My New Naptime Obsession

When Jack was a newborn, my favorite way to spend his naptime was to go to sleep myself.  I embraced the advice to sleep when your baby sleeps, letting laundry go undone and dishes sit in the sink, sometimes for an embarrassingly disgusting length of time.  When Jack reached about seven months or so and was (finally!) only waking up 3-4 times a night, my naptime treat became watching Desperate Housewives and Daily Show reruns while drinking a Diet Coke and eating chocolate.  While I still greatly enjoy that setup, today it has been usurped as my favorite naptime pastime. 

Slate.com, my long-time favorite online magazine, has just launched a new for-women sister site called Double X, and I am obsessed.  For about a year and a half I've followed religiously the conversations on the XX Factor, Slate's women's blog, and now it's evolved from a blog into a full website.  I couldn't be more thrilled at the prospect of spending Jack's naps reading the brilliant insights of these incredible journalists.  Much more mind-expanding than Desperate Housewives reruns.  I predict a rapid decline in the cleanliness of our home.

Even though I, as an over-educated, unemployed/stay-at-home mother, am occasionally (okay, repeatedly) attacked through varying levels of chastisement in many of their articles, I love the idea of an online home for intelligent conversation about news, women's issues, and families with other women.  This article about the failures of feminism (or maybe just the lack of a definitive solution to Betty Friedan's "problem that has no name," described in The Feminine Mystique) had me intrigued today.  It describes some of the conflict I feel between wanting to be a "perfect" mom/wife and recognizing we could all use a little relaxation of standards in the name of both feminism and sanity.  A brief quote:

"If, as Joan Didion noted of the women’s movement in 1972, “to make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them,” today you need the women who spend their days buying organic eggs from Whole Foods and mommy-blogging about the frittatas they made for their kids to question seriously their life choices. This is a much harder proposition than merely claiming membership among the oppressed. The generations of women now in their twenties, thirties, and forties were raised to believe they could be anything and do anything they wanted to do. Now that they have educations, jobs, husbands, and children, they are finding that doing all of these things well isn’t so simple. They don’t suffer from a problem that has no name so much as they nurture resentments with no obvious cause.

In the end, the modern day querelle des femmes often reveals more about class (and status anxiety) than it does about the particular experience of being female. It is the maddening demands of an ever more competitive meritocracy, and not the malevolence of men, that challenges these daughters of the second wave." 

Every time I read an article like this I face another interesting conflict--do I attempt to write something publishable on mommy feminism, or is that market flooded already with women more eloquent than I am?