BREAKING: BREEDER v. BREEDER??? [Censorship on Park Slope Parents]

I didn’t start last week with “incite breeder culture war” on the top of my to-do list. I’m a peace-loving proponent of coexistence, goddammit. I am a "live and let live" kind of gal (well, in theory...most of the time). But when I run into something that is simply so INDEFUCKINGFENSIBLE, I get well and truly up in arms, which I now officially am.

So, you BREEDERS want a war???
 
Well, okay then.
 
It all started with my simple inquiry on the Park Slope Parents listserv. Truth be told, I was actually mulling over a possible pitch for Babble on a best in “bad” parenting guide (and no: I didn’t mean locking your kid in the car while you hit the bar in midtown kind of bad parenting). I hoped my post would maybe be a bit more thought provoking than say, the optimal color and consistency of baby poop, but hardly the first salvo in a bloody civil war.

Here's my original post, which was sandwiched in between inquiries on how to clean a wool rug and a call for camp reviews:
 
Politically-Incorrect Parenting  Posted by: "Allison" Thu Mar 11, 2010 9:52 am (PST)

So, I’m curious to know if I’m the only aspiring detachment parent in this neighborhood. Have you gone back to old-school ways? Because I don’t know if I can get through another 12 years of over-parenting with my sanity intact and I doubt my kids would be better off if I did. So, show my your bad parenting, please. I’ll get you started... I yell, i'm mean, i punish, i say no, i’m inconsistent, i’m tired and often lazy, i cave, i have no desire to get on the rug and play... You?

For purposes of comparison, when I posted the identical message on Facebook, I got responses like:
 
J: I tell him, “if you don't stop doing (fill in the blank), I'm going publically embarrass you so horribly you will never even think of doing (blank) again.”
 
D: I tell my kids to go watch TV, and leave me alone...
 
N: I yell, “I’m calling your father!,” all the way through to mock dialing of the telephone.

So, after these entertaining/informative/SANE responses started rolling in, I emailed Park Slope Parents (which I *finally* broke down and shelled out the twenty five bucks to rejoin because my FANTASTIC, AFFORDABLE summer bungalow colony has put me in charge of drumming up renters and who better, I thought, than my neighbors and the good breeders of Park Slope).
 
PHUCK!!!!!!
 
What was I thinking?
 
I’d be way safer with that depressed fried cupcake commenter who wants to boil all the hood’s children into a stew than with the crowd on Park Slope Parents.
 
Within minutes of posting my inquiry, my brand new Blackberry (the ancient cell phone had finally broken in half) was dinging incoming messages every few seconds.  First came my fellow mean mommies, some wanting to form a club, get together for drinks, put themselves forward as the worst bad mama of the bunch, etc. (though I should note that few of my comrades actually came out of the closet to post their true confessions on the board...they just sent them to me).
 
Then, the hate mail started rolling in.  The first was so perfectly bad, I still can’t quite believe that it was for real. And yet according to my new friend "D," it so is:
 
Yikes...you do not want to get down on the floor and play with your kiddos...you yell and are mean. Maybe you should let your kiddos come to my house. I will play and cuddle and tickle, sing and dance and treat them like children should be treated...with love and respect. Don't get me wrong, i do discipline when needed in the form of time out or i try to divert their attention to something more constructive. But i do not yell and am not mean. I would not call what you are doing "old school"... i call it wrong and sad and i feel sorry for you and your children. But to each their own i guess.
 
If you are being sarcastic with your post i do not find it funny at all. Maybe you need to see a therapist or just go to the park or museum with your children and see how wonderful they are!
 
Wow.. this post made me so mad i want to wake up my sweet babies from their nap and give them big hugs and kisses!!!
 
D (loving Mummy to  ___ 2 and ____ 7 months)

That evening, unable to resist, I wrote her back:
 
D,

Can I call you D?

I LOVE this response. It reads like a perfectly-pitched work of satire right down to the fact that you named your kid ___, which I think may be borderline child abuse.

And thanks for the offer to babysit. How's this weekend? My 12-year-old is especially looking forward to the tickly cuddle-fest.

Also, please refer back to this in a decade and see how you're holding up then.

Best,
Allison

Then she wrote ME back.
 
Sorry, cannot do this weekend as we are in the Hamptons every weekend having FUN with our children. But what the heck, send your kiddos on out and they can have fun with us and case our dog on the beach.
 
Have a great evening and maybe tomorrow you will have a great fun day with your kiddos!
 
Oh.. and the name ____ is my husbands _____ Grandfathers name. It is one of the most popular names in _____. I will be sure to pass on your thoughts of the name.
 
