Oct 28, 2011

Karma, baby!!

There is no escaping it, not for any of us.

I hope you've read my post on Feminism. It mentioned Madonna's influence on what an entire generation of near sighted, admittedly self-medicated women decided to call "liberation".  Where all you ever had to think about was yourself and what you felt like at that very moment.  You were worth it.......etc. Not to look at it as a systematic destabilization of the world as we knew it, but as blazing new paths into the world of working, and leaving your children with, well, your mother.  Or someone.  Someone you would pay to watch your children so you could get a job and make some money.

Shortsightedness is the first thing you give up when you become a parent.  Also, selfishness, sleep and gray areas, but I'm wandering again.  These things will be stolen from you in the night when you sleep.  You don't even realize they are gone until you start to throttle someone who doesn't sterilize the pacifier/bottle/toy properly before they give it to your newborn baby.  And it only gets worse from there.

I, being just a little younger than Madonna, was over her after I tuned into her HBO Special for her Blonde Ambition tour. I had just become a mother, and found myself, for the first time, on the side of the "parents" instead of the "children".  It was horrible, but it was also one of the necessary steps into parenthood.

Even though I only had an infant, I could not abide having him in the same room where an American woman would subject her viewers to simulated ( I think it was simulated) masturbation, let alone accept the fact that I would pay to see it. Frankly, I simply didn't feel that I had ever done anything to deserve being treated in such a way. To take that thought just a bit further, I was hard pressed to imagine what could have happened to Madonna in her life that would make her have to stoop to such levels. I knew her mother was dead, but still wondered what kind of family would be able to brazen this kind of thing out. It cannot be denied: no matter what they had or had not done within their family, it didn't look good.  I pitied them. I pity them still.

Consequently, it was also the end of my HBO subscription. I've never looked back. I don't spend a lot of time doing that. It's kind of a rule of mine.

I couldn't help but share this, which caught my eye today:

Now, I can vividly remember learning that Madonna was pregnant. I was standing in Trenton Missouri's Hy-Vee and saw it on a magazine cover. I immediately laughed out loud. The lady in front of me, a stranger, looked around to see what had caught my eye and we had the funniest conversation about how poor Madonna was probably frantically trying to buy up copies of books, magazines, CD's, you name it, in preparation for becoming a mother. "How would you explain that??!!" we howled. The clerk chimed in that there was no way she would ever get it all back.  

Obviously, that was true.  What she did instead was try to isolate her children from the world.

When I think of her these days, I wonder if, like all parents, she thinks far enough down the road to wonder at what kind of positions her own children will put her in?  How much responsibility does she take for the world they live in?  I pity her.  I pity them.  The circle is complete, but circles never end.