Feminism

The Wo-Man Cold

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

When The Hubs gets a cold, he magically transforms from a supportive, independent, rock-star husband into a sad, pathetic, needy little boy. He drinks tons of tea and he needs hugs and he sleeps all day. He gets the ultimate Man Cold every time he gets a cold.

I know I’m not the only one whose husband gets a Man Cold. Because I have talked to dozens of straight married women whose husbands do the same thing. Not all of them, of course–some do like I tend to do and power through it, all the while bitching about it how shitty we feel. But enough that I feel justified in using the phrase Man Cold.

Gay men: do your husbands/partners get Man Colds? What happens if you both get a Man Cold at the same time? Do the children just go feral and forage for food wherever they can find it? I’m asking because I’m about to do the most feminist thing I can I think of: I’m going to do some gender-bending and start getting Man Colds myself.

Here’s the thing: when people of either gender get sick, they feel like ass. A fever makes you feel like ass. A nose rubbed raw from wiping it 10,000 times feels like ass. Post nasal drip draining into your stomach and giving you the poops feels like ass. It is perfectly reasonable that The Hubs would take a break and get some rest when he feels like ass. He is not in the wrong here.

So why, when I have a cold, do I play the goddamn martyr and act like I’m a better person because I kept up my usual routine when I was sick? Why don’t I feel like it’s OK to let the house get messy and let The Kids entertain themselves with extra screen time for a couple days? I’ll tell you why: because of the goddamn Cult of Perfect Motherhood trying to tell me that I must be completely selfless at all times and that if my house isn’t perfect and I’m not giving 150% every minute, I am a bad mother.

Fuck that noise. I’m busting through the glass ceiling of colds and having Wo-Man Colds from now on. I’m going to be the Rosie the Riveter of colds. I’m going to be the Sally Ride of colds. This is an act of radical feminism, and I want you to join me in it.

Say it with me: when I have a cold, I will rest. I will not do the dishes. I will not fold the laundry. If my husband tries to ask me for help, I will tell him I’m too tired and that I know he can handle things on his own while I get well. I will not cave to the pressure for perfection when what I really need is rest and fluids.

Now go blow your nose, get a cup of tea, and take a nap, for feminism!

A Sense of Purpose

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

I don’t know if you guys heard, I mean, I only tweeted about it and shared it on Facebook like ten thousand times with all caps freak-outs, but I was on Huffington Post for the first time last week. Am I bragging? Fuck yeah! It’s made me reflect a bit on this whole blogging thing, as has the whole rock-smoothing I’ve been doing. Pardon me while I navel-gaze even more than usual.

One of the biggest things that is now covered in lava and can’t be restored is my legal career. It’s pretty hard to hold down a job when you’re in treatment, and honestly, the stress of finding a work-life balance is more than my stress box can hold now that it’s got two big ass trauma rocks in it. I’m mourning that loss, in ways I didn’t realize I would when I decided to take a disability retirement. It was a part of my identity more than I realized. It feels really raw and for a while I felt kind of lost and alone about it.

Then I pulled my head out of my ass and realized two things. First off, shitloads of moms have to go through that loss of their career all the damn time in this country, because of the shitty way we treat parents in the workplace. I know other lawyers who left their careers to be parents. Daycare is fucking expensive, and even more so if you work in a job that requires long hours and doesn’t respect that the child care center closes at 6PM and charges $5 for every minute you’re late. The forced-from-your-career thing doesn’t just happen to lawyers either, it happens especially to low-wage workers for whom daycare literally costs more than they make. That makes me feel mad about losing my career instead of sad and alone, which is somehow easier.

Secondly, one of the things I got from being a lawyer was a sense of purpose. My work made me feel useful. There were many, many days when I just felt like a bureaucrat, but there were also days when I’d talk to a parent whose kid was struggling and they’d cry on the phone and tell me thank you for being the first person who listened and tried to help. Those days were fucking amazing, and I was missing them a lot. And then BAM! Huffington Post, y’all, and I had other bloggers sharing my words on their blogs and on Twitter. MY WORDS. And saying how my words made them feel less alone, or how they were going to approach their friend with cancer differently, or how moved they were.

Oh hello sense of purpose, it’s nice to see you again! Turns out you weren’t destroyed by the lava, you just floated downstream in it and landed someplace new. Damn, sense of purpose, you’re STRONG.

