I’m Late to the Party, but Gimme a Drink.

February 6, 2007 – 3:44 pm |

I didn’t see the Today Show segment on Cocktail Playdates when it ran last week, but after reading all the controversy I watched it on MSN.   

Since it ran, the blogosphere’s been aflutter with support and disdain for blogger Melissa Summers.  If you don’t want to take the time to watch the entire clip, here’s a long story made short:  

Summers has admitted she has combined social drinking and children’s playdates. So the Today Show invited her to come on the show and talk about that with Meredith Viera.  They also invited a psychology pundit named Janet Taylor to argue the “other side” and say something along the lines of ‘you need to do something way more appropriate to relieve stress lest you be a bad role model, endanger your children, and wreak havoc in the modern world.’ (I’m paraphrasing, of course.)  As a side note, I found Melissa’s reflective and thoughtful response to the experience, though lengthy, to be worthy of my reading time.  

The thing is, Janet Taylor’s got the high road, and there’s really no arguing with her logic.  Of course we need to be reasonable about what we do when we have children.  But the show, and the whole “Cocktail Playdate Controversy” leaves me still begging for an answer to the same question I posed last week …

Why [Oprah, or Meredith, or Katie, or Elizabeth]? Why do you, and the media machine that drives you, continue to pit mothers against each other and take us to task for every choice we make for ourselves and our children?

   … Mommy, do you work or stay home?  WRONG.  Mommy, do you cook or eat out?  WRONG.  Do you ever have a drink?  WRONG.  Do you spank, yell, Ferberize, bribe, punish, swear, allow TV, disallow TV, run, play, blog, have sex, go out, stay in, craft, read, speak languages, join PTA, homeschool, no school, private school, public school, sports, dance? Ooh - bad, bad, bad, bad and double bad. 

Alas, I renew my demand for One.Single.Story from a national news program that grills (or even just politely asks) the modern father about:

1) Men and how their work choices impact their children; 2) The application of Family Leave laws to MEN; or, as here, 3) The impact it has on the children when men drink a beer at the family SuperBowl party. 

In the alternative,  I guess we can all just keep martyring ourselves at the foot of the duty mother, ignoring the role of fathers, and arguing over who gets the title of Best Mommy. 

Here’s me doing my part in sing-songy schoolyard voice … ”Not It.”