No one said that raising kiddos was easy and fun every second.... but your post made me feel sad for you and your children. I have days where my kiddos drive me nutty, but i laugh at it as they are little developing people and learn from me. If i am mean to them.. they will just be mean to others. There is enough mean people in this world... mine will not be joining that group.
 
Oh, and i am sure i will be holding up just fine a decade from now... i take each day as it comes and welcome it. Maybe you should read a Holocaust survivors story and you will appreciate your life a bit more.
 
D

One friend’s response to my back-and-forth with D: OMG! She played the Holocaust card!

Meanwhile, back on the PSP public listserv, I was being assailed from several more “attachment” parents, who clearly demonstrated my initial point that today’s parents are being driven round the bend trying to do everything too conscientiously at the expense of our collective sanity, and in the process creating little pashas who can hardly wipe their own asses by themselves by the time they head off to high school.
 
"The earnest parents are taking the chum! You managed to get an outraged response from the same pro-fur, pro-foreskin guy I got into a fight with once," wrote a different D in response.
 
Really, as I look back, I got some very wonderful, hilarious, and heartening responses from the mothers of Park Slope.

For every:
 
“Allison, I heartily recommend that you find a support group of other moms, or with a professional, if you can.”

There were many more counterpoints like:
 
“why is it always the folks who have just one precious little new baby to deal with--and who you know are still in the rush of that first-time-parent enthusiasm--who seem to know so much about everyone else's lives?”

After the dust settled over the next day, I drafted a reply/summation to the PSP list and sent it off:
 
Wow!

When I finally got home yesterday (after dodging attachment folks who wanted to string me up by their slings at 321 pickup), I had over two dozen emails from the gamut of park slope parents in my mailbox.

I’ve been asked to form a bad mommy club (sorry, I’m not much for clubs that would have me, either), go out for drinks with a pregnant woman (after the baby’s born!), head to my nearest support group/therapist, put my “kiddos” up for adoption since I’m such a crappy mother.

I was applauded and excoriated by a roughly 3/1 margin (applause from closeted mean mamas 3, haters 1). I WISH I could show you all the emails because some were truly, if unwittingly, brilliant.

In fact, I apparently touched off some sort of culture war I didn’t even realize was going on in our bucolic almost suburb. I’m just waiting for us to be preserved in print once again in Gawker or the Times for the humorless priggish mombies they’ll no doubt be calling us by the end of the day. Has anybody trademarked "Park Slope" yet, by the way?

As one particularly hilarious writer told me (reprinted with permission), “I don't usually buy into the Park Slope Sanctimommy thing, but parents here are outdoing themselves - was I this humorless when my kids were little? I guess it may take awhile to get your body back, but even longer to get back your sense of humor.”

Etiquette decrees that we’re not allowed to get too mean online, which must be why people reserved their greatest vituperation for the offline replies. A couple were so perfectly pitched, they could have been satire, right down to their choices of kids’ names (____ name rhymes with ___). I am apparently not allowed to reply in kind that certain kids’ names are, in my opinion, borderline child abuse.

So, my original query, which I obviously didn’t articulate as earnestly as I might have but which is actually a legitimate line of inquiry, was whether all the hand-holding and tush-wiping and vigilant, ever-patient, unconditional love is actually all that good in the long run for our kids. And whether it’s sustainable for most parents.

I am kind of appalled and fascinated by the response. Why are people who are purportedly so loving and caring, responding in such a judgmental way to another point of view? Why such intensity and hostility? I mean, the whole tenor is too close for comfort to the crowd picketing Planned Parenthood. The longer I’m a parent, the less I feel like I know.

My goal as a parent is to teach my kids to ask good questions, not to think they have all the answers. It’s to help them be self-reliant, to be good citizens and friends, to have fun and play (but not necessarily exclusively with ME).

Okay, that’s it. Except for the irony of my husband checking the weather on the local news this morning and having a baby death by sling story come on.

And by the way, I think I said I'm an aspiring detachment parent, not that I've actually had any success at it. By this, I mean that I would like to sit in harmonious parallel play with my offspring every once in a while, not that I lock them in a closet while I head out to the nearest bar.

Best wishes,
Allison

And eventually, a day later, I got a “message not-approved” email from a PSP moderator:

There are lots of places beyond PSP where you can vent about people in the  neighborhood. The thing is, most of the people who took the time to respond to your post on the list were supportive and constructive so the irritation jars a bit, but that's your choice.  You're welcome to re submit a reply to the group but do not make it personal - even anonymously. Really, how long do you think it would take people to work out that you're talking about the mom of  *that* ___? We wouldn't have let someone post accusing you of child abuse. It kind of demeans what is actually a really important discussion.