I don’t have a ton of readers here. The Hubs keeps joking about how his wife is “famous on the internet.” In fact, the other day he said, “Not only do I know someone who’s famous on the internet, I’ve SLEPT with someone who’s famous on the internet.” Famous isn’t really what this whole thing is about, though, I mean, I’m not monetizing this blog and casting a wide net isn’t my goal here. It’s about me sharing my thoughts, and hoping they mean something to someone else someday. That the someday turned out to be last week? Yeah, that felt fucking AMAZING.

Which is why I want to say thank you, to all of you who read this blog, and to all of you who’ve said such nice things about my writing. It means so much to me, and to my sense of self-worth, that what I have to say means something to you.

BRRREEEEAAAAASSSSSTTTTTTSSSSSS

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

Jesus, pinktober, would you just fucking end already? No? Alright, then let’s talk about sexualization of cancer. You started this, pinktober, and now I’m going to finish it.

Yes, hetero male world, we know–you love breasts. You just do. I get that. That’s why they’re fucking EVERYWHERE. You’re like fucking zombies only instead of looking for bbbbrrraaaaaiiiiiiinnnssss, you’re looking for BRRREEEEAAAAASSSSSTTTTTTSSSSSS.

But here is the thing about my breast cancer: it’s not in my breast anymore. Because I don’t HAVE that breast anymore. It’s been cut off. Still turned on?
No? Of course not, because making cancer about breasts is FUCKING CREEPY. Seriously, it’s cancer for the love of Christ. It’s not hot.

Except during pinktober. Because pinktober isn’t about people with cancer. It’s about marketing. It’s about selling t-shirts and making your fracking company seem less evil for destroying the planet and making people sick. Because breasts are sexy, and sex sells, and sex also distracts people from the shitty things your company does. Who can think about the carcinogens you’re pumping into our water supply when they’ve got breasts to think about? BRRREEEEAAAAASSSSSTTTTTTSSSSSS.

Ever wonder why there isn’t a month for esophageal cancer awareness? Have you ever SEEN a photo of an esophagus? Was it sexy? No? There you have it.

What really gets me about slogans like “save the boobies” and “cop a feel” and all the other “Hahaha, I am so witty, I made breast cancer into a sexy joke” crap that happens every October is that it doesn’t seem to be about keeping women alive or curing disease. It’s about breasts, and how important they are to heterosexual men, and shouldn’t we do something to save the breasts, because BRRREEEEAAAAASSSSSTTTTTTSSSSSS. Where are the people attached to those breasts in those conversations? Oh right, we’re NOT in those conversations, because women are nothing more than the sum of our parts. Parts that sometimes get cut off as part of our treatment for cancer. And we can’t have that happening, can we? Because BRRREEEEAAAAASSSSSTTTTTTSSSSSS are what’s important, not the people they are attached to.

I have a feeling that’s also why there is such a focus on early detection. It doesn’t ACTUALLY save lives, if you look at the data. But if you find your cancer early, you might get to have a lumpectomy instead of a mastectomy, and then your booby is saved. And what’s more important than saving BRRREEEEAAAAASSSSSTTTTTTSSSSSS? Certainly not research that saves actual lives. Lives are boring–boobs are hot.

Look. I know there are people in the marketing world who aren’t assholes. I know at least some of you must have a fucking conscience. Men of Madison Avenue, please stop living up to your stereotype, and for the love of all that is holy, just stop making my cancer into some creepy sex fetish thing. It’s fucking gross.

A Year of Deprogramming

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

YOU GUYS! It’s my one year blogiversary! And now I will wax philosophical about writing, and sisterhood, and The Cult.

I feel like in the past year, I have noticed a change in the world. I feel like I run into less Judgy McJudgersons, and more…well, I haven’t coined a term for the opposite of Judgy McJudgersons yet, have I? How about we call her Ms. Awesomesauce? Ms. Awesomesauce does stuff like finding support for a friend who she worries has postpartum depression. Ms. Awesomesauce tells everyone that her friend’s house may be a mess, but it’s cool because the friend is focusing on what is important: spending time with her family. Ms. Awesomesauce calls out a Judgy McJudgerson when she meets one, but in a non-assholic way, because she knows we are all stronger if we come together as moms and support each other.

The best part of this last year of writing has been the amazing community of bloggers I have joined. You may not realize this if you’re not a blogger, but when you start a blog, and other bloggers hear about it, they come read your blog and start sharing the things you write that resonate with them. And they tell you how much they loved a particular piece, and WOW, does that feedback feel good! And I do the same for them, because we are all stronger if we come together as writers and support each other.

