Pile-up in Aisle 3: What's With the Mom-on-Mom Violence?

When parenting commentary generates even a small firestorm of controversy -- which is to say, it involved an action, decision or opinion -- it can yield a backdraft of such explosive enormity as to consume the contributor completely.

Two articles I came across the past few days took the peanut gallery reaction to a disturbing level. In the January issue of O, responses to an article about the Columbine High School shootings, written by the mother of Dylan Klebold, Susan Klebold -- a woman who, unlike Ayelet Waldman, can confidently say the entire world thinks she's a bad mother -- were so voluminous as to require an accompanying graphic with stacks of envelopes representing which viewpoint dominated. (For the record, 50 percent "were deeply touched by her words and couldn't imagine dealing with her pain," while 15 percent "said that at first they had faulted the parents, but now they've changed their minds.")

On the New York Times' Motherlode blog, Sara Brown's article on her husband David's estrangement from his son with another woman similarly yielded comments of such proscriptive vitriol that they prompted a follow-up from both the author and her husband. Those clarifications certainly cast an entirely different light on the subject (to be sure, kicking the piece off with "an-illegitimate-son" in the URL was probably not a good move on the editor's part), but you would be mistaken to call them a simple response. Nearly three hundred parents screamed "Get Me Rewrite!" on another woman's life -- and mom, with dad as co-writer for ballast, complied.

Prefacing Brown's addendum in Motherlode with understandable timidity, editor Lisa Belkin waxed philosophical, couching her words in the DMZ of "we":

It's possible the deluge of handy how-to tips on parenting has led to a confusion with the two modes of discourse. Advice on basic mom stuff -- say, the aforementioned sore nipples -- welcomes refinement, additions, disagreements on, say, the utility of cabbage. There may be a period of catch-up in which we have to remember that, when a mother is unburdening her breast, flinging cabbage is not the order of the day.

But most importantly, Lottery-style gang-ups on our fellow females are a particularly unwise diversion. As we observe health care legislation that will profoundly affect all women's health care, with a president who years ago raised the issue of the rising cost of child care more than once, the prospects are hardly a lock. The august members of Congress have had no compunction about using women's rights as a bargaining chip, throwing the issues of abortion, maternity care and maternity leave, well-child care, and the overall rights of women in the health insurance market on the table again and again.

How about we direct some of this heated debate at them?