My problem with Dooce

My sister asked me why I have "mixed feelings" about Dooce. In case you've been living under a rock in a cave on Mars (or you don't have kids), Dooce is Heather Armstrong. She writes a blog (let's face it, it's THE blog) about motherhood. When she had her first baby 4-5 years ago, it knocked her on her ass so hard that she did time in a mental hospital. For that, I respect (and can relate to) her. She recently published a book about her experience and went on Oprah. Good for her. (Honestly, I am not being sarcastic there.) She is weeks away from having her second baby.

Here is the exact e-mail I sent my sister:

Hmmm. I don't know. I mean, I like her; I totally think we would be friends in real life. I'm just jealous. It's very low and base and immature, but I'm jealous because she's so freakin' skinny and so freakin' rich. And she's rich from doing exactly what I do too, except I have to work. I've made six dollars from my blog since last August. When I first started reading her blog [about a year after I had Sascha], I went back to the pregnancy posts and was (A) delighted to find that someone else felt exactly how I did, and (B) horrified that she had written almost word for word what I did, in several posts, and she is freaking loaded from those words. It's just depressing.

[a sidenote: I have put off writing this post because I intended to link her posts next to mine for a side-by-side comparison, I've just been too lazy to go through them.]

I have nothing against her personally, she's very cool and smart. And funny. I'm really REALLY interested in how she feels about the second baby considering her breakdown with the first, which (although I don't read her all the time) I haven't seen. A lot of her posts are hard to relate to because of her money-- look how we decorated, look what we bought, we took a family vacation, etc. It's turning into GOOP-- are you familiar with that website? It's Gwenyth Paltrow's site all about how fabulous her life is, basically. And I'm fully aware that my mixed feelings stem from jealousy, so I know this is a problem with me, not her.

When she has a second kid, she's not going to have to go back to work-- to teach, no less, not get to slump behind a cubicle-- when her kid is still waking up 3x a night. She won't have to recover from surgery. She will be able to order groceries online and have them delivered. She will snap back to her stick-figure body in about ten minutes. She can afford a professional doula to help, if she wanted to. She's not getting one that I'm aware of, I'm just saying that these are all things that would help me tremendously in the process of having a baby.

In short, she writes a blog about how motherhood is hard, and it's difficult to relate to her now because her money makes things much less hard. Again, not just the money, but having my body do what it did (betray me with the breastfeeding, blow up for three years) was really, really hard for me psychologically. Seeing that come easy to someone else, well, that's hard.

I know I'm verbally digging myself into an ugly, selfish hole that's making me sound like a horrible person, but meh-- I can tell you these things. [and now I've just told the rest of the world, heh.] When I think about my first 6-8 months with Sascha, I could make myself cry-- easily-- remembering how bad it was. Looking forward to that again, as much as I'd like a second child, is.... well, I'm in therapy for it. There are aspects that are unavoidable, like the c-section and the loss of sleep, but a lot of the other stuff would be much easier if I was bringing home $400K a year for doing something I'm already doing. You know? I could pay someone to help with the regular workings of life-- errand running, housecleaning, etc.-- while I focus on trying to heal, stay awake, and get my kid to breastfeed. And then focus on crying over my crap ability to do any of those things. Lather, rinse, repeat...

There you go. There it is. Sorry, Heather. I do like you, promise.