scott simon and motherhood

Last Saturday on Weekend Edition, Scott Simon delivered an essay entitled At My Place, Every Day is Mother’s Day. It was a sweet, tongue-in-cheek appreciation of his wife for her hard work as a stay-at-home mom of their two small daughters, laced with self-depreciating remarks about his own domestic incompetence.

I read it through once, and found it annoying, without putting my finger completely on why. This is my experience with most things that Scott Simon writes, and many of the things he says on air. I think he’s overrated, but there’s little about him that I can pinpoint as blatantly offensive. A friend once described him as a “sanctimonious bastard”; that comes as close as anything to describing my distaste for his work. But my dislike makes me feel like a bit of a pill. He writes affectionate essays about his wife and children and is generally liberal and peace-loving. He did, after 9/11, write an incoherent screed entitled “Even Pacifists Must Support This War,” an essay that made me feel even more miserable, bullied, and alienated than I already felt at that time, but few of us were on an even keel after 9/11, and I could probably forgive him for that. No, what bugs me is the drippiness, the holier-than-thou-ness, of Scott Simon. And is that really a reason to hate the guy? I could, alternatively, avoid his essays. (Unfortunately, they tend to come up right when I’m in the car on Saturday mornings.)

A good friend posted the Mother’s Day story, appreciatively, on Facebook. Rather than going back and reading the story carefully, to see if my objections held any water, I wrote a quick comment, complaining about several lines in the story that bugged me. (Note to self: Do not do this. If you are going to criticize anything, reread it. Twice.) My friend tactfully responded that she had read one of the lines that bothered me as irony, that in fact Scott Simon meant to criticize the very cultural daftness that I found annoying about that line. And she was right. Which was embarrassing, because nobody as sarcastic as I am likes to have to admit that they missed the irony.

Of course, even with that, the essay still bothers me, and having read it more carefully now, I have a better idea of why. It’s not the appreciation of his wife’s relentless workday—I know how hard stay-at-home parents work, or at least I know as well as a person who has never been one can know. It’s his cutesy depiction of himself as the Dad Who Does Jackshit At Home that irks. He describes a typical morning, with himself holed up in his office drinking coffee and reading baseball scores while his wife tries to pee with a 2-year-old on her lap and dress two squirming children at the same time. Yes, this is supposed to be self-effacing, and one might also reasonably conclude that Simon is in fact exaggerating, that he’s probably a much more active parent than he portrays himself to be here. My guess is he puts his girls to bed at night. But still, I don’t think it’s particularly funny. Because the implication that I read into it is that it’s okay to let women do all the work of child-rearing, so long as men voice occasional appreciation and admit that the women are probably working a lot harder than they are. This, of course, is the sort of reading that a lot of people would find clinically oversensitive.

After missing the irony and making the dumb comment on Facebook, I went back to the essay and read the online comments, something I very rarely do with NPR pieces. And I found that many people loved it, and the handful of people who didn’t voiced objections similar to mine. The one who said that Simon’s piece was insulting to all mothers was possibly a little over-the-top. The one who pointed out that she read similarly humorous writings on motherhood in the 50s and 60s in the “woman’s work is never done” genre and that she found the piece patronizing was probably onto something. All critical commenters were roundly dismissed by everyone else, Simon included, with advice to “get a sense of humor” and “take a chill pill,” which is such familiar language in this sort of online discussion that it should be codified.

(Sometimes I think that the equality movements will have finally borne their fruits when it is finally widely acknowledged that it is possible to notice that something was intended to be humorous without actually finding it to be so oneself.)

Of course, as I noted later to my friend in an e-mail, part of my reaction to the piece is pure, unexamined defensiveness. I’m about to start a PhD program, and when I feel like I’m settled into my new schedule, Eric and I plan to adopt from foster care. (For the time being, our adoption plans are on hold. I realized that I wanted to start school first.) I don’t plan to drop out of school when that happens. I don’t usually feel criticized for my choices, but as I confessed to my friend, I sometimes feel isolated by them. And isolation tends to foster defensiveness. At least it does in me.

But what the hell do my feelings of isolation over my career and parenting choices have to do with Simon’s piece? It’s possible to read the essay as a covert championing of stay-at-home-motherhood as a superior option, but that interpretation is a pretty big stretch. Here, I think the problem is mine. As much as I loathe the so-called “Mommy Wars,” I am already fighting them, incapable of reading the praise of one mother as anything but a criticism of women who do it differently.

Mothers who work outside the home take endless shit for it. Mothers who stay at home with their kids take endless shit for it. (Michel Martin, another NPR person, wrote a fantastic piece this week on the endless, pointless criticism that mothers face.) And as a society, we still have not let go of the idea that all women should want the same thing. We can’t decide what the hell that thing is, but we sure are fixated on it.