A Heaping Pile of WTF?

Take this with a grain of salt.  My advice shouldn't be taken either- these
are my two year olds "drinking wine" right after breakfast.  Yeah.  I'm an
awesome mom.

Motherhood is terrifying.

Pure and simple.

First, your body is completely hijacked.  Your primary task in life is trying to nurture the thing growing inside of you- a thing you can neither see, nor hear, nor touch.  And as soon as you CAN feel the thing, the thing that you are growing to love, it starts hitting you.

A prelude of things to come.

I'm not saying that motherhood is all bad.  It's not.  Motherhood is amazing.

What I'm saying is that we all seek advice in motherhood, because for every single thing a parent can do, there seems to be a "wrong" way.

And thus, the blogosphere came into existence, and practically overnight a niche was carved out- parents, calling out into the darkness.. is there anybody out there who can HELP me?

We've been looking for help since way before blogs.  Dr. Spock, for example, provided women of past generations the confort of knowing a right way and a wrong way.  Lots of schools of thought in child rearing came... and went.

But now?  Now things move so quickly... they change so suddenly.

One minute, we're praising helicopter parenting.

Then un-parenting.

Cry it out.  Don't cry it out.

Co-sleep.  Co-sleeping will kill your babies.

Formula is best.  Screw that, breast is best.

Circumcision is mutilation.  Circumcision's benefits outweigh its risks.

How do you find the right answer, when the right answer seems to change every few hours?

The truth is, you don't.  There is no right answer.  And most women fundamentally know that.  They know that there isn't a black and white, right and wrong, absolute in parenting.

But that doesn't stop them from looking.

And that brings us back to... the internet.

So, the internet.  Full to the brim of helpful people, offering helpful advice.

Websites, dedicated to offering that kind of advice.  And I'm not going to pretend I haven't relied on them from time to time.

I've even gone through remarkable amounts of trouble to get the benefits of some of them.

But seriously...

Seriously.

What is wrong with people?

Today, a friend on facebook posted a link to a column, one might even say an advice article, on Mamapedia.  It was about the need to discipline your kids.

I agree.  Discipline is important.

But I don't care how right somebody might be on one issue, I don't care how dedicated to discipline one mom might be...

Who in their right mind is going to take ANY parenting advice from Nadya Suleman?

Really, Mamapedia?

REALLY???

You're going to offer new moms advice from the OCTOMOM?

It was only a few months ago that she was making the news for locking her kids in a bedroom while she got a brazilian blowout.

Nadya Suleman is quite possibly my generations example of WHAT NOT TO DO when parenting.  From conception onward.

And so, Mamapedia, despite the ridiculous challenges of becoming a member of your website, I feel the need to sever ties with you forever.

You are hurting new, terrified parents.  You are pointing them in the wrong direction.

You are offering the advice from the Octomom to routinely put babies younger than one year old into time out.

Her claim of knowing anything whatsoever about "well adjusted" children is ludicrous.

And I promise you, people are reading what she's written, and they are lapping it up.

"Yes!  This woman knows how to handle fourteen children, I should take her advice about my one or two."

I'm sorry, but that's it for me.

Mamapedia, you and I are done.