culture" is wearing off on me) that her mother hadn't posted them for all the world to see. Even if it was for a philosophical reason having to do with trees falling in the forest, etc.
But when people dared to criticize Schuman–and many did–oh my! Sexism!
Schuman gave a whiny interview to her Slate editor titled "Nobody Called CPS on Louis C.K." (referring to the latter's damous routine in which he called his 4-year-old daughter an "a–hole"):
When Slate education columnist Rebecca Schuman wrote “Baby Bird,” in which she evaluated the ethics of flipping off her daughter during naptime, she expected some negative comments. What she did not expect was people openly wishing for her and her baby to die, threats to call Child Protective Services, or a multiday flood of abuse and condemnation on her Facebook page and personal website….
Winter: Sometimes I think the Internet was invented to give people a more efficient delivery system for the message that women should keep their legs closed, except for when they should open them.
Schuman: Exactly.
Winter: Given that each of us is the owner-operator of both a vagina and a baby, I’m curious about the gender aspect of parenting critiques. If you were a bro kicking back with a beer and giving your snoozing baby the finger, would you have come in for this kind of vitriol?
And there's more self-pity on Schuman's own website:
Honestly. I do not intend to provoke to the extent that I do. I am not an “attention whore”–if I were, I would have said yes to an offer to appear on national daytime TV this week. But I turned that offer down, because I knew that any more national attention to #Birdghazi would cause yet more threats, harm, death wishes and distress to my family. Honestly. I am not trying to make anyone mad. I just happen to have strongly-held opinions about certain sacred cows (in academia and now in parenting) and those ideas happen to reaaaaaaaaaally p[—] some people off. I am always honestly shocked when people get so mad at me, because I am an intelligent person and I’ve generally thought these opinions through carefully. They seem, if not obvious, than at least understandable.
Gee, it's so sad to be so misunderstood.
But even though, I'm not a mother myself, I have some advice for Schuman that will help both her and the baby feel better: Junk the "co-sleeping." At 7 months, your infant doesn't you next to her for 20 hours a day. Buy a baby crib the way most moms do. Then stick Little Darling in it with a blanky and a soft plush animal. Then quietly shut the door and tiptoe away. She'll cry for a bit, maybe. Then she'll get the idea. This will work–really! You won't even feel like giving her the finger.