Palin’s children should take priority over being Vice President
Okay. Look. I wasn’t going to tell you what I think of Sarah Palin, but so many people are asking, so fine. Here it is. She is nuts. And the Republicans are nuts for putting her on a ticket. She has a five-month-old kid with Down’s Syndrome.
Why is no one writing about this? I have a special needs kid. I have two. Here’s what happens when you have a special needs kid. You are in shock. You love the kid. I loved my first one so much that even though there was something like an 80% chance of having another kid with autism, I had a second kid.
And guess what? The second kid had a different disability than the first. Amazing. Statistically phenomenal, really. But my point here is that I’m very qualified to tell you what it’s like to be a breadwinner mom of a five-month-old special needs kid. And, it’s not just from my perspective. I am a magnet for breadwinner moms. They constantly write to me. And when I write about this topic—being the breadwinner and having a special needs kid—women come out of the woodwork. They all say exactly what I’m telling you now: it’s insane. It’s insanely hard.
Here’s what’s insanely hard. You go through a mourning period. Don’t tell me about love and how everyone is different. Because everyone is the same about their kids: They love their kids no matter what, and they didn’t plan on having a special needs kid, no matter what. So you need adjusting time.
And here’s more I know from both statistics and first-hand experience: It’s nearly impossible to keep a marriage together with a special needs kid. And it’s nearly impossible to keep a marriage together when the husband quits his job to take care of the kids (which Palin’s husband just did). And Sarah needs her marriage to stay together pretty badly right now.
And who will take care of the newest member of the family? Certainly not the 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant with the newest kid. So the dad now has three teens at home and soon two kids under one year old at home and one has special needs. This is not a reasonable job. For anyone.
I know that I’m going to be reminded me that I have a nanny, a house manager, and a cleaning woman (who actually shows up every day). But I also have a job that allows me to leave at 2:30. It’s a compromise for me. Because every parent in the world has had to compromise, and it’s fair to judge public figures on the choices they make.
It’s really hard to know where to compromise. Here’s what I was doing when my kid was five months old: I was at home. Hating it. Telling myself that I was not cut out to be at home. I was sort of a columnist and sort of a mom and sort of a psychopath. Because having a five-month-old with special needs is very very hard. Not just learning to take care of the baby, but mentally coping.
Why is no one talking about this? The Republicans should dump Palin. She’s got too much responsibility at home.
Don’t tell me that this is not fair to women. Because you know what? People should have railed against John Edwards running for President when he had two young kids at home and a wife fighting cancer. Fine if she wants him to run for office while she fights the cancer. I get it. But I don’t get how the President of the United States was going to have time to console two school age kids about their mom’s death while leading the country. It’s irresponsible.
I know it’s not cool to tell people how to parent. I know it’s not cool because every day someone asks me how I run my company when I have two young kids and what they are really saying is “you suck as a parent.” It’s hard to hear every day, so I have empathy for the idea that everyone should shut up about how other people parent.
But it’s absurd how extreme these presidential-wanna-be cases are. I don’t want someone in the White House who has kids at home who desperately need them. I don’t want to watch that scenario unfold on national TV. So at some point, it must be okay to speak up. At some point we have to say that we have standards for parenting and we want the community to uphold them.
I agree with you about Palin. Very good post
I’m offended that her emphasis is on “handicapped” or “special needs” children, and not on ALL children. I’m too.
At some point you just have to draw the line between career and family. In Palin’s case, I bet that she considered that going after the vice president position was an opportunity of a life time. It did change her and her family’s life completely. So I bet she and her husband sat down and calculated the risk.
Although I disagree with you, I understand you.Because in eastern europe women envy to you.
Hi Penelope,
Here’s a post that you would expect to have various and numerous responses. Now I should click on other categories. For me politics is something I can’t change. Politics speak the same language and that is to promise and once in the position, promises are just hanging in the air. I wonder why people easily believed in impossible promises that Obama gave (now that’s another topic others might hate me for bringing up). Off to your next post!
Jonha
No matter one’s political bent, Sarah Palin is a genuinely interesting figure, and so I thought I should mention ten reasons why I believe she is formidable:
1. She has achieved the near impossible in politics, that zen-like state of being an amiable dunce and an evil genius at the same time. It is always a good idea to keep an eye on that kind of person.
2. She makes all the right people on the left go bonkers. This has great entertainment value, of course, but there is substantive political value as well. Lots of people will follow you around just to watch the resultant show.
3. She makes all the establishmentoids on the right make patronizing noises, while they try to damn her with faint praise, working hard not to grimace as they do.
4. She has a remarkable sense of timing, and she has shown up the experts with it repeatedly. She does something, like resign her governorship, her political future gets pronounced le dead, as the French say, and yet it turns out she knows what she is doing, and bunch of other people don’t.
5. She has a gift for really effective sound bytes. Now that the good ship U.S.S. Obamacare is providing the foundation for a new coral reef, we should recall that the first big hole in the side of that thing was Sarah Palin’s torpedo line “death panels.”
6. She clearly has an adroit mastery of the new media. She can make the national news with an understated Facebook post, and she looks like she is going to keep that up.
7. She resigned the governorship, but then stayed in Alaska. This represents a clear failure to recognize that all really important people live in northern Virginia and western Maryland — and this is the kind of failure that almost 300 million people who don’t live there can kind of appreciate.
8. She has a high sense of humor, all while occupying a place where the slightest mis-step could represent disaster, and will represent disaster if the people covering her have their way. Her “Hi, mom” response to the hand-writing “scandal” a few months ago is a case in point. When Obama pronounces corpsmen as corpsemen, this is taken as a sign of a lofty intellect that cannot be troubled with the pronunciation rules of these mortals, but for any formidable conservative, such a blunder would be terminal. She thinks its funny.
9. She clearly does not care at all that the people who will never like her don’t like her. This is the essential lesson that fully 95% of all modern conservatives of all stripes — political, theological, social, whatever — never learn.
10. She is a genuinely likable human being. In a era when fully half the candidates are droids with perfect hair, and the other half are sleezebuckets, this counts for more than just a bit.
I really enjoyed reading this article and the comments, mostly the article! Now it is November 23, 2010 and Willow Palin has said hurtful things on facebook, defending her Mom. Bristol, tonight on DWTS, made a crude remark about giving her middle finger to haters of her and her Mom. Something is very, very wrong. She should be home instead of her book signing travels. She claims she is about God and then family but her family is being hurt. Her younger kids are being impacted too. Please write more on this these topics.
The fact that two Palin children, who have grown up in the public eye, can feel free to make inappropriate/hateful comments to a national audience, brings up two questions for me: 1) is a person who has apparently been unable to impart better values and more appropriate conduct to her own children qualified to be the leader of the free world, and 2) since those children HAVE spent most, if not all, of their formative years in the public eye (and since the behaviors in question have occurred since their mother has indicated her interest in being a candidate in 2012), is there another purpose to their behavior — perhaps an unspoken message that they DON’T want their mother pursuing a national office? In any case, the thought of Sarah Palin in the White House is upsetting in the extreme!