Update: My op-ed on why we need to respect the online privacy of children in Al Jazeera
Update: Quit gawking and do something useful — donate to a Newtown charity
Update: Please see my joint statement with Liza Long. We do not want to be part of a “mommy war” and want to steer this conversation in a productive and respectful direction.
Update: Please see my follow-up post “A brief response on Liza Long”
Liza Long, the woman who wrote the viral post “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother”, is being held up as a heroic woman warranting sympathy for bring the plight of her mentally ill son to the public.
Her blog tells a different story. Long has written a series of vindictive and cruel posts about her children in which she fantasizes about beating them, locking them up and giving them away. In most posts, her allegedly insane and violent son is portrayed as a normal boy who incites her wrath by being messy, buying too many Apple products and supporting Obama.
I feel uncomfortable speculating about someone’s private life based on a blog. But since these children are likely to be the object of enormous media attention, someone should be paying close attention to the words of their mother.
These children could be in real danger if her goal was to capitalize on the Newtown tragedy by creating a media campaign designed to give her sympathy. If I am wrong about this, I truly apologize. But there is a 13-year-old boy who has already had his reputation destroyed and who may be facing serious harm.
This “national conversation” on mental illness needs to include the mental illness of mothers and the online privacy of their children.
According to the blog, Liza Long is going through a bitter divorce and has violent and paranoid fantasies about her family. The father of the children is also portrayed as abusive.
Below, some excerpts:
On wanting to throttle her kids and give them to the state, in blog post titled I Quit!
Dear Progeny of Mine who cannot be in the car together for more than five minutes without erupting into screams that make a Japanese horror flick seem tame by comparison: No, you cannot ever have computer time again. Not ever. Your “I love to fart on you” song may seem whimsical or even clever to you, my dear seven year old. But it makes me want to throttle you.
And you, the 11 year old in the back, if you even touch your brother again, I will call your parole officer. I quit! Let the state take care of you and your compulsive inability to stop poking people.
And five year old, please only cry like that if you are facing imminent death—not if you drop your lollipop on the car floor, where it joins a two year food supply of discarded candy, fruit snacks, and cracker crumbs. Believe me, life will throw you much tougher challenges, and at this rate, you will be nothing but a fluffy cheerleader who drops the ball at the first sign of a chipped manicure.
On her allegedly violently insane son, described pre-Newtown massacre as a normal boy:
Those of you who aren’t parents should really take my advice and stick with a puppy.
Because the puppy will never grow up to be a teenager.
Confession: My teen is driving me nuts. Oh sure, the rest of you see this poised, self-confident, polite young man who always holds doors open and helps little old ladies cross the street and can magically make your iPad work. Sure, he’s a straight A Boy Scout who can play anything in the key of Coldplay on the piano and writes English essays that make his teacher weep for joy.
What you don’t see is him shooting rubber bands at his siblings while he is supposed to be cleaning the Room of Doom. I have asked him to clean said room, every day for the past two months, roughly 14.7 times per hour. If you have a teenage son, you know the room I am talking about. There’s no point in even trying to guess if the clothes are clean or dirty, or what that strange bloodlike substance on the wall is, or where the two year supply of cookie crumbs ground into the carpet came from. Do not, under any circumstances, look under the bed.
My son’s room also features a bizarre altar decorated with icons and product boxes for every single Apple item ever produced. The only thing missing is a candle. A picture of Saint Steve Jobs smirks benevolently down on this collection, which I must confess I didn’t realize was a collection—to me, it looked like a lot of old product packaging that needed to be tossed.
“No, Mom!” my son screamed as I started toward the shrine with a garbage bag in hand. “That’s Apple stuff! Steve Jobs personally designed those boxes. By himself!”
Um, okay.
In addition to worshiping Steve Jobs, my son is an Obama-loving Democrat. All day long I have to listen to him go on and on about how President Obama and Steve Jobs have made the earth a paradise right here and now, set to a Coldplay soundtrack (okay, at least the kid has decent taste in tuneage).
This is, of course, revenge for my own Ronald Reagan-loving years in a Carter-Dukakis-Clinton household. I still love Ronald Reagan.