N
For the PSP Moderators

So, I revised my response and sent it back with a note that kindly asked the moderator to let me know if anything else needed to be changed. I heard nothing.

I emailed again requesting that they let me know what exactly in my response needed changing in order to get it approved? I asked them to send me line edits, respond or post it. Nothing. Three days passed and a couple more emails from me to them (one a day). Still nothing.

Meanwhile as I waited for a response, I practiced a lot of good detachment parenting: standing in a monsoon to watch Lion Kings on Ice at Prospect Park’s Wollman Rink with my little rhino, co-starring alongside surprise guest OKSANA BAIUL!!!!! Okay, skating in proximity. Fine, on the same rink. But really, how did they get Oksana Baiul to skate? And in a foot of water, no less? And, no, she wasn’t fat or sluiced on wodka--she was great.

Okay, back to the righteous indignation...

Another sort-of polite no finally arrived, citing continuing mean-spiritedness and snarky parent-mocking. WHHHHHAAAATTTTTTT? Also, yet another virtual exhortation to take up my matter elsewhere: “there are a gazillion places to mock parents, some even specific to Park Slope-perhaps you know of one?  ;)

Sincerely,
B
PSP Moderator, on behalf of the PSP Advisory Board

Hmmmm. I really didn't cook this whole thing up to post it to you BALLER-Y, greenish, hung-over St. Patty’s Day revelers on FIPS. Really, I didn't.

And so, in keeping with my closeted earnest self, I decided to email PSP one last even more scrubbed-up totally boring version of my response:

Okay, I hear you. I’m going to take another pass at a post. I would say that what passes for respectful disagreement and civilized discussion didn’t pass muster with some of those posts, but maybe I’m conflating the private and public emails. I know for sure that the foreskin dude (as one respondent called him) *did* ask me why I had children, but fine. I’ll take the high road. As I think I wrote N, I really wasn’t trying to set off an internecine culture war, just working on a pitch for a Babble best in “bad” parenting guide.

My final draft, by this point, was so friggin spic and span, it looked like Martha Stewart's floor. It was wiped clean of any possible incendiary undertones (and some of my best lines, goddammit)--well "wiped clean" as much as I could stomach, but surely clean enough for my censors, er, I mean moderators?

Again, two days pass during which I made shrinky dinks, attended parent/teacher conferences and stewed. I still remained confused about exactly what I said that was *so* inflammatory, it couldn’t even be seen by the gentle and sensitive eyes of the parents of Park Slope?

Then I received a final no, from yet another PSP moderator, this time because I had mentioned that the initial post was part of my article research for a Babble pitch. This was coupled with some explanatory langauage laying out their “bloggers” policy.

You have gottttttt to be fucking kidding me!

So I don’t get to respond, Park Slope Parents??? That's how you're gonna play this?

By the way, N the co-moderator turns out to also be N the self-styled parenting guru on Park Slope Parents, who had written a long and condescending advice post of her own (and remarkably, she also had no trouble approving all the inexplicable congratulatory posts SHE got in response).  Shit like: “Oh N, the only club I want to join is the I love N Club.” So correct me if I'm wrong, N, but aren't *you* using your own PSP posts to shill for your own profession?? 

And yet for me, all you've got is CENSORSHIP? Park Slope Parents won't even allow the original poster to respond? From the card-carrying civil-libertarians of Park Slope, who daily have to run the gauntlet of Greenpeace and ACLU fundraisers on Seventh Ave, such easy pickings are we. Peace-y and democratic is our official MO.

Not good. Actually, its all kind of shocking. Appalling even.

As one of my closeted mommy comrades wrote me:

“Dang--what a fascinating look behind the wizard's curtain at Park Slope Parents.  Quite interesting to see the sort of thoughtful censorship my $25 membership fee is supporting.  This thread has been a near perfect storm of the list-serve at its most insufferable--humorless attachment parents, the incomprehensible adulation of N, and, as you so elegantly put it, "the pro-foreskin dude."  Thanks and let me know if you need any help in the upcoming culture war.”

And, so here we are.

Which is why I now call on you, closeted dissident parents, to rebel against the tyranny of Park Slope Parents and their loud but visible mombie minority! 

I exhort you all to do a mass email dump of scurrilous and snarky posts on such topics as the virtues of public embarrassment for kids and teaching your toddler Lady Gaga songs! Go to your Entourage, your Gmail, and your Outlook, and tell the moderators of PSP you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it any more!

Up with the people!

Let democracy and good humor reign!!!!

[p.s. even SMARTMOM has weighed in on all this bullshit: see OTBKB].