Occasionally, as I'm quickly scanning and scrolling friends' posts and blogs and articles from sites I follow on Facebook, I will come across a title that sounds interesting to me. But because I have mere seconds to scan, I "share" it, so that it will appear on my own page, and I can come back to read the whole thing later without having to search endlessly for it.
Yes, sometimes I ask myself if I really want to share something with friends that I am not even sure I actually like. In the end, though, I do it because I figure the topic is interesting enough and just because I have it on my Facebook page does not necessarily mean I agree with every single word in an article or blog post. And I was okay with that. Okay with it being on my page. Okay with my name being associated with whichever issue I took interest in, because at least, regardless of the opinion given by the author, I am interested in the general discussion.
Until today.
This morning I saw a Huffington Post blog title that struck me to my core: "I dropped everything in my life . . . but gained so much more."
Totally me! I was on the fast track to a PhD program, thrilled to get to teaching, having my own classroom; I had pretty much given up on the idea of having children naturally, and then I missed a period. Two years after beginning to try to have a baby and here I was in the prime of my life, ready to embark on a whole new journey... pregnant.
So I did drop everything and gain so much more. I wrote my thesis as quickly as I could and threw myself into motherhood. I embarked on a whole different new journey. And I have never for a second wished it were any other way.
So I was eagerly looking forward to Celaya's naptime today so that I could read what this woman had given up and what she had gained.
From the very first paragraph I was angry. By the time I got to the end of the essay I was outraged and ashamed. Ashamed that I had put my name on this woman's blatant disregard for humanity in the name of self satisfaction.
I have since deleted the post from my page (the only time I have ever done that), but I am reposting it here, so that I am not mistaken as overdramatic or misrepresenting her story.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/19/i-dropped-everything-in-my-life_n_4769872.html
Essentially, this woman still has the hots for her high school sweetheart, and, because she is consumed by a sense of her own mortality (her mother is dead, her father seems to be dying in a hospital nearby), decides to uproot her entire life and move in (to her childhood home) with this man.
So? Who cares, right? To each her own.
Sure. I have been there. I was married when I was much younger and left my husband for another man who gave me the hots. Been there done that.
But I did not have children. I was terribly unhappy. And I was a child.
This woman is forty years old, describes her marriage as having been happy, and has children at home in New York. The man, ironically named Carlos, is also married with children. And she left it all.
Because Carlos gives her great orgasms.
In a nutshell.
The entire piece is a drippy Harlequin romance that allows for the feelings of not one other person. She writes as though her children came happily along, across the country from their daddy, to live with a stranger and his children. Additionally, she simply asks Carlos to move in, and he does, with his children. And now they are all so happy to wake up in the morning and life is perfect.
Really? The fact that she could ever be held up as any kind of champion, strong woman, risk taker, is so atrocious to me that I just sat there with my jaw dropped.
I am not so furious that she hurt people. Although I am certainly upset about that. What I am enraged over is that she writes about it all as though we, as fellow humans, fellow women, should be proud of her, should nod our heads in agreement, should follow her lead. "Yes, yes!" She wants us to shout. "Carpe Diem! Vive L'amour!" Because, she justifies, she does not want to wake up just okay with life, she want to wake up "with ardor."
A forty year old woman should know, having lived forty years, that not one person on earth wakes up every single morning for years on end with ardor.
This woman, the epitome of self-servitude, is not even content in life with happiness (the thing I have been ranting about for a few days), she needs ardor!
Fittingly, I was working on a passage of reading last night in a study book for the MCAT (a dear friend of mine is taking the MCAT, ne pas moi), and the topic was individualism. In the end, the author makes clear that socialism actually feeds into individualism; it is just that, he says, we have been thinking about both socialism and individualism all wrong. We, as a society, think capitalism and individualism go together because "I want money, or houses, or cars, or clothes, so I should have it, and capitalism will help me get it." Basically, individualism in our minds is equal to what we have. But, this writer points out, individualism is not about what we have, it is about who we are. And if we are so focused on what we have, how can we ever figure out who we are? Whereas, in a modern socialist society, where people agree to work for the common good, and not let their fellow citizens slip through the cracks, we are focused on doing good work for others, on being good members of society. Ideally, of course.
Then I read this article today, and cannot help but think that this woman is the perfect example of ill defined individualism.
Because, really, at some point she will have to face herself, right? Wonder what kind of person she really is. Who she is. What good she is doing for anyone other than herself. Have to look her children in the eyes and explain her actions to them. Wake up and smell Carlos' nasty breath, or look at his softening middle, and think, "oh yea, I gained so much more."
No comments:
Post a Comment