Nobody cares about your kids' poop

I am doing my best to tread carefully here, because back in the day I promised that I would never become one of those tiresome jerks who talks about mortgages and home improvement as if anyone else gives a $hit. On a similar note, I understand that I may one day have a child who likes to scream on airplanes (but let me tell you, I will at least do what I can).

Disclaimers aside, I LOVED this article, as well as the not-online Editor's Letter that introduced it:

Veteran business journalist [Nancy] Hass looks at the ways in which mommy culture seems to have invaded everything, arguing that we've embraced it publicly for long enough, thank you-and women can now move forward secure in the knowledge that motherhood is, yes, a tough and demanding and extremely rewarding job, but it doesn't necessarily make you fit to be a senator, any more than Al Franken's being a father makes him fit to be the freshman congressman from Minnesota.

Highlights from the article:

It’s not as though I don’t love my daughter. Or that I take her for granted. Infertility made her birth a novel-length saga, and I marvel daily that she’s a healthy, fearless, slaphappy toddler... But I have never once thought of her as the best thing I’ve ever done. Perhaps that’s a function of having had a better-than average work life, but it’s also because I’m loath to take credit for my daughter as an accomplishment. Reproducing, even for me, who had to go to such lengths to become a mother, doesn’t feel like a personal achievement; it’s just a natural part of the human cycle. That’s one of the reasons I love being a parent; it’s comfortingly prosaic, delightfully unremarkable. Can you imagine women in small Indian villages standing around the local well asking for reassurance from the others that having their brood of kids is “the best thing they’ve ever done”? It’s a ready-made caption for a New Yorker cartoon.

and

So why do so many accomplished women, even in the most rarefied professional environments, feel compelled to treat their children as something to be celebrated publicly in minute, often embarrassingly scatological, detail? Why do they assume that tales of their offspring’s quotidian doings will envelop everyone else in a cloak of bliss? While there are indeed a few colleagues with whom I’ve developed a real friendship and whose children’s lives I love hearing about (part of the reason I chose these pals is their ability to endow even a toddler tantrum story with wit and irony), it’s a tiny club. And it surely doesn’t include the acquaintance who corralled me during a break at a recent seminar on the world economic crisis, nearly bursting to compare stories of our kids’ capricious bowel habits, school issues, and general adorability...

Give a female celebrity a soapbox, and you can bet she’ll eventually wind up effervescing on the joys of motherhood. No cliché is too hoary for these gals as they gesticulate madly with their slender arms and toss their high-gloss manes; they seem unaware of the cultural ironies embedded in the reveries. These mistresses of mass media (and you know who they are) have perfected the mixed message: I’m a regular mom, just like you. Pay no attention to the three nannies who have been cropped out of this picture or the fact that I spend four nights a week on the red carpet. I’m really just a harried hausfrau who can’t stop talking about my kids’ organic diet. Have I told you that having a baby is the best thing I’ve ever done?

and

Linda Hirshman, the philosopher and feminist author, says the current tendency of women to blather at work about their children is a by-product of the “Mommy Wars,” the heightened tension that developed a decade ago between stay-at-home mothers and their employee counterparts... The question, she says, is “how much of your banal, private reproductive life is appropriate in the public space? No one is saying you should be a man in a skirt, that you shouldn’t leave early for a soccer game or that you should hide your pregnancy, but that’s not the same thing as abolishing the boundaries between the personal and professional spheres.”

and

My husband too thinks I’m overreacting...He advises me to suffer the indignities of office baby talk gracefully. “So what if you have to choke down one more poop story?” he asks.

Okay, I KNEW I wasn't the only person out there sick of the poop talk and the presumptuousness behind it, i.e. other people will find talk of this person's baby's poop fascinating. Now I know that I've mentioned Gracie's poop once or twice, but it's in the context of "I never want to see it outside the litter box again," not "awww, what a strong personality she has"

There's another interesting point in this article:

Hirshman, who has a grown daughter, suggests that incessant banter about children at the office ultimately feels forced because it conflicts with the true nature of paid work. “Women try to use children as a way to bond with other women at the job, to say, ‘I’m your sister, not your competitor...’”

Kid talk can also, ironically, wind up creating just the sort of exclusionary environment that women historically resented on the job.... And then there’s the stealth power gesture of bosses who mention their children—and the frustrations of mothering—in an attempt to humanize themselves to women below them in the hierarchy, Hirshman adds. In some cases, the boss may be a genuine softie, as focused on the needs of her employees as she is on her kids, but more often such mentions are “a powerful if illegitimate weapon. They create commonality, but that’s just a device. You don’t get to be the boss by being a nice mom type.”

I've seen this a lot with things other than motherhood, in the workplace and otherwise. People who are uncomfortable with their status, socioeconomic or otherwise, try to portray it as not that big a deal, but it backfires because to it's a huge deal to the person that doesn't have it. I once had a very wealthy manager who complained about the price of things-- strategically, to make herself sound like one of us-- but it backfired because it was so clearly contrived. There was also the colleague who went out of her way, whether she knew it or not, to establish her place in society (what private schools she went to, whom she knew, etc.) but tried to be "one of us" by talking about how she's really most at ease in her jogging clothes, which struck "us" as, 'well, yeah, you can afford to be; your connections will get you ahead, whereas the rest of us better look the part.' And I've certainly seen people try to do this with kids, i.e. emphasize the burden that they are... and in that case especially, I've seen it backfire, because those people that really want kids would gladly take up that burden. I guess if you think that people can't just be happy for you--that they're going to be jealous-- you're going to try to compensate by emphasizing the negative, and it will probably backfire.

I've been thinking of a friend--because she's being a jerk--who is on the surface very nice but has regularly displayed jealous, defensive behavior when someone else is living an aspect of the life she wants. I wouldn't think that this person is unhappy (and no, she doesn't read the blog, so I'm not hinting at anyone), but for some reason she's excessively threatened. The Times just had an interesting piece about jealousy and envy, and Barack Obama made a reference to the concept when he said that we don't begrudge people their success. I'm often envious and rarely jealous, i.e., every time I hear that a friend has a fabulous trip on the horizon, I very much want to go on that kind of trip myself. But I don't harbor jealousy toward the friend; I'm quite happy for her. And if she started going on about how much the trip sucked, it would just annoy me.

To bring this full circle, I do care about my friends' kids. Of course, I care about my friends and about the important things in their lives, and I like talking about children when it is interesting/sociological, or as Hass says, "endowed with wit and irony." But I don't want to hear anyone's kids scream on a plane, and I don't want to hear about their poop.