Women's confessional journalism is a problem for motherhood writers

Broadsheet on Salon.com asks the question today whether "female confessional journalism" harms women. I feel that it is harmful at worst, extremely limiting at best, especially when it comes to motherhood. Unless you want to write about being a "Bad Mommy," your husband's affair, or peeing in a diaper, women's confessional journalism is a problem for motherhood writers! Read my Salon.com letter for more of my perspective.

Watch today's rerun of The Secret Lives of Moms on Oprah to see an example of why this oversharing-yet-not-very-thoughtful trend drives me nuts. [I blogged about that episode when it first aired in April.] It's a fine line, because I believe in honesty about motherhood, yet if you are going to share intimate details of your family life you'd better earn it by creating a true insight. I thought the Oprah episodes back in 2002 with Naomi Wolf really did earn it ("What Your Mother Never Told You About Motherhood and "What Mothers Honestly Think About Motherhood"). In fact, those episodes helped inspire me to write Mojo Mom, and at the time they created controversy about telling hard truths about motherhood. Now we spew all sorts of personal details yet it feels like blowing off steam with gallows humor that keeps us on a juvenile level and prevents us from looking deeply at what motherhood means to our lives.

Is the True Mom Confessions trend already over the top?

Wow, after last week's Oprah about "The Secret Lives of Moms," it seems like everywhere I turn there is a new development in Bad-Mommy-lit or True Mom Confessions.

I'll confess, The Wall Street Journal article, "Bad Parents and Proud of It: Moms and a Dad Confess" gave me the creeps:

When her two young sons first started walking, Lisa Moricoli-Latham, a mother in Pacific Palisades, Calif., would gently push them over. For the sake of their development, she thought it would be better for them to crawl first. A physical therapist had told her so. She kind of enjoyed it, she says. "It gave me this sort of nasty thrill..."

Okay, they lost me at "nasty thrill." A ton of books seem to be coming out in this genre, including Heather Armstrong's It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Margarita, Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace and a compilation of True Mom Confessions.

It raises questions about what it means to be honest about motherhood. Do we want to or need to share all of our dirty laundry and bad feelings? Are there some things better said to a therapist than to the world wide web? If I were ten years younger and had grown up on with the internet, would this all make sense to me?

I haven't gotten into these websites or read these specific books. Maybe someone who has can explain their allure.

While it would be cooler to align myself with this trend, I've never gravitated toward this style of writing, ever since Perfect Madness came out. I thought I'd really like that book, but it left me feeling frustrated. I believe that continuously rehashing the difficult parts of motherhood can keep us almost as stuck as ignoring them.

I read a comment yesterday, and I apologize because I can't remember where, that expressed the concern that some of this confessional approach ends up infantilizing Moms, like the woman on Oprah who told the story about peeing into a diaper when she didn't want to wake her sleeping kids on a cross-country road trip. Those zany Moms, no wonder we never get anything else done!

I've also heard from a number of mothers of older kids, say age 9 and up, who validate my personal experience that even though parenting is still intense, when the kids get older it's easier to "mother while multitasking," developing creative, career, and family aspects in one's life.

As for my writing, I get as real as I need to in Mojo Mom. My best venting is done through tennis and improv comedy rather than Bad Mom lit.