how I came to be where I am around the current election,
and the third post about the candidates themselves.
Sarah Palin and I have very different moral, political and spiritual beliefs. We have had very different experiences as women and mothers. I'm sure there are folks who would say that all we have in common is our gender and the fact we each have a special needs child.
After all, before Palin had her son Trig, she was aware that he would be born with Down Syndrome. She kept up a demanding job as governor of the state of Alaska throughout her entire pregnancy and was back to work within days of her son's birth. Now he's four months old and she's running for the second highest office in the nation.
When my son Austen was born, I didn't yet know he was autistic. I didn't even know that he was different; I hadn't spent much time around infants, so I assumed that his high pitched wailing, inability to sleep and need to have his environment just so were typical of all babies and that I had simply been woefully unprepared for parenting. His crying induced a kind of wild panic in me, and the mere thought of leaving him to go back to my job reduced me to tears of sheer terror. I quit my job at the end of my maternity leave, and my husband Mark and I agreed that we'd just have to do whatever it took (which included rapidly decimating our finances and credit rating) to make it happen.
Forget about working, let alone running a vice presidential campaign, between Austen's needs and my undiagnosed post-partum depression, I didn't even leave the house for three months. (Yes, literally, three months.) I had a friend who was out hiking and camping with her one-week-old around this time, and I was completely baffled. I remember hating women like her who were able to get back up and running so fast. What were they doing right that I was doing wrong?
Still, while I secretly envied them their seeming strength, I was the one being applauded by a society that recognized my post-partum depression as brave decision making. People praised me for doing the right thing in forgoing money and career interests in order to say home with my son. And as they did it, they'd quietly tsk-tsk the moms who made the opposite choice, just as I've heard Sarah Palin tsk-tsked. As a friend said to me, "Palin went back to work when her son was just a few days old! If she makes those kinds of bad and irresponsible decisions about her son's wellbeing, what kinds of decisions would she make for the country?"
The problem was, that while I was lauded for my admirable decision to quit my paying job, now that it was my job to care for my son and home, and it rapidly became clear that I wasn't doing it right. All that babies are supposed to do in the beginning is sleep, eat and eliminate the digested remains of their meals, yet my son had a terrible time with two of the three of those. (Yes, he can pee and poop with the best of them, but eating and sleeping? Sigh!) And as time went on he wasn't doing some of the other things he was supposed to on time: things like waving and talking. I was told that I wasn't sleep training him properly, wasn't feeding him properly, wasn't talking to him enough and correctly. And a part of me believed it. It was my fault. I wasn't working hard enough.
I was criticized by many of the people who tore through our lives in those early years: doctors, therapists, teachers, other parents. They told me that -- while I'd certainly made the right choice to stay home -- I needed to work harder and sacrifice still more. I needed to learn educational law, occupational therapy, organizational skills, nutrition, speech therapy, and if I wasn't good at it or didn't enjoy it, I'd better try harder.
An advocate I tried to hire to help me navigate complex educational law and negotiations with the school district lambasted me for not being able to do (or even being interested in) the job I was going to hire her to do. "You have to learn to do this yourself! If you're not good at it, you'd better work to get good at it! Your son needs you to do this!" Then, when my son was having trouble in school last year, the school's solution wasn't to train the teachers properly or hire an aide; it was to have me come in and act as free support.
After all, if I really loved my son, wouldn't I do anything for him? Wouldn't I go to any lengths to give him what he needed? Shouldn't I? Moms are supposed to do anything for their children, and special needs moms? Why, we're supposed to be superstars. We're not supposed to have jobs or other priorities or needs of our own to balance. We're not supposed to admit that there's anything we can't or won't or don't want to do. We are supposed to live, eat and breathe our single minded dedication to our children.
And when I say moms, I do mean moms, not parents. Because you see, Sarah Palin is supposed to do all that too. Yet, other than gender (and that's a big other!), she has more in common with my husband than she does with me; she makes a good salary working long hours in a high demands career, and she has a spouse who, while not a stay-at-home parent, has taken several months off of work and cut back on his own career as the demands of hers have increased. Her son Trig (like my son) has parental care equal to other working families and his family (even more than ours) has financial resources that allow access to quality medical care and therapy.
In his seven years of parenting, Mark has gotten a series of cheerful "good jobs" for doing his satisfactory and expected job as Daddy. No one said Mark should quit his job or even cut back on his hours at work to help at care for Austen. No one criticized him for going back to work exhausted and sleep deprived days after our son's birth. No one said Austen was suffering because Daddy was working long hours and traveling frequently. No one said Daddy should have done a better job with the sleep training or feeding. No one suggested Daddy learn educational law or teach himself to be an occupational therapist when he made a good enough living to pay an expert to help. No one expected Daddy to leave his other responsibilities to come act as a free aide at school. And no one suggested he didn't really care about his son if he didn't do all this.
I love my son. I'd give my life for him. But he is not -- and I think shouldn't be -- my entire life. And I always feel a pang of guilt for that. I feel guilty for having no interest or aptitude at educational law. I feel guilty for not having any interest in or energy for spending each waking minute of my day on his development and improvement. I feel guilty for wanting to (and enjoying doing) work on things that have nothing to do with him.
So now when I hear these whispers around Sarah Palin about what she "should" be doing for her children, especially her special needs child, I get angry. I get throw-a-flaming-dagger-into-the-heart-of-the-next-person-who-brings-it-up angry. Sarah Palin and I share more than "just" our gender and a special needs child. We share the ways in which we are perceived by society. We share the burden of that special needs supermom myth. We share the weight of society's expectation that we should express our love for, and dedication to, our children in a particular way and that it's our job to do it all, not Daddy's.
Whatever you think of her politics or her qualifications, Sarah Palin has become a mirror for ourselves. She's a Rorschach test for the American psyche. And when I tease apart the personal from the political, what I see in that ink blot is another special needs mom who, however different from me, still can't manage to do anything right enough for anyone.
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