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| Angry reader, pre-comment. |
Recently,
I posted my piece about the effect of empty nest on fathers at Generation Fabulous, a site for women over forty. One of the reader
comments came from a woman who said, "I'm years away from an empty nest,
but if women got a life, they wouldn't have to deal with empty nest and there
wouldn't be these stories all over the internet," or words to that
effect. I responded, "When I was your
age, I felt the same way."
I
deleted the rest.
Sharon
Hodor Greenthal is the co-founder of Generation Fabulous She is also a frequently published blogger
and speaker about social media issues. She is an intelligent, kind, and
insightful writer whose observations of everyday life often make me see things
a different way. Her blog is here.
Last
week, she wrote about her choice to stay home full time with children while her
husband worked outside the home to support the family. The piece appeared on Huffington Post, and it is here. In it, she was responding to a study which claimed single-earner marriages fail
more often than others.
Her
point: her own single-earner marriage survived not because it was easy - it was
hard for her to sacrifice a career and hard for him to be away from the family
while he built a business - it worked because it was a choice they arrived at together to best support their common,
guiding priority: what was best for their kids.
Their kids. Not everyone else's.
Their
choice. Not everyone else's.
Of
the 171 comments she received (and they're still coming in) dozens leapfrogged Sharon's
point about collaborating within a marriage to attack her as a woman. Here are some:
"You can
rationalize it however you like, but either your husband was working an insane
amount of hours to keep you in your preferred lifestyle, or he found homelife
so horrible that he preferred workaholism to coming home to wife and family."
"It's dangerous to express
your feelings as if they were your husband's, not to mention completely
disrespectful of him as a person. And when you spend a few months working
eighty hour weeks you can let us all know how much you enjoyed it. What
colossal nerve"
"How ironic! We do
need to be supportive, not drive our spouses to work themselves to death while
we bake brownies and take elocution lessons. Life is hard and we need to support our loved
ones, not pile on. But I'm sure your nails are simply lovely!"
"You won't know
you've done a good job for quite awhile yet... it doesn't sound like you did, not even close."
I
thought about this, people who attack a writer who, by holding a position which
argues with their own, has, in their perception, attacked them.
In my unscientific opinion, people shoot the messenger on message boards for several
reasons:
- Because they can. They're anonymous,
and possibly in a real life sense as much as in front of the computer.
- They have been bolstered in their
lives and community by like-thinkers long enough to be appalled by ideas
that argue with their own.
- They kind of don't like their own
choices. And wish they did.
- They kind of support the choices they would never makes themselves.
And wish they didn't.
In
my other, equally unscientific opinion, we don't get angry with the choices
of another when our own are steeped in our truest beliefs and knowledge
of who we are. People who are childless by choice don't get angry with people
who have babies. People who have no desire to marry don't get angry with those who do. But
people get frustrated, vitriolic, scornful, and hateful when, to accept the quality of another's
beliefs, it feels like they must cheat on their own.
Sharon's
post, for 171 people and counting, held
up a mirror that many were not ready to
look into.
"Maybe
your poor husband will find some cuties at the local gym," said one woman.
Does she know Sharon or her husband or even their proximity to the local gym?
No. Did she offer an opinion? Yes, this one, by default: women who stay at home
deserve it when their men grow bored and find someone else. Does she really
believe it? I'd like to think not, but it was hard to hear over all that yelling.
We
want to be mature, approachable, reasonable people (have you ever been told
you're not?) and so we take a balanced position on the things that don't cost
anything: what kinds of food to eat,
exercise that is best, appropriate clothing for the office, where to go on
vacation and so on.
But
push the ever-contentious buttons: SAHMs, breast/bottle feeding, home vs. public vs. private schooling, politics and then, well, look at Sharon's critics, it's kids off the
street. Quickly, the discussion veers from agreeable and civil to hostile and
polarizing.
How
great it would be to identify, as the adage goes, and not compare. To read the opinion of a stranger that differs
from our own, and based on their argument, be able to defend both. But this is a stretch for people still trying
to reconcile their own choices, or, themselves.
I
learned a couple of things watching this unfold: That Sharon Hodor Greenthal
has more class, restraint and professionalism than most would under attack. And, that if I plan to blog about things that inspire comment, in places where anyone can make them, I gotta
get me a thicker skin.