I am not a big-time blogger. I just write whatever comes in my head, not wondering “will people like this” because I am not making money off of this. If you read much of what I write, you can tell that it’s clearly therapeutic for me to be writing my blog, especially since The Cancer. So, I don’t really worry about trying to reach new readers or page views or whatever. I just spew out some stuff filled with typos and call it a day. Which is why it is all the more amazing to me that there are so many of you who DO read what I write, and say nice things about it. And it makes me feel stronger, because in this space on the Internet, we have come together as people who support each other.

So, thanks for being so Awesomesauce, you guys! And here’s to another year of fighting The Cult!

Losing the Privilege of Choice

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

All my life, I have valued education, and so my law degree, and being a lawyer, mean a lot to me. I am very proud of those things–when people ask me what I do for a living, I’m proud to say “I am a civil rights attorney.” Even though, most of what I do each day isn’t being an attorney, it’s being a bureaucrat. It’s shuffling papers and working in a system, not doing Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg stuff. But that title, attorney, represents the hard work I did to get it. It represents my intellect and my knowledge too. And I am proud of those things.

And now I am losing that title, because I am leaving my job to become a full time cancer warrior. And I am having the predictable identity crisis about that.

I wrote a while ago about stay-at-home parenting not being a real choice for many women, that often it happens not because women hate their jobs and want to stay home with their kids, but because it’s financially better for them to stay home with the kids than to pay for daycare. The idea that it is a choice based in personal preference is really one for wealthy people, whose incomes are high enough that they can choose to work or not to work. It’s a privilege to have choice. I always had that privilege, and was grateful for it.

Until cancer took it away.

I’d been really burnt out at work before The Cancer happened. It hasn’t been the greatest place to work lately. Don’t get me wrong, it CAN be a great place to work, and I love my coworkers, but lately it’s been a really stressful job. I wasn’t happy at work–I came home frustrated a lot, and dreaded going there when I woke up in the morning. So I suppose leaving my job should be one of those “cancer is a gift” moments where I say “Cancer sucks but it gave me the gift of leaving that job I hated.”

Except, no, cancer is not a fucking gift. It’s a monster that eats the things that define you, even things you didn’t think about being defining until the cancer ate them. Like my eyebrows. And my breast. And my job. And this blog. And my privilege of choice.

I’m coping with this identity crisis by keeping up my law license. I will still be an attorney–just not one who is working. It’s a few hundred dollars a year to keep myself licensed, an unnecessary expense in a time when our family will have to be downsizing, but it’s my way of saying FUCK YOU to cancer–by holding onto one little bit of who I am, and not letting the cancer take it away from me.

In Defense of Pink

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

I feel like this post is a follow-up to my post about the color purple. Remember that one? I wrote about how the real problem with boys rejecting “girl” stuff is that it is a symptom of how we devalue the feminine. And that devaluation is a part of the larger problem of misogyny in our society.

But hating on girl toys isn’t just for boys. It’s for grown-ups too. Ever talk to an adult who sneered at buying a princess dress or a doll for their daughter? And insisted on only gender neutral or more masculine toys? I have, lots of times. They want their daughters to embrace Legos so they learn engineering, and Star Wars, so the embrace a love of space and adventure.

The Girl loves her some girl toys. She loves to play with her baby dolls and serve me some tea from her alarmingly pink tea set, and then twirl around in a princess dress singing Let it Go. That’s where she finds her joy. So, it makes me go a little mama bear on people when they start shitting on the stuff my daughter likes, and suggesting that the pretend play she is engaging in is the wrong kind of play.

I understand that it gets tricky with kids and marketing and did the kids choose the toys or did the marketers brainwash the kids. And I know that choice and tastes in little kids are more easily influenced than adults. That isn’t really the point, though. The point is that we value the traits of traditionally male things over the traits of traditionally female things. We value engineering over nursing. We pay carpenters more than child care workers.

When The Girl plays with her girl toys, like her baby dolls and her very pink tea set, she is the most kind and thoughtful and loving person. She shares her tea with me. She sings to her baby and feeds it bottles. She invites me to dance with her in her princess gown and tells me I look beautiful. These are behaviors I want her to learn and to practice and to internalize. Hell, I want The Boy to learn and practice and internalize them too, and that’s why I make him play with his sister sometimes–because HER toys teach important skills, just as much as his Legos are teaching him important skills involving engineering and construction.

