Mom
Wisdom from Mom Bloggers
Mom bloggers are awesome: they can be punchy, smart, original, honest, controversial, insanely inspiring, and fall-off-your-chair funny. Since we can't get enough of them, we are asking the Top 50 Mom Bloggers a special question a month, every month, for 2011. This month, we asked each mom to give us a shout-out to her other half. Read on to find out what they love most about the special men in their lives - and check back next month, when they tell us which bloggers are their favorites!
A shout-out for your other half:
Why are you lucky to have him?
12 of 33
Catherine
Connors
Her Bad Mother
Catherine’s Rankings
- #2 Best Written
- #4 Most Controversial
- #10 The Funniest
- #8 2010 Top 50
- #9 2009 Top 50
Like this advice?
I don’t write much about my husband, nor about our marriage. I don’t, I feel, have enough propriety over those stories to assert myself as their narrator. Those stories are not mine to share. They are his stories – or, in the case of our marriage, our stories. So it is that you rarely read anything substantive about my husband.
Which is a shame, because you would like him, you really would. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man: one of those souls who is just genuinely good, genuinely concerned about the world around him and everyone in it, who is just naturally, effortlessly generous and kind, and not in the cloying manner of someone who wants recognition or a place in the kingdom of God for their efforts but in the straightforward and authentic manner of someone who knows that we all just have to be good to one another if we’re going to get along. And he loves animals and children, all of them, except maybe the really unpleasant ones and the older ones who wear skinny jeans and lurk on street corners (the kids, not the animals) and he always has, even before we had our own. He once got teary-eyed at a performance of Disney on Ice. All of which might make him sound kind of wussy, but he’s not, he’s really not, and that’s the thing, probably the biggest thing, that I love about him: he is at once the kindest and gentlest human being that I know, and the strongest.
Yeah. I kind of love him a lot.
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This is such a nice idea, I love reading mom bloggers writing about marriage and partnership — it’s too bad I’m really kind of put off of reading it because the headline, “a shout out to your other half: why are you lucky to have him?” just makes it so painfully clear right off the bat that we’re talking about STRAIGHT moms. I myself am a woman married to a man; it just makes me kind of viscerally sad to see that institutional norm being codified and reinforced here. Like when you hear someone saying “your husband” or “your wife” to someone when they don’t know anything about their sexuality or life situation. Even if all your chosen bloggers are straight (which, with some of the fantastic blogs by lesbian moms out there, I really don’t know why this is the case), you could still phrase it “why are you lucky to have them?” It’s colloquial but technically correct nowadays. It just makes me sad.
Even sadder is that none of your top bloggers seem to be single parents (I honestly don’t have the heart to read all 50.) Surely to God, some great bloggers are flying solo being mom, dad and everything else
Actually, EEK, you couldn’t say “them” because to do so would be to go against the rules of grammar, namely pronoun-antecedent agreement. If you are talking about ONE other half, you must use a singular pronoun to follow up, so him/her. Babble should’ve said “partner” or left that out altogether.
With that being said, I agree with you in that it’d be nice to see same-sex parents included in this list despite the fact that I myself am heterosexual.