Review by request: Ms. Magazine

There are three things that influenced my feminist childhood: My mom, Phil Donahue (another post for another time) and Ms. Magazine.

My mom was a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine. I grew up reading Stories for Free Children and scanning the letters for the “click” moments that told women that they were, in fact, feminists. Their “clicks” helped make my “click” obsolete; I was a feminist by the time I finished sixth grade and kicked Mike G. in the shins when he smacked my ass in the elementary school hallway. So when Ms. asked if I wanted a copy of the magazine so I could blog about their blogging article, I said yes (actually more like “hell yes”). Because I may be a feminist but I’m also broke and magazine subscriptions are sadly in my “luxuries to pointlessly pine for” category. (Other magazines I miss: Brain Child, Bitch, The Sun and The Atlantic. I mean, in case you were wondering what to get me for Hanukkah.)

I’ll admit I was wary about the article. I’m sick of people talking about mommy blogs, like “mommies” are a special sub-species of women. And I’m especially sick of hearing people talk about how revolutionary it is for “mommies” to admit to being full-fledged human beings with good days, sure, but also hilarious bad days where we scandalously blog about how drunk we are or want to be or how we sent the kid off to school with her hem stapled instead of sewn. It really bothers me that it’s been nearly fifty years since Erma Bombeck knocked Donna Reed off of her pedestal and still we can’t just write our normal lives without someone turning us into a target market for PR pros and misogynist pundits. So when I saw the cover I wasn’t thrilled; it looked like more of the same. You know, harried white mom bringing home the bacon, frying it up in the pan, cradling a baby and dangling keys to her minivan and looking obviously miserable. If we’re so powerful, (which is what the article says), why does our cover girl stand-in look so dang harassed?

But the article is pretty good and it covers some of my personal favorite political moms including Punditmom (whose new blog looks to be using a Blog Oh Blog theme, too! Great minds!), Write Like She Talks and of course RONI (who has been part of the blogosphere since before she was a mom!). It hits all the big hitters and as an overview it’s swell. BUT. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I wanted something deeper and less overview. And maybe that’s because I live here in the blogosphere — virtually anyway — and so I didn’t learn anything new. But I think an off-line woman might get something out of it and hopefully she would check out the sites included in the article.

I guess my dream article about mommy bloggers would have included a sidebar about consciousness raising that is happening on the web. For me, the feminist value of blogging is that I’m interacting with women who are perhaps nothing like me. In real life, my mom-support tends to be from women whose lives look an awful lot like mine. My closest friends tend to be straight, white women who are generally married and from roughly the same socio-economic background that I am. Details may differ (our current incomes, our religious backgrounds, etc) but our values are not-so-remarkably the same.

But online, well, online is a whole different world. And as my virtual world has broadened, so has my in-real-life world. Would I have actively sought contact with adoptees and first parents if it weren’t for the internet? I doubt it. Personally and professionally, my life has been heavily shaped by the relationships I’ve made with women whose lives DON’T echo mine. Their influence — their consciousness raising — has been integral to my growth as a mother and as a woman. (Here I’m tempted to link y’all up but I know I’d miss some of the people who have meant so much to me.)

As an aside? This is a big part of what my essay in Mothering and Blogging is about. An excerpt:

In traditional adoption communities there’s a chasm between adoptive parents and birth parents. Our local adoption support group is made up entirely of adoptive families and our agency’s training included one scant hour with a birth mother. (Our group’s inexperience with birth parenthood was apparent – we stared at her like she was a celebrity. That young woman, only about six months post-partum at our training, suffered yearning gazes with dignity and answered our questions with tired patience.)

Aimee’s comment bridged the chasm in which I was writing in two ways. One, she made me remember that there are birth parents among us; she effectively un-othered the other. Two, she reminded me that birth parents have a context – have an existence – outside of adoption.  I knew Aimee first as a fellow mom who responded to my posts about homeschooling and using baking soda to wash my hair instead of shampoo. By disclosing her birth motherhood she reminded me that every woman who places a child shouldn’t be defined by that singular role.

When I read her post, (when I realized she was a birth mother), I was startled. I felt ashamed, as if I had been caught out talking about someone behind her back. I read back through my archives and wondered what she saw in them. I felt my perspective shift – almost with an audible “thunk” – as Aimee slid into focus as a whole, rounded person who was also a birth mother. I had no idea if she was the only birth parent reading me but from there on out I decided to presume that in any group – in real life or online – that any person in front of me might know what it is to place a child for adoption.

I guarantee that I wouldn’t have testified for HB 7 (unrestricted access to birth certificates for adult adopted people) because 1) I wouldn’t have known it was happening (the networking and activism discussed in the article) but 2) because I likely wouldn’t have stepped out of my adoptive parent happy bubble to even think about open records (because have Madison’s original birth certificate and I think likely I would have not thought much beyond that).

Hearing from the world outside my sphere is a big deal and it wasn’t possible before the internet — at least not to this degree.

I always go back to my favorite June Jordan quote:

If you want to know how somebody feels or thinks, ask him. If he can’t tell you in words that you understand, ask someone else. Not anybody else, but someone else. A relative of the man. A close friend. Somebody who seems to you very similar. And when you resort to these sources of information, qualify the value of your data: call it secondhand or worse.

from On Listening: A Good Way to Hear

Thanks for talking so I can listen; you’ve made me a better person (and a better feminist) just by writing down your stories.

Possibly related posts:

1. From the peanut gallery
2. The myths that don’t fly here
3. One-issue voter
4. Feminism and homeschooling
5. Watching the Palin/Couric interviews