I can't get this article/post/cri d'ceour out of my head.  It's made me sad, and angry, and frustrated, and angry, and confused, and really, really angry.  When I get angry, I write.  If I'm lucky, I don't rant; I only write.

So I'm writing.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the proximate cause of this bolus of emotion.  Ms. Rizzuto is a writer, the author and editor of a number of books, including a finalist for this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards, "Hiroshima in Mourning". In addition, she teaches writing in the MFA program at Goddard College.  Let me state it right here:  Ms. Rizzuto is more of a writer than I am.  I've been published, if "Cisco CRS-1 Hardware Installation Guide" counts.  Which, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't.  She's a writer.  I'm not particularly fond of her style, but she's proved herself in that regard in the only way someone calling him or herself a writer can:  she's been published.  She's received a piece of paper with those lovely words, "Pay to the order of" on them.

I write.  Ms. Rizzuto is a writer.  Let nothing I say here take that away.

I also think her article in Salon, "Why I Left My Children", is one long rationalization for excusing herself for, well, leaving her children.  And I think it's the bunk.

(Let's face it:  no one can rationalize like an intellectual.  Me, too!)  

You get married, and sometimes you get divorced.  It happens.  Life brings weird-ass shit your way.  I got no truck with that; none. 

But when you have kids, you have made an agreement; signed a contract, literally, in blood; taken responsibility for raising and caring for another human being.  I'm sorry if you got married too young; I'm sorry if you "grew apart"; I'm sorry if you realized that you married for the wrong reasons; I'm sorry if you decided, too late, that you "really didn't want to have children".  You had them.  As a thinking, reasoning adult, you took on this responsibility.  Frankly, i don't give a fuck if you feel you made it in haste, or whatever your excuse is.  Your children don't deserve to pay the price of your mistake.

In an abusive relationship?  No, of course not.  I'm not a complete jerk, after all.  But read Ms. Rizzuto's piece--she was in a loving relationship, with a partner who urged her to follow her dream.  And his payoff in that was . . . the destruction of his marriage, and raising his kids in a "joint custody" situation.  And chilluns, let me tell you:  whoever tells you that that's okay is lying.  They're lying to themselves, too, I'm sure; otherwise the pain of their decision might be too much to bear.  But they're lying. 

Ms. Rizzuto says:

The question I am always asked is, "How could you leave your children?" How could you be the mother who walks away? As if my children were embedded inside me, even years after birth, and had to be surgically removed?

Don't be absurd.  You know why people ask you that?  Because you made a committment, and then welshed on it.  You gave your solumn word, paid for in blood (your own blood!), and broke it to your children. 

Ms. Rizzuto says:

My problem was not with my children, but with how we think about motherhood.

Horse-feathers.  We call dads who abandon their kids "deadbeat dads".  I would agree that mothers take it on the chin more often in the prejudice department; our society does indeed expect a mother to be the full-time caretaker.  Believe me, when I was the full-time caretaker, I got nothing but funny looks.  But that issue has nothing to do with the main point, Ms. Rizzuto:  you left your children.  At best, it's a side-issue.  At worst, it's mere obstufication.

Ms. Rizzuto says:

My trip to Japan changed me. I went from being uncertain, ambivalent, loving but overwhelmed, to being a damned good mother.

Let's ask your kids about that 15 years from now, shall we?  I suspect, pretty strongly, you might not like the answer you're going to get.  To be a "damned good mother", you have to be there.  You aren't.  Your protestations that you "kept joint custody, and I did not take the house in Hawaii and jump a plane into the sunset," and that your part-time mom status leaves you to "be that 1950s mother we idealize who was waiting in an apron with fresh cookies when we got off the school bus and wasn't too busy for anything we needed until we went to bed" are weak in the face of the overwhelming reality:  you are a part-time parent.  And, trust me on this one, your kids know it very well, and will never forget it.

The middle-class, muddling through as best we can under stagnant wages, a government that either is indifferent to our needs (when Democrats are in charge) or actively hostile (when they're Republicans) , has in the majority of cases turned to the two-earner family solution.  And society hasn't caught up with how to deal with that; no question about it.

But Ms. Rizzuto, the way to deal with that is assuredly not to "find yourself" while in a foreign country and then become a "part-time mother."   Those kids weren't brought in the world to have "part-time" parents; they were brought into the world to have parents.  And no matter how much you rationalize, you ditched part of your responsiblity.  And as someone who was on the receiving end of a not-dissimilar decision, and who would never do the same thing to his own children, I call bull-pucky on your article.  It's a rationalization--a well-written, thoughtful, and at-times interesting one--but a rationalization is all it is.  

"You're only young once" is a common refrain.  And while young, don't you think you deserved to have two full-time parents?  (Hey, I would vote for extra parents, personally!)  Your kids aren't getting that.  Dissemble all you like, but that's the raw truth; time to face it.