What worries me is not that The Girl is having too much feminine stuff. Because there is a lot about The Feminine that is awesome. Like nurturing and compassion and empathy and thoughtfulness. What worries me is that The Boy isn’t getting enough of it from his weaponized Legos.

Pink is not the enemy. Having ONLY pink is the enemy. Lack of choice is the enemy. And devaluation of pink is the enemy.

Disability Benefits and Bureaucrazy

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

So, like a lunatic, I have been working, or, more like, trying to work, through my cancer treatment. Which basically means that when I am not at a doctor’s office or recovering from chemo, I go to my office and do what I call The Hug’N’Chat. The Hug’N’Chat means that lots of my coworkers come by and hug me and ask how I’m doing and want to know how treatment is going. Then they chat about work or their kids or whatever, and then they leave and the next Hug’N’Chatter comes in. I’ve been given a lot less work to do because, (a) I am so rarely at the office, and (b) when I am there, I don’t get that much done because I am so busy doing the Hug’N’Chat. I am handling a little work, but it’s fair to say I am not pulling my weight at the office these days.

At first, I thought this was going to be temporary–I’d have my chemo, they’d put me on hormone therapy, and I’d hopefully live a while longer, but there wasn’t much to do in the way of treatment because I was Stage IV, so I’d likely be back at work a lot more. But now that the docs are throwing around words like “cure” and “aggressive treatment” and “off the reservation,” it’s become clear that I don’t have time to go to work. Juggling 3 jobs–attorney, parent, and cancer patient–is just not feasible in the long term, no matter how kind and sympathetic my office has been. (And boy howdy have they been sympathetic! Honestly, people’s kindness floors me, again and again.)

So, luckily for me, I am eligible for disability retirement from my job, and for SocIal Security Disability Insurance. Most employers these days don’t offer disability retirement–I happen to work someplace that has a pension, and disability retirement is part of that. SSDI is something everyone who pays into Social Security is eligible for. Now, I am lucky–I have a spouse with a good job, and my disability retirement will make this whole thing not so painful of a transition. I get to keep my health and life insurance, too. But if i didn’t…

Let me paint a picture for you. You’re a single mom of two kids, ages 8 and 4. One day, you have a stroke. You’re gonna live, but work is not going to be part of your future anymore. So, you apply for SSDI. Somehow you navigate the online system, or maybe a friend helps wheel you down to the Social Security office in your neighborhood, and you fill out the paperwork. 5 MONTHS LATER, you finally become eligible for benefits. That’s not because of a backlog, folks, that’s written INTO THE LAW. You literally do not become eligible for benefits until you have been disabled for 5 months. So, how are you and your kids supposed to eat in the meantime? How are you supposed to pay your rent or your mortgage? What in the actual fuck?

Better still, now that you can’t work, you’re going to have to kiss your health insurance goodbye, huh? And guess what? You can qualify for Medicare once you qualify for SSDI…but only after two years. TWO YEARS ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?! So right when you are disabled the most, in need of the most medical care, you lose access to a system to pay for it? WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK?!?!

Folks, these are stupid rules. And like all rules, they were made up by people and they can be un-made-up by people. All it takes is someone to care enough to write a letter to their member of Congress. Every day. For the next 3 years. Until it changes. Who’s with me?

What Women Need: An End to Domestic Violence

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

I bet you thought I couldn’t get more Debbie Downer than talking about The Cancer all the time. Hahaha! You clearly underestimate me.

Lately I have seen a lot of Facebook memes that say something like “Like if you know it’s never OK to hit a woman” over a picture of a woman with bruises. That shit makes me CRAZY. I really think that the meme-ing for “awareness” of issues like domestic violence is one of the stupidest things we do nowadays. Like, dude, if you don’t know by now that it’s wrong to hit people, I am pretty sure a Facebook meme isn’t gonna teach you that lesson. Also, I mean, way to make a victim’s pain into something trivial like some shitty meme people share on the Internet. Seriously, that person with the bruises? Yeah, she’s a person. Perhaps like-farming with a picture of a woman with a black eye is, shall we say, uncooth?

Which is also why I don’t usually watch TV shows that portray domestic violence. Because domestic violence isn’t entertainment, and most of the portrayals of it that you see on TV are not really about education or raising money for shelters or whatever. They’re about selling advertising, like pretty much all TV shows are. It just creeps me out to know someone is making money off of images of something that traumatic.

