Clip Number Ten: In Which It Is Revealed that Our Heroine Is a Delicate Flower, Held Against Her Will by Her Guardian’s Boorish Minions

(Sorry for the low quality. The Huffington Post has a better clip, but you can’t embed it. Thanks You Tube for liberating the video for the masses.)

BOTTOM LINE: Palmer Cortlandt is holding Erica Kane hostage SO SHE DOESN’T WILT UNDER THE BRIGHT LIGHTS! WTF? Has anyone every seen Susan Lucci? She lost the Daytime Emmy how many times? Did she ever stop rocking the shoulder pads?

Is Palmer poisoning Erica? Is he in love with her? Is Henry Kissinger a cross-over guest from General Hospital? Is he going to turn on the snow machine?

I just wrote Andrew Sullivan an email with the subject “My Response to Obama’s Response on Bristol Palin.”

Andrew,

I could not agree more that Sarah Palin’s family deserves privacy and respect. Bristol Palin is a private citizen; using her as some sort of punching bag, while very tempting, is completely inappropriate (see the endless streams of comment on Daily Kos).

I also agree with Obama that today’s news about Bristol has no bearing on Palin’s performance as governor or as a potential vice president.

However, I am concerned that in issuing this statement, the Obama campaign has asked supporters to stop questioning the details of Governor Palin’s most recent delivery.  The Obama statement seems to imply that we should stop talking about Governor Palin’s family altogether. While I am more than willing to stop wondering if Bristol Palin is the mother of Trig Palin, I am not willing to stop thinking about or discussing Sarah Palin’s behavior leading up to Trig’s delivery.

Extreme risk taking is extreme risk taking, no matter where it happens.

The reason I cannot completely comply with Obama’s wishes in this matter are professional as well as personal. You see, when I am asked my profession by the countless people who call and ask for donations, my answer often catches them off guard.

I am a mother.

That’s what the Obama campaign has me down as. That’s what the DNC has me down as. The DNCC. The Texas Democratic Party. Rick Noriega for Senate. When you get money from me, you’re getting it from a mother.

Professionals have ethical codes. Doctors. Lawyers. Librarians. They all have standards of practice that they agree to uphold as members of the profession.

Now, how you raise your children is not the business of other mothers when you are upholding the standards of the profession. And the standards are relatively few and straightforward. Safety is the paramount standard. Children’s safety is the highest good of mothers. It is the greatest sadness when a mother cannot ensure her children’s safety. And it is up to others to step in when these situations arise.

The story of the day of Trig Palin’s birth is beyond belief. It is shocking. It demonstrates a recklessness so outside normal mores that many of us jumped to the far safer fable that perhaps this woman was not really pregnant rather than contemplate it. Perhaps she didn’t really give the speech and get on the plane and get in the car and then finally give birth, all the while risking infection and an airplane birth. The story that Governor Palin might be “covering” for a teenage daughter makes “sense” compared to getting on a plane and going back to the homeland. For your fifth birth. When women give birth more and more quickly with each successive birth.

I don’t doubt that Sarah Palin believed that she was doing the right thing when she got on that plane. But just because she believed it (and nothing truly terrible seems to have happened) doesn’t mean it was.  She was reckless. As a mother, I cannot be silent. There are reasons airlines require doctors’ letters for women who travel late in pregnancy. There are serious risks involved.

I believe that Sarah Palin’s behavior on April 18th should remain on the table.

The aim of the women’s movement was not to take bad mothers off the hook. It was to keep motherhood from being the only option for women, and the only role in which they could be evaluated. Just because we can evaluate Sarah Palin as a governor and a mayor does not mean that we cannot also evaluate her as a mother. I do not believe that the purpose of second wave feminism was to erase the value and importance of motherhood or “private life.” It was simply to say that that was not the only field on which women can play.

Andrew, do not back down. Keep calling for the documents. It’s more important now than it was this morning.

