Once Bitten
When I wrote the piece about my child's expulsion from preschool for Salon (see link below), I expected some criticism. I realized that my wife and I come off a little whiny. We'd just experienced an extremely traumatic and humiliating defeat as parents. The wound was raw, and the piece reflects that; I tried very hard to be honest, and I have no doubt we did some things wrong along the way.
But I'm stunned, discouraged, and even appalled at the response I've received. In the past 36 hours, we've been called "people who should not be parents." It's been suggested that we all go through family therapy, or that we turn over our kid to someone who "knows how to take care of him." A number of people have told me they feel sorry for my son because he has such neurotic, self-absorbed parents. Respondents have mocked what my wife and I do for a living, and they've mocked our recent financial troubles. I've been preached to that parenting is hard work and that I should deal with it and just love my son, as if I don't love him and as if I don't work hard at all.
I don't need to detail my life as a parent here. That can wait until my groundbreaking memoir, Daddy Was A Sinner, is published by Pantheon in the fall of 2006, and I know that most of the criticism is grounded in little more than supposition, misreading between the lines, and, to use a lame-o psychobabble term, the respondents' "own baggage." But I still think the overall response was shameful. I was trying to elucidate a legitimate sociological phenomenon, based on a study that came out the same day that my son got expelled, and to point out certain defects in our country's child-care system. Few people seem to care about that, though. It's easy to call someone a bad mother or to feel sorry for a perfectly lovely, and well-loved (if somewhat high-strung) two-year-old who you don't even know. But it's not easy to recognize the need for social change. I'm trying, just a little, based on difficult real-life experience, to help point the way.