Gutsy, Glamorous
Raise your brat in poverty, without a dad … just like the stars do! Eagan at Boston Herald:
So, unwed mothers Bridget Moynahan and Spice Girl Melanie Brown just won a “Best of 2007” award from Glamour Magazine. Why? “Because they remained thrilled about their pregnancies even after their relationships fell apart.”
That would be Moynahan’s relationship with the Patriot’s Tom Brady and Brown’s former romance with actor Eddie Murphy.
OK, we can understand Bridget’s enthusiasm for the finest genes in the universe. And Murphy was spectacular in “Dreamgirls.” But he insisted on DNA tests to prove he’s the father of his baby girl, and then declared he wants nothing to do with her.
Nonetheless, Melanie and Bridget are 2007’s “Best Gutsy New Moms,” says Glamour, a distinctly influential bible to thousands of middle-class teenage girls. They’re heroes. Role models of proud womanhood.
…
For generations we’ve bemoaned the pathology of teenage single parenting among the poor, particularly inner-city African-Americans. Bill Cosby has just been crisscrossing America decrying fatherlessness (70 percent among black Americans) and pumping his latest book. In a particularly poignant moment with Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” he imagined a young child thinking, “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this.”
Then Cosby said that father hunger “turns into anger” and a plaintive, “Why don’t you care about me?”
Four years ago, Joanna Lipper published her classic book on teenage single mothers in Pittsfield, “Growing Up Fast.” It detailed the horrors - abuse, violence, homelessness, even hunger -that plagued babies of young girls too poor to care for them. A 16-year-old who actually planned a pregnancy with her high school sweetheart told Lipper she thought motherhood “would bring my popularity up because people would be like, ‘Hey, she’s got a baby, and that’s cool.’ ”
Yet “cool” is exactly the message Glamour magazine is sending in its December cover story - a sort of trickle-down “isn’t this swell!” intended for young women with neither the money, maturity, nor the skills of a Bridget Moynahan or a Melanie Brown. Or for that matter the very weird Angelina Jolie, who’s become some sort of motherhood poster girl anyway. A Brad marriage is apparently out of the equation there as well.
Not long ago I interviewed a 36-year-old Dorchester mother whose 18-year-old son was murdered. At one point she said she wished she’d finished school so she could’ve found better work and been able to move from a place she’s scared to live in now. But she can’t. Her boy had no father. She has no husband, no second income. She earns little herself. So she is trapped, and there’s nothing “cool” about it.
Topics: moms and dads
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:47 am on Thursday, November 29, 2007
5 Responses to “Gutsy, Glamorous”
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November 29th, 2007 at 10:15 am
It isn’t only inner-city teenagers who struggle (although their struggle is no doubt harder). In my years at the university, I watched several young women start out dewy-eyed and rosy-cheeked, convinced that getting pregnant was no big deal, they’d just finish college, get a great job, and everything would be all rose petals and baby powder. You couldn’t talk to them, and it was sad to watch the realization slowly dawn on them that from that moment on, life was going to be twice as hard, especially if, as often happened, the father walked away.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
My goodness, Ms. Eagan will be brought to the woodshed for that article.
November 29th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Waddaya wanna bet that these same authors also back every piece of entitlement legislation that barely supports single mothers, every minimum wage law that makes it impossible for small business to hire people because they can’t afford to pay an arbitrarily determined “living wage,” every theory of education that ignores teaching critical thinking skills in favor of socially engineering a baseless “self-esteem,” along with every other feel-good altruistic idea that keeps people dependent and resentful of reality.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I was 47 when I met my father — and my parents had been married 11 years when I came along.
Dan Quayle was right.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Dan Quayle?
Murphy Brown!