On her bitter custody battle with her ex-husband
We are in therapy because said father decided that he would abdicate his parenting responsibilities to the juvenile correction facility (i.e., he had his 11 year old incarcerated for not doing his chores, something I will admit I have fantasized about but never really considered as a viable parenting technique)…
And the very fact that I am even considering the possibility of thinking about option three tells you everything you need to know about just how bad that situation really is. The situation where he abandons his 14 year old son at a mental hospital. The situation where he has his 11 year old son incarcerated—four times!
I have a 12 minute recording made a few months ago in which he outlines the vast conspiracy theory by which I allegedly contrived to take his children from him. It’s not his fault, he says. It’s his violent and destructive children, he says. It’s my fault for encouraging them to accuse him of abuse, he says. He has to protect himself and his new wife, he says.
Indeed.
Safety is never anything more than a pretty illusion for any of us, at any time. We are all just one car accident, one cancer diagnosis, one unimagined catastrophe away from death. But what makes this situation bad—no, intolerable—is that someone, somewhere, for some reason, is actively seeking to destroy me.
I am not going to even pretend I wasn’t tempted—a sudden picture of Jesus standing on a mountain top with Satan, surveying the world, flashed through my mind. But my confidence factor was a mere 25%–in other words, I was only 25% sure that I could cross the space beneath me and cling to the other side. Nate started playing with his rope, putting a few “Man vs. Wild” moves into practice as he swung the teal nylon cord across the abyss, catching it on the opposite side. I had already made my decision when I said to him, with utter calmness, “Crossing that crevasse is a selfish act. If you want to do it, I will stand here and take your picture when or if you reach the summit. But it’s selfish. And I will not follow you.”
I was speaking to myself. But Nate heard me. For several minutes. he thought about what I said, and in the end, he too decided not to cross. I knew exactly how courageous that decision was.
“Why do we do this to ourselves, Mom?” my son had asked a few weeks before, as he moved with aching slowness down the back face of Timpanogos.
Why do we climb mountains? I think there are two reasons. We climb because we want to push ourselves to the limits of our physical endurance; we want to see just how far these sacks of skin and bone can take us. And we climb because there simply isn’t any other way to experience what we feel when we stand on the summit, feeling for a brief moment what the gods feel. No photograph, no mere description, can do it justice—that sense of absolute awe and wonder and pure freedom that assaults your every sense when you are quite literally on top of your world.
Why then do we choose not to summit a mountain? That question is more difficult for me. We choose because when we reach the moment of decision, we find ourselves insufficiently aware, informed, prepared. We choose not to succeed at some things because the risks outweigh the benefits. To give up something that you value greatly for those you love is to know the meaning of sacrifice in the Biblical sense. As I turned back from Mr. Regan’s taunting summit, as I wedged my body between sheer rock faces with vertical drops of more than 30 feet, as I scavenged for handholds in flaking granite, I thought of Abraham, knife poised above the body of his innocent son. Why does God give us these urges, then tell us not to act on them?
On her own mental breakdown due to the divorce and custody battle, a constant theme in the blog
The story goes a little something like this. Last year I woke up and found myself living in a McMansion in one of those well appointed “lifestyle communities” replete with waterfalls and acres of precisely trimmed Kentucky bluegrass and 2.7 luxury SUVs per capita.
And I realized that my daydreams all involved a)my own death; or b)federal prison.
I had four beautiful children. A fluffy college degree in Classics (omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est, etc.). My husband was a handsome, successful attorney. I taught Sunday School. I served on a local school board. I was, in short, a soccer mom.
So I did what any reasonably bright person would do under the circumstances. I went stark raving mad.
Insanity is great fun. I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, dealing with the fallout from the nuclear blast that was my attempt to regain consciousness has proven somewhat more difficult than I expected. Especially for my kids.
Here’s what he got: the house, the minivan, 50% custody.
Here’s what I got: the Steinway, and the ability to solve the Rubiks Cube.
Learning to make my own way in the world: priceless.
Sarah Kendzior 
Thanks for doing the homework every other single person should have done before spreading that post. I have commented elsewhere that there were huge read flags for me, but I also failed to take the time to research the writer. Now, I need to go throw up.
Note that she has an older son, and he is likely the one in the Steve Jobs post.
I agree with Sarah, the impression I got is that the Steve Jobs loving, Halo-playing oldest son does not have a mental illness. It is actually the middle son. She’s being an honest mom, not everything is rainbows and butterflies all of the time, sometimes your children really are annoying. This “truth behind the article” is resembles more of a major exaggeration of Liza’s posts.
