There are supposedly over 40,000 mommy bloggers online these days. Most mommy bloggers write very informative, positive, life-affirming articles about relationships, pregnancies and the joys and challenges of raising children. All pretty safe and standard stuff.
Then there is Rebecca Eckler. I consider her a writer without peer in the mommy blogosphere.
Eckler writes with wit and sass. She is ribald, profane, and outrageous and always very funny. Eckler is a well-known columnist in Canada. She has written for the National Post and the Globe and Mail. She is also the author of nine books.
Eckler's most recent book is The Mommy Mob, a witty expose of the cruel judgmental world of the mommy blogosphere. For several years, Eckler wrote a twice weekly column for an online mommy blog, Mommyish.com. Eckler's book summarizes her most controversial columns and the sometimes insane vituperative reactions from her female readers.
The book is captivating. Once you get into The Mommy Mob, you can't get out. The Mommy Mob also reminds me of The Sopranos, but with 4 inch stilettos. Bada Bling, B..tch.
In this book, Eckler portrays herself as the victim of vicious attacks from outraged mommies for her unconventional relationships, parenting views and actions.
The blogging mommies' online criticism of Eckler is intense and nasty. What I like about Eckler is that she stubbornly marches to her own drummer. Eckler lives by her own code of conduct and behavior. And those who disagree with her, well, that's their problem. Not Eckler's.
But why is Rebecca Eckler hated by so many mommy bloggers? Why do so many seemingly sane women get their Laura Ashley knickers in a knot when it comes to Eckler?
For starters, Eckler loves sex. And she is not afraid to talk and write about the most intimate details of her sexual liaisons.
In her first book, Knocked Up, Eckler gives an hysterical account of how she and her then first fiancé, after a drunken engagement party, had wild unprotected sex. Resulting in the accidental conception that night of her first born, Rowan, aka, according to Eckler, "the best accident I ever had."
Fast forward several years later. In The Mommy Mob, we learn that Eckler had split from her first fiancé. Her daughter Rowan, the love of Eckler's life is 10 years old. Eckler has literally hooked up with another dude, fiancé Numero Duo.
Eckler advised us that she had sex with her second fiancé on their first date.
Clearly, the sex is amazing, and the relationship is firing on all cylinders. Because Eckler advises that she convinces her second fiancé to reverse the vasectomy he obtained during his first marriage.
Obviously, the surgical procedure works, because Eckler is once again pregnant , within nanoseconds, with her second child.
Then Eckler goes all in and convinces the second fiancé to have sex with her daily throughout her whole pregnancy. Which apparently, they accomplish, even on those days, when Eckler confesses, she is not really in the mood. But her guy is, and Eckler, manfully womans up and as she wittily noted, "takes one for the team."
I don't know about you, women, but as a guy, this Eckler chick is a great literary character in her own right, rivalling Molly Bloom from Ulysses and Defoe's Moll Flanders.
And frankly, I have not read the depiction of great pregnancy sex since Updike's classic Couples.
However, according to Eckler, in The Mommy Mob, the mommy bloggers do not share my admiration for Eckler's sexual "tell all".
Eckler reports gleefully that these anonymous female bloggers publicly "slut shame" her and call her all kinds of horrible names like, "whore and the "c" word that rhymes with "runt".
But when Eckler shares her parenting views on raising her Rowan and newborn son Holt, the mommy blogosphere fully goes ballistic.
Irate mommies chastise Eckler for relying on nannies, encouraging Rowan to ditch school, for outsourcing Rowan's bike lessons, for avoiding changing Holt's smelly diapers for months, for over programming Rowan and spoiling her with expensive gifts. And the biggest crime, permitting Rowan to treat Eckler's vibrator and tampons as toys.
What these mommies don't get is that at the core of Eckler's unconventional parenting, is her extreme love for and devotion to her children. And that makes all the difference.
I have met the famous Rowan and she is cute, smart, talented, self-assured and adores her mom. Prada case, closed.
I believe that the insane reaction to Eckler's musings reflect a society whose conventions are under attack. These traditionalists, Eckler's antagonists, come across as jealous, insecure, weak, scared and threatened. Kudos to Rebecca Eckler for exposing the soft underbelly of conventional Toronto society.
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