Erma Bombeck's What's a Nice Girl Like Me Doing in a Dump Like This? has it's funny moments, but is most of the time downright depressing. As a young, single man, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I'm NOT the intended audience for this piece. I can't relate to the woes of married life, but I'm convinced after reading this that I should scratch "marriage" off of my "to-do" list.
Seriously, are all married women THIS miserable?! Unappreciated, addicted to knitting, looking for any excuse that will stop them from raising their children?! Someone needs to tell this woman to quit her bitching. To hell if I'm ever going to be stuck with a wife who says that "kids are rotten. They really are."
I didn't dislike everything about WANGLMDIADLT. The addicition to knitting, which spiraled into an addiction to water painting was funny. And it's in moments like that where her writing is so outrageous that I like the article. No one gets addicted to knitting, but it was a funny way to talk about how a mom would escape from her hated reality.
Ok, so I'm not the intended audience for this piece. I just don't care to hear yet ANOTHER woman to talk about how she doesn't have a beach body, doesn't like her husband, and gets pissed off at the responsibilities of motherhood. C'mon lady, you shouldn't have gotten married and pregnant in the first place.
Is married life perfect? Of course not. Nor can any woman live up to the standards of 50's housewife Harriet from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. But this piece is just so depressing and dark it makes me feel guilty for ever being born. And this woman thinks her children's schools had too many snow cancellations? Listen lady, I lived in northern Virginia in '95, back when we were getting three feet of snow and school was cancelled for whole weeks at a time. Shut up. My mom wasn't getting pissed off at us because we rushed to play in the snow.
I didn't come from a perfect family. My parent's got divorced. And looking back on life, I wish there were times when I was younger that I would've thanked my mother more often for all the things she did for me and my brothers. BUT WE WERE KIDS! We're supposed to be selfish. Thats who we are! Childhood selfishness and ignorance does not make us "rotten".
Basically, Bombeck is just way too negative. I know that if I was a mother, I could relate to a heck of a lot more to what she is saying than I could ever do now. But referring to her children as "rotten" and complaining non-stop about her husband? This woman should give up knitting and water colors and just stick to Jack Daniels. Life ain't perfect...something Bombeck should've known before she got married
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I think you're taking this the wrong way. This seems to me like more of a "b----ing session". And you were definitely not the intended audience. Just imagine if you were told that you only had one vocational option. Wouldn't that be kind of limiting? Wouldn't you occassionally be frustrated?
ReplyDeleteYou are right when you say that not all housewives are this unhappy, but not all women were made to be just housewives either, but this is what Bombeck's era expected. Ours does not.