No the relevant post is dated 2010, her Steve Jobs-loving 11-year-old would be the 13-year-old she’s talking about with the mental illness. Is doing homework that hard?
I agree with you Megan–I believe Liza’ Long’s blog posts here are taken out of context. Special needs children are incredibly trying on so many levels and to judge someone on a few blog posts without knowing the whole story is irresponsible. If you believe Ms Long and/or her husband are abusive, get proof before you impugn someone’s character. Otherwise this author is doing exactly what she accuses Ms Long of, ‘…capitalize on the Newtown tragedy…”
Are you sure you’re not overreacting? I get a different impression from these posts than you got. When she complains about her kids in the back seat bickering and says she wants to throttle them, she doesn’t sound like she MEANS it, she sounds like she is a typical parent, feeling like she’s had it with her kids. As for the son sounding normal, Sara J Henry has given a good theory about that, but even if that boy IS the kid in question: in the viral piece, she said the thing that was so hard about the situation was that her son was mostly normal, smart, affable (loved Harry Potter, snuggled at night, etc.) which is why his unpredictable crazy rages were so hard to deal with. She can’t just lock him up when most of the time he’s a normal kid and she loves him.
I will admit that the original post seemed odd in a few places. But I figured the author was probably in bad shape from dealing with this very difficult situation on her own, and spooked by the shooting because she knew her son could go haywire, too.
Maybe you are right, maybe you are wrong. But the evidence you’ve put before us here is not convincing to me.
Seriously?!? Would you look at this blog and think these were huge red flags if you didn’t know what had happened?!?
Trying to make an issue out of what is clearly a joke comment almost every parent makes about their children at some point says more about the author of this blog and their idea of “the truth” than it does about Lisa Long
My assumption is that you’ve never read a mommyblog before, don’t understand the frustration of parenting, and didn’t bother to investigate the fact that the mentally ill son has an older brother. Wow, talk about cherry-picking lines to make someone look as bad as possible.
An “investigative job” worthy of Geraldo Rivera, truly.
I am a parent of 3 kids and what i have read does not seem to be malicious. I have thought about how much I want to put some sense into my kids when they are being annoying or dumbasses. Still love my kids to the end, big reason why I tattoo’d their faces on my body. This writer has no concept except to look down from a pulpit.
Sure you’re not the one trying to capitalize on something?
She’s specifically referring to her “teenage son” when talking about the Steve Jobs saga. In 2010, here now 13 year old son would not have been a teenager. Perhaps he’s the 11 year old who her ex husband had incarcerated 4 times.
That would make sense, wouldn’t it. I guess that would require not looking at the blog with the intention of doing a hatchet-job on the writer in an effort to capitalize on the “viral” blog post.
While I’m sure there’s quite a bit of hyperbole and overdramatization in the blog posts… It’s still kinda disturbing. She sounds like she needs quite a bit of therapy herself.
Just what I said…
I am not a huge fan of her post, and I agree that in her blog she comes off moderately self-righteous and a bit paranoid, whiny and screwy, but this is character assassination of the highest order, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Almost all of these posts are taken ludicrously out of context, the most so being the mountain climbing one (Hint: The person she is on the mountain with is not her son, and the Abraham reference is to wanting to finish climbing the mountain but deciding it is wiser not to.) It only took me 5 minutes of clicking on the links to glance at the full posts and see that your interpretations are seriously off, but how many people will actually follow the links and read the original posts?
If you don’t agree with her statement, and as I mentioned previously I do have issues with her original post and I do find it ethically questionable/exploitative to her son, then come back with a rational, well thought out critique. In fact many people have done this and pointed out a variety of issues with her post. But going out of your way to trash her personally out of fake concern for her family is truly a shameful and cowardly act.
I think you’re taking this out of context. Mom blogs are generally a safe place to vent. We all love our kids, but there are times we all want to throttle them.
This doesn’t seem that bad to me. I mean, I’m not a parent, but I’d imagine raising three kids, including one with special needs, could make someone a bit crazy at times. She’s just being honest.
I raised three sons; It was a joke that I would ‘break their face’. It was a joke because more often they got hugs and listened to. This mother’s rantings are scary and should raise an alarm.
