Women's Crossroads

Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, is "back in the saddle" again with her blog "Domestic Disturbances," published on Fridays in The New York Times. Now maybe it's true that I'm a wee bit jealous of all the attention Warner is getting with her chronicles of the trials and tribulations of motherhood--but that in itself is part of the problem I'm registering here.

Why is she getting so much attention? Why are New York Times readers so eager to read about how Warner nearly had a nervous breakdown while preparing the profiteroles for her nine-year-old daughter's French-themed birthday party?

Here's the scene Warner describes in her latest column:

"On Saturday, I found myself, midafternoon, standing in the kitchen, preparing to hurl a pan of unpuffed cream puffs through the window. The alleged “puffs” — really the size and color of underbaked digestive biscuits — were intended for the profiteroles I was making for Julia’s birthday party with friends that evening. The party was French-themed, at her impassioned request, and there were drinking cups in the shape of Eiffel Towers and an Eiffel Tower centerpiece. There were quiche and two kinds of goat cheese and Trader Joe’s sparkling French lemonade. There were supposed to be profiteroles — cream puffs stuffed with vanilla ice cream, topped with homemade chocolate sauce and fresh whipped cream, piled together into a pièce montée topped with a candle in the shape of the number nine.

"Now the mere commingling of the concepts “profiteroles” and “nine-year-old” may signal, to some of you, the presence of a problem. But it hadn’t to me, at least, not until that point. Before then, I’d been too busy figuring out how to get quiche, salad, melon and pâtes au beurre onto the dining table while supervising “tween” makeovers and making warm but not burnt chocolate sauce. I was too worried about how to get my mother and mother-in-law out of the kitchen without alienating them even more.

"(To give you a sense of the atmosphere: I turned on the electric beater. The dog began to howl. I opened the back door and shouted at him, “Get out!” My mother replied, “Let me just get my things.”)"

It makes for an entertaining column, no question about it. But I find the unabashed description of privilege to be startling and kind of eerie. This frantic baking is going on while Warner's journalist husband is "out at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner" (wasn't his wife invited too?). Really I just feel like shouting at her some very old, cliched lines: "Don't you realize kids are starving in Sudan?" and "Why don't you get a life??"

Here is Judith Warner, a talented, well-educated woman living an incredibly privileged life in the heart of the capital city of the Empire, Washington D.C., and she can think of nothing better to do with her time and talents than make profiteroles for her nine-year-old daughter? Aren't there more interesting, less navel-centered ways of celebrating a ninth birthday, come to think of it, than having your mother and both grandmothers in the house frantically preparing to slavishly serve you and your friends?

This is how blind privilege--that super-confident sense of entitlement, which we see on display every day in its adult form in the person of our own George W. Bush--gets perpetuated. Mother to daughter, mother to son, on and on. And obviously New York Times readers are part of that charmed circle, because they're just lapping it up in Warner's columns and best-selling book.

I'd like to suggest that Judith Warner and her fans do something different for Mother's Day this year: go out and join the CODE PINK women who will be standing a 24-hour vigil in front of the White House to "honor all the mothers -- US and Iraqi -- who have lost sons and daughters in the conflict in Iraq." These women--many of them mothers and grandmothers, all of them daughters--will be calling "for our troops to come home so that no more mothers will suffer the unbearable grief of losing a child to Bush's war," and also sending "a message of sorrow, friendship and peace directly to the women of Iraq and their families."

There is simply too much at stake, Judith, to waste your energy and talent on such frivolities as perfect profiteroles! Do you really want to go down as another Marie Antoinette, focused on cake while the palace burns down around you? Our children need us more than ever now, but the battles we must fight for the sake of their futures, and the futures of all living beings on this planet, aren't going to take place in our ultra-stylish kitchens.