Runaway Mom

Remember the Tiger Mom? A stern disciplinarian, a demanding perfectionist, Amy Chua spent an ungodly amount of time doing everything she could to ensure that her girls would be and do their best.

Remember the reaction to the Tiger Mom? American mothers and their defenders denounced the Tiger Mom for not allowing her daughters to have enough fun.

You would have thought that piano lessons were an exotic Oriental torture, a new form of child abuse invented by an authoritarian culture.

As Tiger Mom’s daughter was playing the piano in Carnegie, righteous Americans were horrified that the girl had learned the value of hard work and discipline.

Clearly, Tiger Mom hit an exposed nerve. Faced with a different culture that held different values and that brought up children differently, Americans reacted defensively. They were not going to abandon their own self-esteemist parenting because some Confucian in New Haven was raising her children differently.

As was clear from the debate, Americans do understand that their children are falling behind their peers in East Asian countries. For now they have chosen to respond by defending the transcendent virtue of the American way of education.

Of course, the picture of American mothering is not entirely as easy going and laissez-faire as the debate over the Tiger Mom would have you believe.

Before the Tiger Mom there was the Helicopter Mom. As you know, this term of derision was invented to cast aspersions on mothers who were actively involved in their children’s lives.

The New York version of the Helicopter Mom has placed her children in a private school whose homework requirements often surpass what the Tiger Mom demands. Just like the Tiger Mom, the Helicopter Mom hovers with vigilance over her children because she distrusts the messages and the values that the culture is transmitting to them.

Both the Tiger Mom and the Helicopter Mom received a good measure of scorn and contempt.

But what about the Runaway Mom? I am referring to the case of Rahna Rieko Rizzuto, a woman who abandoned her children, aged 3 and 5, to go to Japan for several months to interview survivors of the atomic bomb. Link here.

As it happens, most people do not approve of Runaway Mom. Abandoning your children does not sit well with most normal human beings. Especially when done by a mother.

Yet, feminists like Anna North at Jezebel have seized on Rizzuto’s unhappy experience to advance their cause. You see, they are unhappy that society is casting aspersions on Rizzuto, even stigmatizing her.

North, and, I suspect, other feminists, never miss an opportunity to attack basic human values. Anything to promote their ideology.

So, while the world wants to stigmatize the Tiger Mom and to ridicule the Helicopter Mom, feminism wants to destigmatize the Runaway Mom.

Seen through the feminist lens, there is no fundamental difference between mothers and fathers, or men and women. Somehow one imagines that little children do know the difference. Rizzuto’s children are brave, but they feel abandoned. They might know that she has left them to pursue a project that could, after all, be done by an awful lot of other people. And that would have been done better by someone who spoke Japanese. Rizzuto did not.

If marriage is a patriarchal plot and if motherhood is nothing but a social construct designed to prevent women from fulfilling their true human potential, then Runaway Mom must be something of a feminist heroine. She is, after all, putting her career ahead of her family.

For feminism this seems to be yet another lifestyle choice. For non-feminists it feels like pure self-indulgence.

Rizzuto defends herself on the grounds that her husband encouraged her to go to Japan. As Rizzuto tells the story, when she, living in Brooklyn, was offered the opportunity to spend a few months in Japan, her husband encouraged her to go, even insisted that she go.

One needs to say it clearly, because the thought does not seem to make its way into Rizzuto’s consciousness, but she is responsible for her actions, regardless of what her husband said.

Apparently, her husband was also a feminist, and had bought into feminist gender bending. Neither was sufficiently aware of what happens in the real world when a woman abandons home and hearth and children.

If you don’t mind a little moral philosophy, the fact that two or more people agree than an action is right and good does not make it right and good.

Values do not just dissipate into the ether because a couple of people have chosen to ignore them. Values have a life of their own, and they do not much care whether your advanced consciousness believes that it is no longer bound by them.

We have all heard, too often, of couples who decided that it is good to have extramarital affairs, of various sizes and shapes, only to discover, often too late, that said actions provoke a flood of negative emotions that they cannot control. These negative emotions often end up destroying their relationship.

However you want to explain their existence, these negative emotions do not care that both members of the couple, sentient adults as they are, agreed to do this, that, and the other thing, with this one, that one, and the other one.

As for Rizzuto‘s marriage, it survived exactly one month of her sojourn. Agreements and encouragement and insistence made no difference.

The marriage floundered on the shoals of a new, therapy induced, value system. In that system, right and wrong are bogus; responsibility and duty are ploys designed to keep women in their place. The only thing that really matters is how badly you want something.

You may not believe it, but that is what Rizzuto says. When it comes times to rationalize her actions, she claims that she never wanted to have children anyway, and besides, the said children are no longer inside her, so she, as an independent, liberated woman can do as she pleases.

She did not want to have children, but her husband did want them. She just went along for the ride. As soon as they passed through her birth canal, her responsibility ended.

She can abandon them without concern, because there is no substantive difference between mothers and fathers; the only substantive difference lies in who wanted them more.

You can see that mixing feminist principles with the therapy culture produces a witches brew that causes people to make some very bad decisions.

At no point does Rizzuto ask herself what is best for the children or whether she has any responsibility toward them.

The great thing about ideology is that nothing can possibly disprove it. If you live your life according to feminist ideology and things turn out badly, the fault cannot really be with feminism, and besides, things did not turn out badly.

With an almost Panglossian naivete feminists who make a hash of their lives tend to declare that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

In Rizzuto’s world, and in the value system that Anna North is peddling, she ended up being a better mother.

One might say that considering where she started, it was not too much of a challenge. Yet, her story is being published and disseminated in order to tell women that they can abandon their children as they wish, that there is no moral imperative to being a mother to her children, that a woman can go off to find herself regardless of the effect it has on her marriage or family, and that, none of us should judge her ill for her decisions.

In a way that is the worst part of the story. People will actually believe that following one’s bliss and being an irresponsible parent is going to make you a better parent.

Unfortunately, Rizzuto has now announced to the world that she did not really want her children, and that she had no real compunctions about abandoning them. How do you think that that little piece of information will affect her children as they grow up? And, not to be too judgmental, but what kind of mother announces in public that she never wanted to have her children?