I go back and forth on Sandra Tsing Loh—okay, we get it, you're bad—but it is hard not to love something like this: "I myself am not just an imperfect mother, I am a bad mother. I am bad not in that fluttery, anxious, 21st-century way educated middle-class mothers consider themselves 'failures' because they snap when they are tired, because they occasionally feed their kids McNuggets, because as they journal they soulfully question whether they're mindfully attaining a proper daily work/life balance. No, I am bad because after a domestic partnership of 20 years, when my kids were still elementary-school-age, I fell in love, had an affair, admitted it, and quite deservedly got tossed out of the house on my ass. Currently between homes (my earthly belongings reside in a 10-by-10-foot windowless U-Haul storage unit whilst I alternately house-sit, pool-sit, and cat-sit), I furtively park at the curb of my former home for an extra few minutes after dropping my kids off and, with my laptop, I steal wireless. "
…it is hard not to love something like this….
Start with the "quite" in "quite deservedly" and work your way up to the "soulfully."
pshhhh. im tired of these bad mother confessions. ayelet waldman just wrote a book about it, and it totally takes away from when other people make fun of them.
So basically, she's bored being a mom, has an affair and uses her brain-dead sister- in-law as some sort of weird-ass justification for throwing her kids under the bus.
This isn't a complicated story. This person has discovered being a mom is hard and can sometimes be boring and stupid. Wow. Well, put on your big-girl pants, Sandra, and suck it up. It's called "real-life" and it's where most of us live. This would all be so amusing and smart, if there weren't two little girls involved in this who call this clever writer, mom.
I find it very easy to NOT love this.
Too harsh?
Nope.
Spot on.
not in the least.
Right there with you.
Where does she say she blames her sister-in-law for her problems? I don't get that from her at all.
I like Sandra, she pretty much just writes about her life. I am sad to hear it's not working out all that well. I am with Emily on this, at least she is being honest about it.
Not harsh enough by half, Hockeymom.
Yes, too harsh by far, Hockeymom, in my view. I'm not sure she should have to "suck it up," as you put it, and endure the "real life" that you live. Sandra Tsing Loh wants hot sex in her 40s, despite a marriage that's grown stale. It's smug of us to look down upon her for that. In many ways, she has the courage to pursue those desires. It might well offer excellent female modeling for her kids, too.
This kind of reminds me of this jam band musician I knew whose wife was a teacher and wanted kids and he's like "she doesn't realize that she's just gonna have to go back to work while I be the stay at home dad."
No, honey, what YOU don't realize is that you're gonna have to get up off your lazy ass and DO SOMETHING, which yes, may mean shifting your priorities and sacrificing the fantastical life you've thus far been privileged enough to live.
All of this is also why I'm thinking of running away to teach english in Thailand and not come back for a long time.
Oh jeez. Look. Sandra Tsing Loh is a hugely funny and honest and insightful writer. Rather than totally missing the point of what she's getting at here by judging the quality of her parenting, why not just sit back and enjoy what she's unequivocally doing well: writing?
Because she's doing her writing on stolen wireless connection?
You've made me rethink my comment. We do this all the time with other media, so why not?
Well, I think there's a relationship between the writing and the subject. I bet her writing wouldn't be as interesting if the subject matter weren't so extreme. But, admittedly, I'm judging based on nothing but what's at the link. But, hell, this is a blog, dammit, and I'm just a commenter on blog. So I'm in compliance with all applicable standards.
I haven't read the article yet, only the excerpt above. But I think that's far from unequivocally good writing. Certainly not novel or (IMO) interesting subject matter, and not very elegantly composed, either. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Oh, also: isn't she asking us to judge her by the quality of her parenting, as she is proving her case to us that she's a baddie?
Um, no. People who write about their lives are not usually doing so because they are eager to hear their opinion about what they're doing. Actually.
Sorry, "your opinion." Angry typing!
Sure, she's not writing to hear our opinion, nor should she read criticism of her work or life if she doesn't want to. But it did seem to me she is trying to rhetorically solicit a judgment, at least in the paragraph above. No reason to get angry. So some people like her writerly schtick and others don't right?
"I haven't read the article yet" = I don't have to take anything you say seriously. Seriously: is it really too much to ask, that people *read things* before *publicly responding to them?*? I guess it is too much to ask.
Holy Graduate Seminar, Batman – 'responding to'? How about, chit-chatting about while reading at work? Someone's gotta be able to afford the lululemons advertised!
I haven't read these comments yet, but I don't think I will because they SUCK.
I can't go to the bar tonight because I already looked back on it in my memory and I didn't have a good time.
Reply to Emily. Oh gees girl. I love your stuff, but this woman is not writing a disinterested appellate brief for which she is being paid by a wronged client. She is expressing an opinion about her own life for which she gets paid money. So yes, no matter how well written it may be, we will judge, and we will be entitled to do so.
Also, I think it's just that some people have kids and some don't.
if a writer writes about being an asshole, buts writes it well and honestly, i can still think that this person is an asshole and choose not to enjoy it. sorry.
I feel that way about Toby Young.
i had to google toby young. thanks for introducing that to me.
Seconded. She makes me LOL, think, and FEEL. Satisfying qualities for any writer.
Seconding Emily, BTW.
The writing is not bad sentence-by-sentence I guess. But in structure and what you might loosely call argument, it's extremely self-indulgent. It's like some blog post of the today-this-made-me-think-about-that school. It's not just that she's beating around the bush: you can't even tell what bush she's beating around by the end. And I don't understand how it would be meaningful to distinguish her personal self-indulgence from her self-indulgence in formulating a piece of writing about herself, or to call either one "honest".
Here's her divorce story. I found it rather compelling.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/divorce
Agreed, and I enjoyed the linked piece as well.
