on skateboard injury

So novelist Meg Wolitzer has a new book out she’s titled “The Ten-Year Nap”. Well if that doesn’t sell itself I don’t know what would- “The Nanny Diaries, part XX”?

Honestly what title could possibly invoke more ennui? WHO BUYS THIS SHIT?

And why bother reviewing it? A tale of overachieving, upper middle class women who succumb to the cutesy gurgling of the newborn only to find themselves a decade later, still fashionable, fit and hopelessly vapid as unemployed housewives on the Upper East Side. Wow, how inventive. How controversial. Entering the Mommy Wars indeed.

Give me a break. And a national day care program. And “The Feminine Mystique”, the 45th anniversary edition.

Writers like Wolitzer, and her narcissistic memoirist peer Rebecca Eckler, the self-styled Mommyblogger and litigiously-insistent originator of Apatow’s “Knocked” Up plotline, cause me to daydream wistfully of tube-tying ceremonies in bleach-perfumed boardrooms on the 188th floor.

Of course I like babies. In fact I really, really like babies. I think they are so damn fat and adorable. But you have to be kidding me if it is (publishable) news to someone that her career will go into cardiac failure if she takes ten years “to nap”. Ten years ago we barely even had the internet!!!!!!

Ten years ago we didn’t have adequately available daycare and we still don’t. If you are brilliant and a New Yorker corporate lawyer and not getting enough flexibility to take care of your kid when he’s sick, how about demanding better treatment by your employer? Like, instead of taking ten years off and then demanding to be let back into the labour force, pouting over your displaced pension and permanently-eroded earning potential. Maybe if the wealthy and powerful among us weren’t the first and the most graceful to cave into the inevitably-self-destructive anti-reproductive norms of the workplace, things wouldn’t be so excruciating for the moms who balance three lousy minimum wage jobs AND twins on either hip.

In the movie “Little Children” (which I loved, not just because of Winslet in the red one-piece, because I also read the book, yo), Brad Adamson is a stay-at-home dad who’s wife is disappointed in him because he can’t muster up the wherewithal to write and pass his bar ads. He feels like a loser. He frankly is a big loser, but at least he stays in shape. His kid is a regular that-kid-from-Jerry McGuire-type cutiepie. It’s not the kid’s fault. It’s Brad’s lack of adult contact, the monotony, the isolation. He gets depressed. He finds a woman in a similar (but more patriarchally familiar) ten-year-nap, and cheating on his wife with her is the natural equivalent to a strong dose of Percocet. At the end of the story, he regresses not from just constant hanging out with kids but to being one, and hits his head attempting a skateboard stunt. He wakes up from his concussion (nap), and asks for his wife. And I believe we are supposed to think that after this crisis, things are going to change.

Leslie Bennett’s wrote an a 21st century take on Betty Friedan’s wake-up call, “The Feminine Mistake”. I thought that was a pretty cheeky title. It didn’t come in pastel with Kinsella curlicue font, let me tell you. She wrote damning of the wasted investment and shocking naivete of professional women vacating corner offices, diplomas and diaper bags in hand. Wolitzer concedes, in an interview with Salon’s Rebecca Traister, “There is something inherently appalling about really intelligent people, in any context, not using their minds.”

And it’s not just the democratic tragedy- that so much talent is concentrated on 1.2 kids who spend seven hours a day in elementary school anyway. It’s that it makes the stay-at-homers crazy. Woolf’s house-bound housewife Clarissa Dalloway’s experience parallels Septimus Smith’s PTSD. They are confined; they are confused by memories of past freedom, joy. Septimus jumps out of the window. Brad falls off a half-pipe. Friedan’s generation take Valium with gin.

The women in Wolitzer’s novel make greeting cards.

She exclaims that “You're not thinking about the young woman who can't have the things that you are so cavalierly tossing aside. This story isn't clean”. The story doesn’t sound any good, either. But the market responds to it. And day care staff gets $8/hour.