Today the urge to blog returned. Thanks for the all the kind wishes on my “half-abandonment”. I think all I really needed was a vacation.
I’ve been chuckling lately over this big brouhaha here at Salon.com. Debra Ollivier, author of Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl, wrote an article about the emotional perils of hiring a nanny.
Almost instantaneously she was soundly bashed for being a whiny, privileged, upper-middle class white woman, who, if she can afford to have a nanny, somehow loses her status as card-carrying member of the human race.
I’m not really much interested in the whole childrearing debate anymore. I’m bored to tears and would much rather get on with the childrearing, understanding from so many different standpoints what one gains from the work of one’s own hands and what one stands to lose.
But, this predictable need to strike back at Ollivier just struck me as something Aesop would have had a field day with.
Bashing others--especially educated, privileged, women (nevermind that the education and privilege may only be the result of sacrifice, hard work, and luck) who dare to confess that money doesn’t solve all of life’s problems--seems to have become the Great American Pastime. And I wondered, would they be hated more or less if, instead of confessing frustration, confusion, or sadness, they purred with happiness, self-satisfaction and contentment? What if, for example, Ollivier had written this sentence:
I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty old house; and when I went into the library, with its four windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness. . .
Would that have sent out a professonal lynching mob? Or would it have sent out the volunteers?
As my grandma used to say “There’s just no pleasing some people.”
And I am off to filch some lilacs.
(The above sentence, by the way, comes from Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Armin.)
10:42:01 AM 
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