Lord, I’ve upset the Catholics. Okay, just one Catholic, writing for AltCatholicah.com, in a post that was picked up by pop culture website Acculturated. Go read it, I’ll wait.
Here’s the author’s beef with me – when Leigh Fitzpatrick Snead reads a mom blog, she expects a portrayal of “healthy family life.” Discovering that there is a mom blogger out there who purposely put the carriage before marriage and had a child outside of wedlock (that’s me) exploded all of her “preconceived notions about mommy blogs.”
“I always assumed the writers were married to their children’s father,” she writes.
Surprise!
Leigh, you characterize yourself as a would-be mom blogger. Your stuff’s pretty good and you should totally do it. But first, go to a blogging conference. You’ll meet moms who are married, unmarried, gay, straight, single by choice, single not by choice and more. (You’ll even meet some dads.)
Some parent bloggers portray what you might consider healthy family life (hey, look how perfect I am!), and others share openly and honestly about isolation, divorce, depression, addiction and self-doubt. Hot tip: those warts-and-all blogs tend to be the most interesting reads–and the most popular.
But I didn’t create Carriage Before Marriage to start controversy. I’ve never had an agenda or set out to convert others to my radical way of life. I’m documenting a special time—the whirlwind my partner and I set in motion when we fell in love, decided to have a baby, got engaged, started planning our wedding, and then tried like hell to have another baby before I ran out of time.
Leigh is not a fan of this order of events.
She tells us that before she had her kids, she was married in the capital-C Church, which is a sacrament.
Sure, a religious wedding can be beautiful and sacred, but I bristle at the implication that other marriages are not. I also don’t think God minds if you get hitched at the beach.
There’s more.
“Carriage before Marriage is not just a blog about becoming pregnant before getting married and then rushing to the altar. It is about deliberate (as in fertility-treatment deliberate) pregnancy.”
I’m not sure why the author deems accidental pregnancy better than planned pregnancy. Personally, I’m a fan of family planning and carrying out one’s intentions deliberately.
It seems to be my IVF journey that hit a nerve. Leigh suffered infertility, ultimately adopting, and credits her strong marriage to making it through. I get it and I sympathize. Infertility is awful and a supportive partner is good to have. The author believes this partner must be a husband. I’m in no way anti-marriage (we set a date!) but I think it’s possible to have a loving, committed, supportive partner outside of marriage, and I speak from experience.
Reading Leigh’s article, I kept wondering, why should a woman in a strong marriage feel threatened by me putting the carriage before the marriage? I still don’t know.
“The blog’s title flaunts unwed motherhood, almost in a celebratory way,” Leigh writes.
It’s true, I am celebrating. I’m celebrating that I finally met my life partner. I’m celebrating that we were able to have a wonderful child together. I’m celebrating that blogging was invented and I have a place besides my diary to work it all out.
To the writer and would-be mom blogger whom I offended, I highly recommend it.
Ha! I love it that you offended that crazy bitch. LOVE IT. I personally am wrecking many straight people’s highly-vulnerable marriages right now by being married to another woman. (gasp!) Plus, we have two children together. (gasp!) We were fortunate not to need any special fertility help, despite my advanced maternal age (gasp!). We are very grateful for that; we know we dodged a bullet on that one. However… We did need to go outside of our marriage to get some of the necessary biological material we were missing (gasp!), which was sperm. We had no sperm. We asked someone we knew who had extra. It all worked out. (He and his husband are living in sin, raising their daughters, and wrecking marriages in the Silicon Valley.)
I just want to go on record that I do not feel corrupted by you in the slightest. Quite the contrary. Keep it up, sin sister!
Hey lady, I think you may be higher up on the moral totem pole than I am because you are capital M Married. I’m the one living in sin! Love your story.
Hey lady–I didn’t read your blog post before I commented on HERS, but we ended up with a lot of the same ideas anyway. I hope she responds to me!
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I might send her my link, get a dialogue going. Or worst idea ever?