Also, I’m not a huge fan of showing us over and over again that women are victims. I feel like in this millennium, we see more women as heroes too, but the whole victim thing hasn’t gone away at all. I just feel like seeing pictures of women being abused, I mean, is that really helping us, as women, to see ourselves as empowered? I personally don’t find it empowering, I find it terrifying, and depressing. Because, what fucking year is this that we’re still putting up with this shit?

Back in 1997, when I was in college and was being a left-wing-radical-mobilizing-force-of-one, me and some friends and classmates went to a march on the National Mall on domestic violence. We carried life-sized bright red silhouettes of women who had been murdered by their partners. I honestly don’t remember what policy changes we were advocating for, or if it was to raise funds, or what. It’s been 14 years since that march, and women are still dying.

How do we make it stop? Well, that one seriously complicated question with a seriously complicated answer. First, we have to make it safe for women to leave their abusers. A woman is more likely to die at the hands of her abuser if she leaves than if she stays. Yes, you read that right, she is more likely to be murdered if she leaves. We need more shelters, and safer ones, with adequate funding, so no woman who has the courage to leave finds herself turned away because there is no room at a shelter. We also need better police protection for women who leave, and stronger laws to lock up the assholes who do this to people they claim to love. Police groups agree and are working on this very issue as we speak.

We also need treatment for offenders. Putting people in jail is a temporary measure. It doesn’t change their hearts and minds. It doesn’t teach them empathy. It doesn’t make them see women as human beings and not property. We need to find the men who do this shit, and deprogram them.

As women, this isn’t something we can do alone. Just like we can’t do it with Facebook memes, we can’t do it without the support of the good men in our lives. This has to be something we convince men to care about. And many do. There actually are great organizations out there right now doing that very work, like Men Stopping Violence.

I guess what I’m saying is, women are dying. Right now, as I type this. Facebook memes aren’t going to fix it, but real change, and real help for survivors of abuse, CAN make a difference. So, the next time you see a picture of a bruised woman come across your newsfeed, don’t just scroll by or click like. Write to Congress, or donate to an organization that is making change. Because women’s lives are at stake.

What We Need: A solution to child care costs

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these posts about what women need and what we can do together to try to make our lives better. Today I’m going to write about a topic that’s been a big one for both my family and the families of many of my friends: the cost of child care.

I live in a big city, Seattle. Around here, the going rate for full-time care for an infant at a child care center is somewhere between $1500 and $2200 a month. Yes, you read that right. When we started looking for child care for The Girl, first of all, EVERYWHERE had a wait list. We literally got on a wait list for a daycare the day we found out I was pregnant. But what really amazed me was the cost: $2090 a month. For one kid. And we provided the food and diapers. Let’s break that down for a minute. I work at a good job with a (barely) 6-figure salary. After retirement contributions, health insurance, taxes, and all that, I bring home about $2400 every two weeks. So basically, almost half my take-home pay would go to paying for child care costs at that daycare center.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that a lot of families look at those costs and say “Fuck it, I’m staying home with my kid.” I mean, I make enough money to make it work, but I’m a lawyer and I have a husband who also has a good job with a good salary, so we can make it work. What if I made half what I do? What would be the point of me going back to work? It would make no financial sense at all.

Now, I don’t begrudge child care workers their salary. Because, honestly, do you know any child care workers who are rich? Like, seriously, the (mostly) women who provide child care in this country work long hours of dealing with tantrums and poop and gazillions of children all at once, for often very low pay. The whole thing is completely fucked up. We can barely afford to pay for child care, but they can barely afford to live on what we can afford to pay them. How the hell did this mess happen?

I think the real structural problem is the way that labor and family rearing have evolved in this country since the 70’s. Women can work now, and workplace discrimination is slowly receding, but with women coming into the workplace, there has been no change to the way we structure salaries and work hours to reflect that somebody’s gotta be watching the children. Who is that going to be when both parents are working outside the home? It’s got to be someone, but somehow, society hasn’t evolved a solution to make child care affordable for working families.

What is the solution, then? Honestly, I have no idea. Child care workers deserve decent pay; families need safe and affordable places for their children to be while their parents work. I’ve seen people float the idea of tax credits as a way to offset child care costs, or perhaps subsidies for low income families. Coops seem to help for people who can make those work? Maybe there is no silver bullet, but I feel like there HAS to be a way to make it less shitty. So, if you know of a great idea to fix this, please share it in the comments.

