Home from Texas. This isn’t an important essay. Just a reaction to something I ran into. There are things I really need to write through today, and this isn’t one of them. Just something that bothered me.
Okay, so when I came back on the plane, I sat next to Emma, an LDS mom going to visit friends in Mapleton – who is a writer. Not published yet, but eager and properly obsessed by the word. In our many hour discussion—which spanned everything from grammar to books to the philosophy of motherhood, to artists’ responsibility, to more personal things. And in the course of it, she told me about a funny blog (still hate the word) – SeriouslySoBlessed. A “parody”.
My reading of blogs is fairly limited. I do it to maintain connection with family, mostly – my girls, my son and his wife. They share perspectives and philosophy and news, along with their art. And friends who are sisters to me—Rachel and Ginger, along with extended family. I know my sister-in-law much better now for reading about her life. And I can keep track of my sibs when they write, getting news about what’s shakin’ with them. It’s funny—I almost learn more about all these dear ones by noticing what details they chronicle and the words they choose than by reading the narrative.
I read outside of that circle only rarely. I love wit. I really do. Ain’t got much of my own, but there you are. That’s what drew me to Borrowed Light, wit and perspective.. And Pioneer Woman, I read her too because she challenges me, dang her.
But there’s a lot of other stuff out there. Once in a while, I come across something interesting: a bright mind. Really interesting information. A craftsperson. And sometimes, parody.
The thing about parody is that it is classier than mockery. Harder to do. More intelligent. You don’t have to be mean spirited to do it; in fact, I could argue that your mind has to be clearer than that to do it well. And it’s best when we are sending up ourselves.
Many decades ago, when I was a Freshman at BYU, they had this pillow concert (talk about a parody of itself – all those girls showing up in the regulation no-slacks on campus, sitting on the ballroom floor- thus the “pillow” thing – in A-line skirts – modesty on wheels. Uh-huh). The singer was some one-hit-wonder, female hippy singer person. (At BYU?) And I went, because it was an event, and this singer was just coming off of her pan-flashing fame. Maybe she was opening for somebody real, I don’t know.
Anyway, she sat there on her stool, up there on the stage, and opened her act with this nasty little mock-fest aimed at the Mormons. Somebody had met her at the airport and driven her through Salt Lake City, showing her the sites. And she said, “I saw a big building, and I said, ‘Who owns that?’ [This is a question I often ask when I drive through cities]. And they said, ‘Oh, we do. The Mormons.’ And then I saw another big building, and I said, ‘Who owns that?’ And they said, ‘Yeah – we own that one too.’ And I just have to ask – why does a church need so many big buildings?????”
And she went on like that. I don’t remember the rest of what she said exactly, just that it was pretty mean. And here was the nicey-nicey BYU audience, politely laughing. HA-Ha-Ha. And at one point, they actually clapped. Again, I don’t remember the exact comment, just that it was unbelievably rude and insensitive (and yes, I can laugh at myself, thank you – this was beyond that). It made me want to go up there a slap her a good one across her white-lipsticked little mouth and tear up the check BYU was about to hand her. Then – clapping.
I looked around at the idiots sitting all around me in their neat goody-goody BYU slacks and skirts: there they were, yucking it up like a bunch of mindless idiots. Like they would have been laughing if somebody was blowing on the U of U. I wanted to stand up and yell, “Don’t you GET it, you morons? She’s sitting there LAUGHING at YOU!!!”
People who are genuinely funny are like Brian Regan who, Bill Cosby-like, is human, and whose humor has more to do with the dumb things we all run into, the dumb things we all do—sharing our humanity. But mocking other people because you are so much cooler and more intelligent than they are? Not so funny.
So I went to this site. And I looked it over. I have no idea who writes it; the “blogger” is a made-up person and is evidently the quintessential Mormon Mommy Blogger. It’s supposed to be parody. It feels like mockery. And when you read the comments, you feel two kinds of things: you feel people there who do not realize that they, themselves, are the butt of this thing, and then there are people who are jostling to get back there behind the mocking finger, themselves. It’s weird.
I didn’t read much. I read one article that was a list of women who were vying for some little ticky “make-over” by telling their tragic stories, all introduced by this valley-girl send up of Mormon-mommy speak. And as I read the stories, just a few out of evidently lots and lots of entries, I began to feel sick to my stomach. Like, here was a woman who had lost two babies in two years. That just stopped me in my tracks. Were these stories for real? And why in the name of Heaven would you tell such a personal and terrible thing in a venue like this? Where people come to mock. Why? I skimmed through the rest of them in what was really a growing horror. And then I went away. Nearly in tears.
I may be doing the writer of this thing a wrong, coming to conclusions before I do enough reading. If that’s the case, I apologize. But after that first bit, I didn’t want to read any more. And call me no fun, but I know a lot of young mothers, and some of them write blogs I don’t enjoy that much – stuff you’d enjoy if you knew the kids, or if you had kids like that. Or if you really knew each other; if you were family. These are young women trying to survive young children, catching little moments of joy or personal satisfaction, making sense of their lives by writing down the details, connecting with other women who are staying home to raise children—one of the most noble things any human being can do on the face of the planet. They aren’t professional writers. They are professional mothers. And I’m not sure that making fun of them isn’t a cheap shot of the lowest caliber.
If I were one of them, and I was making fun of myself, that’s one thing. But to come in from the side, hiding behind a fictional character—underlining only shallowness of observation, girlish language, the transparently desperate gratitude of a beleaguered and growing faith—while ignoring the courage, the dedication, the effort behind it all? I can’t respect what this person is doing. And I’m not amused by it.
There is humor. And there is mercy. Making people laugh at themselves when they don’t know they are doing it – it’s like teasing one of the special kids at school, so that everybody around laughs at the person laughing at himself. I don’t know why this hit me so hard, or made me feel so sick. But it did.