You have awful reading comprehension. Her son wasn’t in pain until they were DESCENDING the mountain, so he didn’t have a choice as to whether or not to go on. Nate isn’t her son, Nate is her climbing buddy–her kids weren’t even involved in most of the long climbing story you detailed, especially the part about Abraham and Isaac (I think she was referencing the pride gotten from climbing a mountain to the pride Abraham had in his son and sacrificing that. She’s clearly not saying she has any urge to kill her children).
And what parent hasn’t said that their kids are driving them crazy? Especially a single mom of four. You know what she did? She complained about them in her blog, using hyperbole, and then she moved on.
I read her entire blog earlier today and I don’t see how she’s any worse (given the blog) than any other single mother who’s going through a really awful divorce (it seems that her husband cheated and remarried immediately to a much younger woman, and is choosing not to spend time with his older children, and is pretty messed up in his own ways).
Also, the child with the Steve Jobs shrine? It seems that she’s referencing her oldest son, not the next one down (“Michael”).
Think, and think hard before criticizing this mom. Because this post shows you didn’t think all that hard.
On Friday she tweeted this: “Forget guns. Let’s talk about mental illness.” I’m sure that would make the NRA and the GOP very, very happy. We already know she’s a teabagger. Could she be a gun hugger too? Just a guess… http://twitter.com/anarchistmom/status/279789065602215936
She probably DOES need therapy. She’s a single mother with a bunch of kids – one who is suffering from a mental illness. This is just a desperate attempt at writing something that will go viral – at the cost of a decent blog that might focus the spotlight on something very worthwhile.
She has four children. In a January 2012 post, she references an unnamed 14 year-old. “Michael” is 13. While I agree that a review of her posts reveals that her situation is more complex than the impression one would gain from reading just her most recent post, she’s hardly a “danger” to her children as the OP suggests. Frankly, any reasonable reading of her posts reveals that Liza Long uses a vivid, humorous style pretty regularly. I don’t get the desire to demonize her.
You are a nitwit if you think any of these posts actually are the “smoking gun” you seem to think they are.
I don’t know. To me, she sounds like the typical mom. If any parent tells me they’ve never thought of reaching out and choking their teenager, I’ll show you a liar. My daughter is 19. I’m not afraid to admit that i have wanted to knock her lights out in the past. Did I? No. But all of this makes me human. Moms are human too, you know.
Way to take things out of context! Wow! And I wasn’t the biggest fan of her whole post, so I’m hardly biased. This is ridiculous. She was kidding.
Right! If she cares more about mental illness than gun control and votes Republican, she’s clearly a terrible person and misrepresenting her son in that blog post. Her blog should be combed through for sentences that make her look bad and be presented on a someone else’s blog as the “real story” behind the mom who wrote that viral blog post. Because really, writing a blog post on your mentally ill son out of desperation and fear and sadness means you’re a terrible mother who deserves every word put under a microscope.
Or something.
I don’t care what she wrote in previous blog posts– the sentiment she shared in “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” was a sincere one. Stop being trolls.
As the mother of special needs kids who is sometimes violent, I sometimes vent online there are two things here that I think people are missing. She is using her real name and her underage children’s names and images and posting them publicly and giving a one sided view of their issues. This is ridiculously wrong for any parent to do. Her son could find the perfect medication in a week or just get into a new living situation and get better but if anyone searches his name from here for eternity, her posts will come up describing him as a monster. This is 100% unfair. If she wants to vent, fine, but do it under a pseudonym. .
I was preparing to be shocked, but, being a mom myself, wasn’t shocked at all. Instead I was impressed with the author’s honesty. Not a sentence written by that mother made me think she was inherently unstable.
Try reading this stuff again when you have kids and are confronted by the terrible fact of ultimate and constant responsibility over life and death, particularly in situations where you are assumed to have control (as the parent) but actually don’t.
How do you know they aren’t pseudonyms?
Wow. Learn to read before you post something idiotic like this. I can’t believe someone with reading comprehension skills this poor could get a PhD.
Yeah, I agree
Honestly, I think this blogger is looking for attention in a much more obvious way than Liza Long ever was in her post. Going back through the blog to cherry-pick sentences from someone’s mommyblog to prove that she’s some kind of terrible person demonstrates either a really serious grudge, a troubling lack of understanding about what people write on blogs (especially parenting blogs – my God, the number of times I’ve written about throttling my darling neurotypical children, I can’t even count them), or a blatant grab for the spotlight.
