Editors of Babble.com. Dirt is Good for You: True Stories of Surviving Parenthood. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009. 256 pages.
This book is intended for “urban, hipster” parents, which I’ve concluded is code for “since we pay $2500 a month for a 4th floor 800 square-foot walkup, we think we’re better than people who live in ranch homes and shop at Walmart.” Although the essays are by different authors, the tone is remarkably similar throughout—the unbearable smugness just won’t let up. Imagine the kids from high school who thought they were the coolest because they claimed to like bands that no one else had ever heard of. Okay, now imagine those kids raising kids, and telling you that since what they do goes “against the grain,” it’s totally hip. Annoying doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Generically, each essay says about the same thing: I’m a bad parent because I do x, but I’m not really a bad parent because it’s actually a good idea to breast-feed a 17-month old, demand a present from your husband just for giving birth, not use a baby monitor, warm your sons clothes in the dryer before they get dressed in the morning; not buy your kids toys; give your kid a pacifier; despise other new moms; yell at your kids; overspend on birthday parties; ad nauseum. I’m pretty sure every parent has had a moment that wouldn’t land them on the cover of Parenting magazine; it’s just that most of us don’t turn these mis-steps into virtues.
There’s an underlying tone of, “Wow, how cool, we are the first people to ever raise kids!” which is completely nonsensical, given that homo sapiens goes back about 200,000 years, and “urban” life at least 10,000. Being the first generation of parents who can pause and rewind live TV doesn’t make you any more special than being the first parents to use draft animals or gas lamps. Get back to me when you’re really pioneering by raising kids in zero-g or on the moon.
I actually like one of the nearly-fifty essays in the book: Madeline Holler’s reflections on being the parent of a “below average” child, which breaks through the usual hipster self-defense to offer the reader some of her vulnerability and uncertainty. The collection could have used more of that, and less of the approach Steven Johnson uses in “Street Walkers,” in which he gushes about how “children strengthen the connective tissue of urban streets” in ways that are doubtless inconceivable to parents doomed to live in rural, small town, or suburban America. News flash: people always talk more to people with children, probably because they think they’ve got something in common with them and they’re less likely to try to mug them. Walking around with a child is a marker saying that at least one person finds you tolerable enough to have sex with, and trustworthy enough to take care of his/her offspring. This isn’t an urban phenomenon.
Another writer concludes that it’s okay to take your kids to McDonald’s because the frou-frou coffee houses she went to before she had kids aren’t baby-friendly. That’s the problem with the entire collection right there: it’s based on extremes, with no middle ground. You either go to some sustainable, fair trade art gallery/independent coffee house, or you get in line for a Happy Meal. In fact, there are plenty of small restaurants who welcome children because they’re mom and pop places…and mom and pop usually have some empathy for other moms and pops, particularly those who are regular customers and good tippers. The whole essay is based on a flawed premise that the writer can’t see because she’s too busy trying to be unconventional.
In other words, this is a pretty bad book, at least by the standards of this non-Manhattanite parent. Outside of Holler, the writers just don’t take enough risks: they are too pre-occupied with trying to be cool. And if there’s one thing that kills memoirish writing for me, it’s an author who always has to be the hero of the piece. If you are writing about yourself, you can’t be the coolest person in the essay; it just rings false, like the entire piece is an exercise in self-gratification.
I honestly don’t like giving negative reviews, but this book was so awful that I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone buy it. Maybe you have to be an urban hipster to get it, but I don’t.