Dear Dr. Sears and TIME Magazine:
Bite me.
If you haven't seen this all over the news this past week, you must be living under a rock....
Just in time (no pun intended, heh!) for Mother's Day, we have this lovely image of a woman nursing her preschooler. Yes, her preschooler. And while I nursed my kids, the youngest for over a year, I physically cringed at this picture. And then I laughed, because I realized it's just the latest edition of the "mommy wars" espoused by the media. These pot stirrers did this for release right before Mother's Day.
What a bunch of tools.
(By the way, considering the style of parenting that Sears espouses, isn't it a bit ironic that the kid is wearing camouflage pants? No? Just me? Okay.)
Anyway, the extended breastfeeding itself isn't what bothered me so much. It is that I am personally sick and tired of shit like this being flung at women, who for the most part are simply trying to do the best they can and be good moms. We carry enough guilt no matter what style of parenting we adapt. Hell, I have 4 kids who, at some point in their lives, had different parenting approaches thrown at them because they were....wait for it...DIFFERENT! My oldest and youngest children were absolute dream babies...slept all night from 1 month, ate well, etc. Seriously, I could have been screaming down the highway on a Harley and then wore them in a sling while being a rodeo clown and they wouldn't have batted an eye. My middle two were more, um...challenging, and I had to adapt and try things I didn't necessarily have experience with in my previous parenting adventures.
And for the record, are we going to see any TIME covers at Father's Day with stories like "Workaholic Fathers: Do You Know Your Kid's Birthday"? Of course not.
Sadly, I remember 16 years ago when the internet was really just in its infancy, and there were these forums on AOL that you could post on. Parenting ones were really hot. And I was about to have my younger daughter, so while I was already a mom of 2 at that point, I figured it would be a good way to connect with other moms in cyberspace, in a sort of "support group".
What the hell was I thinking? It was this crap, but on steroids!! It is STILL going on, all these years later. Lets face it...for many people, being on the internet makes people bolder, more "in your face". And it was on those message boards that I first heard of the term "attachment parenting". Most of those moms were some of the most condescending, judgmental twits I had ever encountered. And the crazy part was that when it came to several issues, I agreed with them in that I had adhered to some of their gospel truths and they worked for me. But I never made the conclusion that others who didn't choose as I did (breast vs bottle, for example) were bad parents.
Judging someone's ability to parent is something we are all guilty of sometimes. Yeah, I admit it. Generally it is as a result of someone's self inflated sense of parenting superiority...and when that kid goes in the opposite direction, I fess up to laughing my ass off at it. It's parenting schadenfreude, and we ALL do it at some point.
Some of the moms I have met over the years make me scared for humanity, frankly....but I will say that it isn't because they used cloth diapers (for us, HELL NO), slept with their kids (at times, with some of our kids), formula or breastfeeding (both)...and on and on. And my doing things a certain way didn't make me feel any better than someone who didn't agree with me. Guess what? Well adjusted, healthy kids come from all types of families and all types of parenting approaches. And plenty of little yard monkeys and spoiled brats come from them, too.
So ladies, let's make a pact this Mother's Day to not buy into this nonsense and try to support each other. I have a message for TIME and Dr. Sears:
You'd better believe I'm "mom enough". I dare you or anyone else to say otherwise.