Frankly, this blog post is a lot more troubling to me than Liza Long’s post. It’s a deliberate character assassination on someone who did nothing more but tell her truth on a day people were willing to listen.
Does NO ONE else think it’s odd that one of her children already has a parole officer and is barely in his teens? Exactly how typical is THAT?
Is it clear that these AREN’T pseudonyms?
Shouldn’t we also consider her profile statement? “I’m a total nerd who loves my Steinway, my four kids, and my fancy design software, not necessarily in that order.”
She writes well, other than perhaps an overuse of hyperbole, and strikes me as an intellectual with an eclectic sense of humor. Let’s try to stay focused on the point she made so well.
It’s called humor and us Mom’s of special needs kids need it desperately. But way to go to slander her. Rock on o’ corrupt media. @@
God this is why the internet is an awful, awful thing. People can write whatever they want, and if it just happens to go “viral”, the masses just eat it up and believe every word is true. I’m right with you on this… This article is garbage and posts like this that stretch the truth need to disappear.
‘Special needs children are trying on so many levels’? We’ve heard that one before. It’s usually trotted out in sympathy when a parent murders their ‘special needs’ kid.
I work with children who have ‘special needs’ professionally, and I’ve been a child with ‘special needs’ myself. I put that phrase in quotation marks for a reason, as I don’t believe in taking the basic needs of able-bodied cognitively typical human beings for granted while categorising people with different needs as ‘special’. We all have stuff we need – food, shelter, security, clothing, love, etc. – and we all have humans in our lives who try our patience. I and every other ‘special needs’ person alive could probably name one or two able-bodied types who are ‘trying on every level’. This doesn’t mean it would be right for us to try and get mileage out of them on our blogs.
Not that anyone would read if we did, because such blog posts are only interesting to the world if they’re about someone who is designated as ‘special’.
You must be friends with Ann Coulter. Why else would you try to make a single (divorcing) mother out to be a criminal? And what’s wrong with this mother’s plea for help–on behalf of her son? On behalf of other mothers and fathers, too, and their children? Is it because her remarks make you uncomfortable?
I didn’t read her posts are posing danger on her kids, simple voicing her frustration with them & their behavior.
My mother said as much about me & my sibs….and followed through. Not saying it is right.
Corporeal punishment is considered outdated and mean, much of it is…but I’m not totally against some sort of firm punishment for ill-behaving children. Her kids obviously have the upper hand in the relationship and it is NOT working for that family.
As a mother I understand what she’s writing here. And, reading the bits quoted…sounds like a mom that has a sense of humor and is poking fun at the situation she’s in. Like the fat kid that always made fat jokes in school.
I see a mom making jokes and I get the ‘going stark raving mad’ part. She’s saying she had it all, what one would say was perfect, the best…but she wasn’t happy and was going crazy…a gilded cage. And, while she no longer has the house, car and ‘status’ she’s happy now…where she wasn’t before.
I am a stay at home mother. It’s where I want to be but dear God there are plenty of times when I want to just hear an adult voice that doesn’t belong to my husband. Or actually go to the bathroom…alone…without someone outside the door…or someone asking…’Whatcha’ doin?’ I mean really?! It’s a bathroom. I’m obviously building a time machine to go back in time and perhaps rethink that whole, ‘I want children’ speech.
The sarcastic comments and quips are part of what can help at times. It’s part of what gets me through the day when all we want to do is have something other than a cold dinner and hot ice cream to eat. After all none of my fantasies when I thought of becoming a mother included a sullen, pouty, whiny, grouchy, stinky teenager. They did involve plenty of “hallmark card moments” though. I think the majority of my day is more hallmar, allmark or on bad days allmar card moments. But those amazing moments are what gets me through the hard ones.
I’m anti spanking. I don’t spank, I don’t whip, I don’t smack. I do say I’m going to beat the kids or mail them to Timbuktu….and they promptly laugh at me. My girlfriends laugh when I say it while on the phone with them. It’s a saying. Not a threat or a promise…well…maybe a threat.. 😉 Like saying a baby is so cute you’re going to take them home with you. That’s not saying you’re in the process of hatching a kidnapping plan.
As to why she’s never mentioned her sons mental illness? Perhaps she was afraid she’d be judged on her mothering skills and abilities. Perhaps she couldn’t say it aloud…and make it truly real. Perhaps her blog was the one place she could truly focus on the child she loves…the sweet boy that she gave birth to.