Loved your comment on her post, Steph. You is good people.
Leslie recently posted..Land of the free, home of the brave…
This is as classy and professional a response to unnecessary and misguided criticism that I’ve ever read. Very well done.
Andy G. recently posted..And They Shall Beat Their Hammers Into Spatulas
I was attempting classy because I didn’t find the author malicious. She was expressing her opinion, I just found her opinion surprisingly sheltered and thought I’d try to open it up. She’s still young.
Those who judge don’t matter. Those who matter don’t judge!
I’m going to quote you! Thanks.
HOLY MOLY! I agree with ^^Andy G. Nice response. Love your balls.
They’re hanging low today, Kelley 🙂
Religious fundamentalists do have strong opinions about family. And they have a right to them. But controversy like this is great for opening up discussion and at the very least, I hope this turns into a discussion in which at least a few individuals with strong church-based belief systems agree to live and let live, rather than live and judge.
To me, the criticisms of your lifestyle are just a symptom of a more serious problem, which is the refusal to accept and appreciate all the different types of people who make up our glorious country and society. Why can’t she say, “That’s not what works for my family, but here’s what does and here’s what I love about the way *I* live.” We really do need all kinds to make this world go around, and it’s not right for any group or individual to say that another is wrong or bad for not following along or agreeing. It saddens me to see that happen.
I know – I’ve never understood my way or the highway thinking. What works for one family does not need to be foisted upon all other families.
You are fearless and so open, Amy. Keep going and keep that dialogue moving. Thanks for showing tolerance and understanding without any unnecessary apologies.
Thanks Fly!
I love how you’ve responded to Leigh’s article.
I guess I’ll be offending her too. We’re not married, our children were planned, and we’re in a loving relationship that has withstood some very hard times. Although we’re engaged, we’re not planning a wedding anytime soon. I’d rather spend the money on our kids.
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Sue, that’s fantastic! Let’s be offensive together. Yeah, I totally feel guilty about spending $ on the wedding too but I figure we are making memories (the pictures will be damn cute w/Viv as flower girl) and also making the grandparents very happy. But if we never got married, it wouldn’t make a difference. Love is love.
I am Catholic too, and the Jesus I know and love…you know, the guy who ate with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors?…well he loves us all the same, regardless of our choices or sins or “lifestyle.” Jesus specifically said that we are supposed to LOVE THY NEIGHBOR…it’s His greatest commandment. So Leigh? Maybe instead of judging another blogger like Amy, you should spend a little more time getting acquainted with your bible.
Leslie recently posted..Land of the free, home of the brave…
So great to get your perspective! I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about when it comes to Catholicism, but judging in the name of Jesus did not sound very Jesus like.
There is the impression here that Leigh (and by extension all Catholics or “religious fundamentalists”) was judgmental in her Altcatholicah post. In reading Leigh’s post, however, I’m at a loss to see how she’s judgmental – unless one considers the mere act of engaging in reasoned debate to be mean-spirited and judgmental. For most of her post, Leigh reflects on her own situation and how marriage was integral to the way in which she weathered her struggles with infertility. To be sure, she claimed that Amy “failed her readers.” But this was an actual argument – not simply an ad hominem assertion against Amy personally – that the permanent monogamous commitment embodied in marriage is optimal for weathering such storms successfully. Amy’s fiancé may be a great guy and their relationship may be amazingly solid. Sadly, some marriages aren’t so much. But, empirical evidence shows that on the whole, departing from the traditional order of love-marriage-baby carriage harms women and their children. That’s not judgmental. That’s reality.
Elizabeth, that’s right – Leigh was coming from a place of personal experience. Does that give her (or anyone) the right to assume that what worked best for her family is best for all families?
Amy, I think you handled it very well. Plus, I think you should give Leigh a high five: controversy = traffic. Woohoo!