Her writing is so provocative that the easy way out is to critically disagree with her point of view. I got a lot more out of it by sitting with it for a while.
At the very least, she has beautiful eyes, beautiful big, full lips, and a small nose in her favor.
I liked this one, and I liked the divorce one. To me, she comes across as smart and honest. I think too many people lie about what marriage is really like. What's so wrong about admitting it's hard and that sexual attraction for other people happens even in happy marriages? I agree stability is important for children, but they are stronger than most people give them credit for in this over-coddling age.
I kind of love how much she rags on 'white ppl' — ie: "fluttery, anxious, 21st-century way educated middle-class mothers".
This has been her MO for years in her Atlantic book review column. It's true, and she bashes them very entertainingly, but after the 19th or 20th time it gets a bit stale.
She provides a counter narrative to the helicopter mommies! Some one's gotta!
You're right, NVC. I may have gotten a bit tired of her commentary, but it's good to have in counterpoint to all the crap we moms have to hear from Sears devotees and parenting magazines.
Again, point me to where she rags on "white people". Are you saying that people of other ethnicities cannot be “fluttery, anxious, 21st-century way educated middle-class mothersâ€.
Oh, sorry. "White people, as a social construct, the extent to which such a thing is defined by stereotypes, racism, systems of oppression, etc. notwithstanding." Better? (To be clear: that was my point in using scare quotes and the spelling 'ppl', but apparently I wasn't clear enough!)
No, I am pretty dense though. It seems to me that you reiterated the same concept but with different words. I still read that to mean that people of other etnicities can not have traditional middle class neurosis. Maybe 'vanilla ppl' would be a better choice of a descriptor or 'white bread ppl.'
In any event I have never gotten that vibe from her. Though I haven't read a lot her recent work. I read her in the 90s and she was very funny then. Her work seems as honest as it was then, just with more grown up problems. As I said earlier I am sad to hear how shitty her life got.
Oh I like 'vanilla' and 'white bread' — they are definitely more precise. Originally I meant to refer to a constructed notion of 'white ppl' that sometimes comes part and parcel with 'middle class neurosis' — BUT by making reference to it I didn't mean to endorse this idea. Of course that personality type is not specific to white people, but this shorthand idea of 'white ppl' exists regardless of its accuracy or offensiveness.
So, yeah, you're right and I didn't mean to imply that you're dense (my frustration was directed my own inability to express myself properly). And for the record every time I read STL I LOL, and hard.
Eh. Like most writers she projects, projects, projects. Not such a bad thing when she's dissecting the American Class system but when she's talking about herself (And thus using her limited range of experience as template for the human condition)?
I found her articles on the break up of her marriage and on her kids more of an attempt (Subconsciously cathartic?)to justify her actions within her creative class prism. Like here's me and a pop culture source, and some stuff which I'm going to take and add a couple allusions and voila. A nice generalized statement aimed squarely at her tribe but more projection of her guilt.
Or perhaps L.A. is as weird as "Entourage" suggests.
LA is as weird as "Entourage" suggests. Maybe that is the problem people have with her writing.
Agree, mindpowered. I liked the articles and thought they were well written on the whole, and I appreciate her being open about a really tough subject. But I got fairly annoyed with the self-justification and generalization. Just because her marriage imploded, does that mean marriage is a useless construct and no one should get married?
The other thing I noticed was the amount of stuff she puts her kids through. Like they are a portfolio or investment and they're trying to set them up to extract maximum value.
Is this a function of not saving? Like without retirement money and with a deep insecurity about the future, the children must be given every single opportunity, nay forced into, to overachieve and the parents must stretch themselves on the rack(with big shit eating grins)
No wonder everyone burns out in the end. There is no down time between suzuki method violin, baby einstien, soccer and extra coursework so they can get the dubious value of a deeply indebted liberal arts education.
I propose free Range, slow raised kids. I am simply not willing to burn myself and my marriage out for them.
Why oh why must there be so much anger against women who don't sacrifice literally every aspect of themselves to their children? Why is Loh's affair worse than her husband spending 20 weeks out of every year away from his family?
The reactions here make me feel similarly to whenever I see women tearing apart the character of Betty Draper for being such a horrible mother. As though none of us would spend our time smoking, drinking, and looking for an escape route if we were left home all day to raise children alone, while the man of the house drank and fucked his way throughout the greater NYC area…
This person needs to marry Michael Lewis, have a kid, and then jointly write a narcissistic book ostensibly about their deeply guilty feelings and bad parenting (but really just about themselves) that no actual bad parent will ever even hear of.
She isn't a bad mother. She's just a bad human being who wants to have her failure be more significant than it is.
She has a certain image of what an interesting and worthwhile human life should be like, and somehow she doesn't realize that what it's an image of is adolescence. Which is an interesting and worthwhile period! You get to do things like mate. So why not just always do that stuff, over and over until you're ridiculous? And when it hasn't worked out so well for the children for whom you have responsibility, analyze your failure in political rather than individual terms.
If she could be just a little more pompous, maybe she could write for n+1 instead of The Atlantic. Maybe they give a course in that at the New School. You're never too old for a long march through the institutions.
Somebody got their N+1 in my Atlantic.
It occurred to me many of us are simply jealous of her ability to be a self-empowered Individual, to appreciate life despite all the unfortunate experiences followed by lots of social and inner pressure. Unintentionally, she reveals the value of the Inner Self Awareness, and, suddenly, she is an inspiration. Similar fears, concerns, doubts, questions. Sometimes we all wonder why that hell-road is paved with our good intentions. Those schooled by virtual Mom & Dad's Institute are most likely to disagree with this Verbally, but Sandra brilliantly exposes the process of reweaving the social fabric, and, once again, unintentionally proposes strategies for adaptation to new conditions without loosing Yourself.