Mom Bloggers as Feminist Warriors

Posted on by Beth Caldwell

You know, I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, because actually, this topic is what made me think “Hey, I should start a blog so I can write a post about that.” And then, like, I started writing and other stuff came out first instead of this topic, and I sort of forgot about it. In fact, I think maybe I thought I’d already written the post, but I hadn’t, I’d just talked about it. Chronic sleep exhaustion does funny things to your brain.

When I was in college, I was an unpaid fundraising intern for a feminist non-profit, and one of my duties was to help out at the annual fundraising dinner. Now, in DC, these events are suuuuuper common, but if you’re not from there, you’re probably not as familiar with what a big fundraising dinner is like. Basically, imagine the biggest hotel ballroom you’ve ever been in, filled with big round tables, and people in cocktail attire sitting at said tables eating a fairly generic chicken dinner and drinking Chardonnay while listening to people on a stage talking about how great the organization is that is hosting the dinner. That’s it, that’s basically the event. And, the tickets that get you the generic dinner are like, I dunno, $100 a person or whatever. This was 20 years ago and I don’t remember what the going rate was back then, but it was waaaay over my college student budget, but that’s OK because I was working the event, so I got in for free. A lot of the seats at our dinner were bought by wealthy and/or large companies that supported our cause, like, Nike bought a table at this dinner–that is, they paid for 10 seats. But then they didn’t send anyone, so their table sat empty, except for me and the other unpaid intern who was working the event with me. Which was awesome because then we got to drink all the wine for the table. (Actually, we just drank some of it and took the rest home with us.)

So, my job at the dinner was to staff the name tag table with the other intern, and hand out name tags to the guests as they arrived. At one point a short elderly woman walked up to the table in front of the other intern, who said, “Can I help you?” And the woman sneered, rolled her eyes and said, “Betty Friedan” in the most condescending voice I’ve ever heard. That’s when it registered in my brain that this woman was THE Betty Friedan, the one whose book I had read the previous spring for a women’s studies course. She DID look like the photo on the back of the book, except much older. I handed her name tag to her, and she took it without smiling or saying thank you. Clearly she’d been insulted that my co-intern hadn’t immediately recognized her and said, “Oh Ms. Friedan, we’re so glad you’re here, may I get you your name tag?” What a bitch. It totally shattered for me my hero-worship of the woman who many see as the mother of second-wave feminism because of that book, The Feminine Mystique.

And now I get to my point about mom blogging and feminism. Friedan’s book was about how women like her–educated, upper-class and upper-middle-class white women–felt being housewives in the post-World War II era. Here were women who in our era would be likely to be doctors or lawyers or hedge fund managers or CEOs, but in those days, the only career that was considered acceptable for them was homemaker. It wasn’t like today when women of that income and education can choose between a career in addition to motherhood, or choose to just stick with motherhood as their career. Instead, it was unseemly for women of that social strata to be gainfully employed once they were married, so, despite having degrees from prestigious colleges, they kept house and raised their kids, whether they felt fulfilled by that life or not.

What was radical about Friedan’s work wasn’t just that she was challenging the idea that the best thing for women is to be homemakers. What was radical, what was game-altering, was that she was talking about what women’s lives are really like. Not the idealized images we saw in advertising, and not an academic analysis, but what they were actually living. She was writing the truth of her experience, and using it to say, “This is why things have to change.” The personal became political, and women everywhere realized they didn’t have to pretend to be happy anymore, that they weren’t alone, that other women felt it too.

And THAT is exactly what mom blogging is. It is women writing the truth of their lives. They’re writing about the poop stains on the carpet, and the choice to let their kid eat the food that fell on the floor, and the frustration with their toddler who still WILL NOT SLEEP. It’s powerful stuff, and the reason it’s powerful is because it is the truth of their experience as women at this point in time, in history, in their lives. And when they do that, it gives other women license to say, “Hey, I feel that way too. I’m not a bad person for feeling this way–I’m not alone.” I really can’t say just how important that feeling is, the feeling that you’re not alone, and that it’s OK to feel the way you do, AND, that it’s to talk about what you’re living. That’s what Friedan gave us, and mom bloggers are keeping up that tradition.

So, keep rocking that mom blog, you guys. Speak your truth. Because you’re helping women everywhere to find their strength.