I’m all for transparent blogging. I don’t believe in saying my house is perfect when it’s a mess. Or saying I put on make up everyday. Shoot I’m just happy if I get to brush my teeth everyday. Do you think you’d mention you have set up a safety plan for your children when knives are pulled? Because you fear one of your children would hurt his own body, or yours or your other children. Maybe just maybe after this most recent shooting she felt the need to reach out and connect in the hopes her openness could help others seek help for their own children who are suffering. And, in that reaching out…prevent more death and prevent harm to more children at the hands of hurting and ill members of society.
I don’t like that what you’ve written here seems to judge her. Posts like this encourage more and more women to hide their anger, fears and worries behind a perfectly coiffed mask of perfection. What happens when the mask crumbles and warnings are ignored? Whose fault is it? The person afraid to share due to judgement? Or the person judging and pointing fingers?
~Honey
1) You have no understanding of irony or hyperbole used as literary devices in writing.
2) You cannot possibly be a parent because if you were, you would have had many of these comments go through your head many, many times. This stuff is vanilla.
3) This is about typical as mommy blogging gets – and it’s very typical for raising a special needs child.
4) You have a poor understanding of mental health in general, and there is very little indication in your excerpts above (taken out of context) that this mother has any kind of serious mental health problem other than that which she already sought help for and which makes sense given her circumstances.
5) What on earth do you have to gain from this character assassination? You’re not doing any kind of public service whereas the original blogger is, in fact, attempting to raise awareness of the woefully inadequate mental health services available in this country and our overall pathetic infrastructure for mental healthcare.
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I applaud you for this. It is a tough gig to stand almost alone in the face of thoughtless, kneejerk support for a viral post. This mom published a pic of her son. She created a comparison of him to a mass murderer. I wonder if all those moms defending her to the hilt would do the same to their children. It’s without any regard for his well being or his future.
And who on the internet knows the absolute truth of any blogging stranger? You have shown another side. It deserves the same million-plus shares that the original post by Liza Long Walton got, I fear it will get lost in the clique of mommy bloggers, who value the bandwagon-jumping viral factor more than any ethics, particularly when it comes to the exploitation of minor children.
Me too Leah OMG…. though I am sure their is some truth in her CRY for HELP they both need HELP…….Im sick about it…..
You think she’s outrageous, you ought to read that blog by the guy who thinks the Irish should sell their children to rich Englishmen as food, that’ll REALLY get your blood up! I think his name is Swiff or Schwiff or something like that.
I think that her blog posts are quite clearly hyperbole.
I could have written some of those things myself. It doesn’t detract from her message about mental illness.
I would guess that the person seeking to discredit the author does not have children, and thus has no understanding of the limits to which small humans can push us.
Well said, Tara.
Please tell me you are not serious with this waste of space blogpost. If you’re such a scholarly scholar of scholartown in internetville, how do you not grasp the nature of the Viral Blogpost beast?
Have you never read other mom blogs?
Do you not understand basic reading comprehension?
Have you ever dealt with a mentally ill loved one, let alone your own son?
This piece of what appears to be “jealously journalism” is complete and utter garbage. This blogpost right here and all the comments that side with it are exactly everything that make me ill about the internet. Sometimes a blogpost from a mom with a mentally ill kid is just a blogpost that then hits a nerve, strikes a chord, makes a bigger statement.
Why don’t you take the time and energy used to do whatever it is you think you’ve done here and go help some real people. Go volunteer. Something positive.
I also read some of her blog and certainly found her to be… not someone I could completely identify with. Nonetheless I think she’s getting a lot of attention because she did capture something many of us can identify with- the notion that you can’t entirely control who your kid grows up to be. And it’s gotta be a heck of a situation to be truly afraid- not just cautious about, but afraid of- what one of your kids might do to the others.
As a side note- if you find the *mention* of wanting to throttle your kid so disgusting, I hope you never watch the Simpsons.
Overall, I think her entire post, and your response to it, really highlights something- it’s really, really hard to know the difference between “normal stressed out human in a difficult emotional situation acting less than ideally pro-socially” and “mental illness”. Which is maybe an argument for a more nuanced view of mental health as being a state it takes continuous effort and maintenance to achieve, for all of us, rather than the default that only some deviant violent bad evil people do not have.
