{"id":472,"date":"2009-05-10T14:08:26","date_gmt":"2009-05-10T14:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/the-anti-mom-as-a-new-anti-abo.html"},"modified":"2009-05-10T14:08:26","modified_gmt":"2009-05-10T14:08:26","slug":"the-anti-mom-as-a-new-anti-abo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/the-anti-mom-as-a-new-anti-abo.html","title":{"rendered":"The “anti-Mom” as a new anti-abortion icon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Waldman.jpg\"<\/span>Ayelet Waldman’s essay in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column<\/a> a couple years ago was even more irritating than the usual fare in that space–which of course makes you watch it, the way some people watch Fox News or others listen to NPR. You fume, and wonder how people get away with it. <\/p>\n

Waldman’s self-revelation, for those who may not be as Times-obsessed as I am, was that she loves her husband more than her kids–and that unlike all the other mommyes she knows, she is having great sex while they are way too focused on their kids. And on and on:<\/p>\n

\n

An example: I often engage in the parental pastime known as God Forbid. What if, God forbid, someone were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of them. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child’s death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband’s death. Of course I would have to live. I have four children, a mortgage, work to do. But I can imagine no joy without my husband.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The column made Waldman famous, or infamous, as a kind of “anti-Mom,” a traitor to her vocation, and–no surprise–now Waldman has turned her column into a book, “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace,”<\/a> which is out for Mother’s Day and is being reviewed all over.  <\/p>\n

Want to puke? You may want to wait until your read this bit from the NYT review<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

In an essay called “Rocketship,” Waldman takes brave risks that make the title of the book seem less like a feminist wink and more like a tortured cry of self-doubt. She describes the choice she made, over her husband’s initial objection, to terminate a pregnancy when a genetic counselor informed them there was a small — but bigger than usual — chance that their son would be seriously developmentally and physically challenged.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Waldman is never more moving than when she describes reading aloud, on Yom Kippur, before her entire congregation, a letter of atonement to the little boy or girl who would have been her third child. “I atoned before my husband, and my baby,” Waldman writes. “I begged Rocketship’s forgiveness for being so inadequate a mother that I could not accept an imperfect child.” She wants no consolation from the abortion-rights crowd (“Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him”), and she’s clearly unafraid of what the anti-abortion propaganda machine will do with what she has written. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So what will they do with her? What is the lesson here? Is there one?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ayelet Waldman’s essay in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column a couple years ago was even more irritating than the usual fare in that space–which of course makes you watch it, the way some people watch Fox News or others listen to NPR. You fume, and wonder how people get away with it. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}