Lize Burr
Austin, TX

I’m writing to ask that you please stop turning up in all my favorite Internet haunts. Apparently, admitting that I was powerless over the Mommy Wars and my life had become unmanageable wasn’t enough. One day at a time, I told myself, I will not throw needless handgrenades post about anything having to do with mommmys who are doing something wrong. Live and let live–don’t comment when the Times publishes more incendiary pieces about foolish mommys doing foolish things. Don’t Google around cruising for entertainment because it will only take me to mommy bloggers’ dispatches from the front.

Caitlin, as part of my program of recovery, I tried to avoid the publication of your book. I chose to avoid the NY Times Book Review this week because I knew you’d be in it. OK, I fell off the wagon yesterday when I posted the link to the LA Times review, but you were lumped in with a lot of other books, so at least it wasn’t all about you and me and our tango of feminist denial.

But Caitlin, you had absolutely NO BUSINESS turning up at the end of a perfectly valid line of superpower-related distraction. As a woman bound to use the superpowers of her hair for good, I am sworn to follow any and all links regarging hair color, be they from CNN or Gawker. But when a simple Gawker link (” • Is the Times trying to kill feminism with bottles of peroxide and books about binge drinking? [Broadsheet]“) leads to a Salon blog that should send a happy tingle of recognition up my spine but instead leads me DIRECTLY BACK TO YOU AND THE NEW YORK TIMES, well, it’s yet another sip of the Kool Aid for me.

Who is this balanced reviewer in the New York Times, this Pamela Paul? Does she not know that you are the Enigma Machine of the Mommy Wars? If we don’t crack you, it’s pearls at pick up time and floor wax that’s also a dessert topping. Please please stop, Caitlin.

I can’t stand your subtle combination of satire, self-delusion, and success. It’s enough to land a jealous feminist mommy/writer in a room of yellow wallpaper.

Sincerely,

prematurely grey

P.S.: I guess the only good thing about falling off the wagon was clicking on your name at the end of Broadsheet and finding this fantastic review of your book, nailing you just the way I would, were I a successful feminist mommy/writer instead of the one I am.

Yes, the Mommy Wars are not only a war on mommys, they’re also the greatest display of the women’s movement’s INSANE RELIANCE ON THE PUBLISHED WORD to fight rhetorical battles that leave all of us feeling just a little more strung out than we already are just given the fact that we are mommys.

And yes, I cop to the fact that, when I “publish” something here on prematurely grey, I am definitely part of the problem.

Take my advice: skip the books. Save your limited life essence and just read this review from yesterday’s LA Times. I promise it will not make you want to go out and kill all the mommys. Just the one named Caitlin Flanagan. (Sorry, Cailtlin, but you’ve officially crossed the line with me, you enemy of feminism, self-knowledge, and writers who don’t edit out their most controversial and famous sentences in their books just so they seem a little more palatable to the general public.)

As you might imagine, I was extremely agitated when the Mommy Wars reared its ugly head on my little guilty pleasure last Friday. While trolling for nuggets about Katie Couric’s contract renogotiations, I ended up engrossed by this:
Caitlin Flanagan: Finally Someone Makes Margaret Atwood’s Fiction Seem Plausible – Gawker

Here’s a little sample that might explain why I couldn’t not obsess on this woman:

Flanagan, who got her job at The Atlantic the old-fashioned way (she was seated next to an editor of the magazine at a dinner party) has some, shall we say, retrograde notions about a woman’s place (it’s in the home, damn it!).

One of my recurring obsessions is that I would be successful if only I lived in New York because the web of my hypothtical life there is actually connected to people who have the power to hire or say yes or assign articles. In other words, if only I attended dinner parties, I might have a life that looked better in say, a blog, than the one I actually have.

You may be wondering why I’m writing about this the following Thursday. This Gawker post is old news. We’ve had many other conundra to contemplate since last Thursday (including the return of leggings and Whitney Houston’s latest crackapades). But I made the mistake of opening the link to the Elle article to which Gawker’s post was alerting all us bored, unemployed mommys. Be forewarned: the following link pretty much turned me into the white Whitney.

WHO’S THE FAIREST WIFE OF ALL?

I dare you to read this article and not become deeply disturbed.