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.

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.

Leading up to SXSW Interactive, I had become more than a little agitated about the state of the blogosphere. It was starting to eat me alive and I knew that one of us was going to have to go. I’d outlined my plan to my friend Prentiss (pay attention here, reader; he’ll keep popping up over these next eight posts) at our daughters’ volleyball practice earlier that week. It went something along these lines: people have to shut up. Especially women who are angry at other women because they haven’t made identical decisions that might possibly bolster the toothpicks their self-worth is structured upon.

Prentiss asked me what I thought of BlogHer. And I said I didn’t know about BlogHer. And it was then I learned of BlogHer and the upcoming invasion of Austin by “The Queens of Cyber Space.”

Longtime readers will realize that this prelude to SXSW took place during my earlier consideration of jealousy, in particular, of how jealousy gets in the way of almost any discussion about opting out. Gets in the way yet manages to remain unseen. And how my jealousy of writers and bloggers who are already being read by people like me makes me think that my writing is completely pointless because these other people are already doing it. The way thinking about it makes me feel right now.

Once I checked out BlogHer and the Chronicle articles and other reasonably reasonable mother/women/feminist sites on the web, I started to feel that dreaded little warm spot inside that always leads down one of my spiritual alleys. This one was: You are not alone. You will find an audience. Other people will value your path of intelligence, moderation, and constant scrutiny of your hair for signs of the Second Coming. Maybe, if you go listen to them, SOMEDAY YOU WILL HAVE READERS TOO.

The BlogHer panel was Saturday morning. At the exact same time as my brother-in-law’s movie.

Point, BlogHer.

But maybe I could go to one of the other panels about blogging on Saturday afternoon. Maybe I could catch something that would rub off on me and I could become a famous enough blogger this year that people would ask me to sit on a panel next year and I wouldn’t have to feel so completely horrible about all the decisions I made.

That’s when Chris told me he had a migraine and had to get home.

I had parked the Saab pretty much across the street. The Saab had become my ride because the air conditioning was out. Chris got the Passat. But the Passat was full of stuff for the trade show and was parked someplace else. It was over 85 degrees, Chris felt like he was going to throw up, and we got in the Saab.

Well, the air conditioning was also out in the house, somebody had to pick up the computer Bside was renting for the trade show booth, the computer wasn’t ready when that somebody got the the computer store in a hot Saab, so she had to wait around for 35 minutes, the sitter took Mazie to her sleepover but forgot her bag (which was at the sitter’s house, where they’d walked on the first 90 degree day of 2006), the air conditioning repair guy, my friend Allen from the cold day the heat went out back in December (remember that one?), arrived just as I got back with the iMac (which would turn out not to have wireless–impossible, you say–but that’s really getting ahead to Sunday and why I didn’t get to the panel I wanted to go to because I was the person who could go buy a router and cables at Office Max), and Chris started rallying just as the wiring problem with the A/C had been identified, and he ate some of the ham and cheese brioche I’d managed to pick up en route to picking up Mazie from her morning’s sleepover.

While this was happening, I imagined the men and women in the convention center discussing how blogging is transforming social interaction on the net.

I was aware, in the moment, of the irony that my life, the thing that forces me to write as perhaps the only way to keep from losing my mind, my life of driving around Austin in a frenzy, praying that some song will come on the radio to keep me from going over the edge, the source of this blog that has started to take on some personal significance I wish that it did not have, my subject, was in fact keeping me from being in a room of people I thought of as my virtual tribe.

I imagined the BlogHer women, the mommy bloggers, the hip mamas, all talking and laughing and linking to each others blogs while I was trying to figure out how it was that the computer that was ready on Friday at 5 was not ready on Saturday at 3. Trying to figure out who could let in the A/C guy if I was stuck watching an operating system being installed. Trying to figure out what we would do if Chris didn’t get better. Trying to figure out where Mazie’s bag was. Trying to figure out what to wear to a party full of people who’d spent the day in the freezing convention center.

I was not going to make it to the ball. I was going to stay in my life even when the circus came to town and I’d been practicing my juggling all year long. I seem to be destined to keep practicing and never quite make it to the audition. And how would anything get done if I just ran away and joined the circus?

Why should you care about the fact that I spent opening night of SxSW Film and Interactive watching the second half of a movie that was pretty much all title (Fuck) as far as I’m concerned by myself, eating chicken sate at Thai Passion by myself, going back to the parking lot that you’ll come to know as the Bad Parking Lot by myself, and meeting up with the Bside Boys by myself.

Because, dear reader, your heroine is clearly out of her element even before the story begins. She has dropped the girls off at their respective sleepovers. Not only is she not late, she has time on her hands because she listened to her husband tell her the time of the big opening night screening, clearly a sign of having taken leave of her senses. She does not like a documentary about swearing. She eats before she gets too hungry. And when she arrives at the parking lot, she’s the experienced Paramount Pusher, the one who handed out 3-D glasses at the Austin Film Festival before she handed out the extras on Halloween. She has the t-shirts in her car (actually, it’s her husband’s car; make a note of this because it will matter as the story proceeds), which is already parked in the pole position of the Bad Parking lot.

Three of the Bside Boys appear in their black shirts and jeans. Everyone takes piles of shirts and begins walking down deadman’s curve towards Brazos. You heroine starts to laugh. She explains to the Bside Boys that if she were to tell her high school friends that, at 41, her Deadhead dreams have finally come true and she is essentially a t-shirt dealer with a crew, well, they wouldn’t really believe her.

Reader, I’m tempted to write, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” but that would be a cliche and you know you deserve better than that.

Be careful what you wish for, dear readers.

I wrote a list of things (seven, of course) that I wanted to write in this ugly blog about SXSW. Then the eighth, perhaps most meaningful to me personally, happened, and a day or two later, the ninth thing. It feels like catching up on Song of the Day. But that was worth it, in the end, so maybe this will be too.

Nine is another good number, nearly as good as seven and almost better, when you think about it. Nine shorts posts about SXSW. Sounds good. Even in this ugly blog.