Mommy drive-by

[franceslievens]

It's amazing how little credit people and especially women give each other. Via Crooked Timber I stumbled on a thread from Chez Miscarriage where she asks her readers to give examples of crappy things other people say about your mothering. Most of the stories are pretty nasty and not even funny. I felt gutted afterwards. Is this the kind of society we live in? One where mothers that stay at home throw vile remarks at the ones that work and vice versa, where breastfeeding a four month old is called sick, but other mothers get spat upon because they give their child a bottle? Can I say "Mind your own business and kids"? Or as Belle Waring puts it over on Crooked Timber:

I hate to get all blaming the patriarchy, but it certainly seems as if all this mental energy could be more profitably directed towards trying to change society to make life better for parents, rather than in vicious intersororal strife…