Too bad that you seem to think you have the right to judge someone, based on some out of context entries that you probably read in 10 minutes to come to your conclusions. I believe you are wrong, and sadly, saying “I’m sorry” while destroying someone’s character in the same breath doesn’t exonerate you. It’s called defamation.
Much like when the authorities rushed to identify the shooter and identified the wrong person.
Witch hunt.
I’m gonna “hollah!” to what Tara said. And then leave this conversation. This post is ridiculous and for only those who are really into trolling.
Sarah, thank you so much for this. Just based on the viral blog’s title and captioned photograph, I have been arguing with people all day that this mother is self serving and throwing her innocent child under the bus instead of protecting him. I have three daughters and I am a writer sometimes prone to hyperbole. Nothing excuses this mother for using a highly inflammatory title to gain attention and sensationalize her own experiences. Goddess bless poor Michael and his siblings. How sad for all of them.
This whole family is crying for help. WHEN will we realize mental illness is no joke? This mother is outsider her skills range
this is clearly a case of a mom using hyperbole to vent her frustrations.
ugh. people are so quick to judge before they use any critical thinking skills.
yep, you blew the lid off of overwhelmed mothers everywhere.
sweet lord. grow up.
although, you’re getting a lot of traction, so good for you.
you’re erin brockovitch and murrow rolled into one.
(that was sarcasm,i am in no way saying that you are either of those people)
And you, sarahkendzior, are preying upon people’s laziness, counting on them not to click through to the blog of Liza Long. You are more unstable than she is.
Interpreting that linked blog post as an “Abraham-Isaac murder fantasy” is either willfully malicious or incredibly confused. I honestly hope you’re just trying to cash in on the blog traffic and really didn’t interpret her words so horrifically. She clearly has a hard life and jokes around in her blog – going after her in this way is ridiculous and downright slanderous.
Are you kidding? You’re taking Ms. Long’s words literally. Did it never occur to you that long was doing what many writers have done: Write satirically about life? Yes, she wrote about wanting to throttle her son. Does NOT mean that she really wanted to do so.
I find it shocking that you want to jump to the worst conclusions about Ms. Long. How does the fact that Long has a terrible ex-husband tar her character? She fought for custody of her children. Why is it hard to believe that a stressed out single-mother might use humor and satire to express her angst?
Instead of getting out the torches and pitchforks, why not actually withhold judgement until you know all of the facts?
LOL! Spot on!
While I don’t like Ms. Long’s article, I find it more shocking that Sarah Kendzior can’t understand that Ms. Long is writing satire! She doesn’t actually want to injure her child. She’s joking, using hyperbole. I’m appalled that obvious is being ignored instead of using common sense.
Ah, hyperbole. Sometimes I tell my teenagers I’m going to take them down to the orphanage and sell them. They tell me to shut up or they’ll put me in an old folk’s home. Taken out of context, we all sound horrible. Truth is, they’re totally awesome kids and we have a great relationship.
My guess is her son is mentally ill and she needs a lot of help herself.
So parenting isn’t always a walk in a white-picket fence lined park. And mothers (especially single mothers) get tired of being caregivers, nurses, teachers, park rangers, etc. 24/7. Is this a surprise? Really? Mothers are people who don’t need to like their kids all the time, can get very pissed off at their brats when they overact in restaurants, supermarkets, etc and break down when things really have just hit the disciplinary fan. Through it all, they put up with poop doodled walls, poke fights resulting in a scratch cornea, and so on with considerable aplomb because they have to. Its great to see the woman venting rather than swallowing her discomfort and anger.
Also, pretty sure this isn’t the only parent-propped blog out there that features throttling fantasies. If it is at all hyberbolic, at least it served some good in starting a discussion on mental health care. Blogs should not be a measure of journalistic integrity. More like a very slap dash mad lib of witicisms and cliches.
Thank you! It’s nice to see someone with common sense who understands satire and hyperbole.
That was a blog? I always though he was serious 😉
*thought
{slow claps}
If she is a typical ‘mommy blogger,’ well, I don’t want any part of her. She sounds overwhelmed, and who’s to know if she wouldn’t act on one of her impulses. Other moms have drowned their kids, stabbed them, suffocated them – sounds like a cry for help more than venting. I raised kids and never blogged stuff like that.
Also, who is she to presume to speak for Adam Lanza’s mom? How did she know what she thought, what her life was like? We can only speak for ourselves.
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