I think I might be irrationally offended by her article. I’ve never read either of these websites and came to this through facebook. Leigh isn’t crazy – or a bitch – she’s just not able to imagine what life is like for those of us who didn’t get the perfect outcome. I’m not sure what she would say if I explained my life situation to her but I feel like she would be thinking there’s clearly something wrong with me since I didn’t find the perfect man, at the perfect fertility time, and, therefore, I should….what? Be miserable until I die? I’m not sure where to go with that.
I’m glad you found my blog – sounds like we have some things in common. You bring up a good point–I think Leigh’s not at all mean-spirited, just naive. Having been fortunate to meet her husband young, she has no idea what it’s like when that doesn’t happen. We do.
Amy, nice that you offered to her the option of seeing this reply although, my experience says that folks like that have a habit of posting but yet never responding to any comments like you have here. For me it makes a difference in how seriously I take the author, if they just want to firehose content out there or do they really want a discussion.
@Elizabeth…I am curious where one might find some of that evidence of which you speak.
I’ve never known Leigh to back away from a reasoned discussion, but I’m not sure what has happened offline over the last week. If Amy is interested in exploring the issue with her, I’m happy to email her and attempt to facilitate. This is a sensitive topic, and I’m still a little upset about it, though.
It’s tough to reconcile the viewpoints being presented here, but I applaud you Amy for not completely writing Leigh off as a religious nut job. Your choice of image for this post (the cross-eyed Nun?) and casual denunciations of her as “sheltered”, “naive” and “young” were a little passive aggressive though. (It occurred to me that someone who still follows Kate Moss’ career and loves eye cream is probably not *that* young … possibly closer to your vintage?)
Leigh defends marriage from a Christian perspective as God’s safety net to the trials of life, including the agony of infertility. Looking at your arguments more broadly, they seem to boil down to is differing ideas on the importance of marriage to relationships and society at large
As your readers have underscored, we live in an age where personal choice is sacrosanct. No one has the right to judge another person’s decisions. Love is seen as the noblest human emotion and a human right that trumps all others – love IS love. The beginning and end of the story.
To me, that seems as Pollyannaish as the image that you subtly try to paint of Leigh. Is marriage just a kitsch social convention (as kitsch as the font you use for your blog letterhead) or does it serve some greater purpose?
Does our ‘right’ to love anyway-we-want-it supersede the rights of our children to the stability and safety net of marriage? An article in the NYTimes from February on the rising rates of children born out of wedlock in America put it this way: “Researchers have consistently shown that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling in to poverty, failing in school, or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The importance of marriage in society is an extremely complicated issue. There are clearly unmarried parents out there who are doing a heroic and exemplary job.
The simple point I am trying to make is let’s not trivialize marriage as something arbitrary and meaningless when our decisions (and I’m talking about the human family at large – not you personally) do carry consequences for others.
Hi Perspective,
First of all, all those passive aggressive adjectives I used were in the comments section, during back and forth debate. I appreciate your thorough reading but I never set out to call Leigh names. My point about her youth was less about chronological age and more that she married young and therefore never experienced what many other women go through – years of dating the wrong people, searching eagerly for the right one, and eventually banging up against their own biological clocks as I did. I’m suggesting that Leigh can’t imagine making the choice that I did, to postpone marriage, because she can’t imagine what 20 years of dating does to one’s perspective.
The NY Times article and others like it are unfortunately talking about lower income women without a lot of opportunities or options. Women who became accidentally pregnant at a young age, or gambled with pregnancy hoping for a commitment from guys who were not going to step up. Some of these are sad cases but they have nothing to do with my life. It’s actually pretty insulting for two committed, united, cohabitating partners to be told that their child is going to fall into poverty because they’re not married.
I made an informed, deliberate choice to lead my life in a way that worked for me and my partner. Nobody has been hurt by my choices. Leigh is the one who lashed out by choosing me to make an example of.
I don’t trivialize marriage. I am an ally to the gay men and women who desperately want to marry their loved ones and can’t. Would Leigh stand alongside them and support their right to marry? I’d love to know.
Amy