The next session (April 1-June 3) is now open for registration. Find out more and register here.
Not long ago, I was discussing the DaiShin WolfHawk case with some friends, most of whom, like me, are mothers of young children. All of them applauded Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania for removing Melissa and DaiShin's child a mere 24 hours after he was born. They felt that the father's 20-year-old rape conviction and presence on the sexual offender registry should preclude him from raising a child. And they had no issue about the County terminating the parental rights of the mother either, believing that just the fact she had willingly brought a child into the world with a sex offender made her automatically unfit. When I disagreed with them and stated that though I doubted the WolfHawks would be winning any "Parent of the Year" awards, I still felt that their basic rights had been violated, I was vehemently accused of not wanting to "protect the children." I was stunned by the reaction.
Protect the children. It is a mantra we hear a lot these days from both parents and legislators. Many laws to help prevent sexual crimes against children are too quickly passing across the country all in the name of "protecting the children." But are they actually doing so? Many of these new laws are using Megan's Law - a federal law that requires convicted sexual offenders to register and maintain their address and contact information with the state in which they reside - as a basis for legislation that sets greater and greater limits on the civil rights of sexual offenders. Doing so, I fear, is a serious misstep.
For one, it is not clear that Megan's Law is actually protecting said children. In one of life's sadder ironies, Megan's Law would not have saved Megan Kanka, the girl for which it was named. Though her killer, Jesse Timmendequas, was a repeat sexual offender, his crimes would not have merited a community wide notification of his presence in Megan's neighborhood. Similarly, in the recent high profile cases of Dylan and Shasta Groene, Jessica Lunsford, Jessica Lunde, Dru Sjodin, and others, each perpetrator was registered per Megan's Law as a sex offender - just not in the area where they stalked, assaulted, and murdered their victims. To say that it is ineffective is an understatement. Many serious sexual predators give false addresses, disappear after initially registering, or "shop" for victims away from home. And most state and county agencies are too overworked and under-funded to keep track of each and every one.
Lawmakers are now attempting to overcome these issues by extending Megan's Law. For example, there is new legislation in Iowa forbidding sex offenders from living within so many feet of areas where children are likely to be. Correspondingly, Jessica's Law in Florida now requires repeat offenders to be electronically monitored for life. Many of these restrictions are also being considered at the federal level. Unfortunately, like Megan's Law, all of these measures are knee-jerk reactions to specific crimes, which is hardly a way to successfully legislate. On paper, laws like these make us feel safer, that we are doing something about the problem. I believe that sexual registries also give us as parents a false feeling of control - that we can prevent such a tragedy from happening to our own child with the by simply entering our zip code into a website. But the sad truth of the matter is that these registries may make us feel better, but they are seriously lacking in capacity and resources to be truly effective.
Unfortunately, speaking out against the effectiveness or legality of Megan's Law is much like speaking out against holding detainees indefinitely at Guantánamo or the Patriot Act to the Bush Administration. There is a sort of "if you aren't with us, you are against us" mentality - or worse, if you aren't for the law, than you are, in fact, for the crime itself. To a certain extent, I do understand this. Sexual crimes bring out a visceral response in us, especially when the victim is a child. We mourn the loss of innocence, we empathize with the parents, and it makes us want to ensure that it can never, ever happen to another child. And as a mother, I, too, often want to lash out at the perpetrators of these senseless and unspeakable crimes. But in the case of preventing future offenses, this mindset only works against our objectives when we ignore the shortcomings of these laws in the name of "protecting the children."
Though I am not certain what acts of law are necessary to truly protect our children from violent sexual crimes, I do know that unless we as parents, and as citizens, can open ourselves up to the discussion of alternatives to Megan's Law, instead of continuing to legislate emotionally and blindly - and without inanely suggesting that detractors are somehow "for the pedophiles" - we will continue to see the headlines announcing yet another child victimized by violent sexual crime and still come no closer to realizing an effective solution.
Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates and Other Dispatches from the Dating World
by Rachel Sarah
ISBN#1580051669
published by Seal Press
Review by Shari Maser
I’ve never been a single mother, and I haven’t been on a date in over seventeen years. So I was quite wary of Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates and Other Dispatches from the Dating World, even though a friend highly recommended it. I was sure that it would bore me because the subject matter was so far removed from my own reality, or (worse) I was afraid that I might feel voyeuristic, reading what amounts to someone else’s diary about her hot dates!
But my worries were unfounded. This was a page-turner, in a “wow, I know exactly what she’s talking about even though I never thought about it THAT way before” kind of way.
Sometimes her experiences resonated with my own... balancing the needs of a sick child against a scheduled commitment, racing to get my work done before my baby wakes up from her nap, balancing my need for intimate adult conversation with my child’s need to be with me, oozing breastmilk in public...
When her experiences didn’t resonate, they still captured my imagination. I found myself wondering, “What would I have done?” I was inspired to discuss her dilemmas with my husband, my friends, my sister. I was prompted to evaluate my own moral character and challenged to re-examine some of my “black-and-white” ideas about relationships.
I was so intrigued that I would have read this book from cover to cover...but whenever I put it down for a moment to brew some tea or use the bathroom, my husband swiped it, and I had to fight to get it back.
Oh, you lucky New Yorkers!
If you're in New York City, please come out and hear Single Mom Seeking LITERARY MAMA columnist Rachel Sarah at one of these events:
In The Flesh Reading Series "Erotic Memoir Night"
Wednesday, January 17th
8 p.m.
In the Flesh is a monthly reading series to get you hot and bothered, hosted and curated by Village Voice sex columnist and acclaimed erotic writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel
Rachel Sarah will get hot on the page with the likes of:
Susan Shapiro,(Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic: How To Meet & Marry Your Match)
Ron Geraci, (The Bachelor Chronicles),
Grant Stoddard, (Working Stiff: The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert),
Virginia Vitzthum (I Love You, Let's Meet: Adventures in Online Dating)
Free refreshments will be served.
Happy Ending Lounge
302 Broome Street, NYC
Tel: (212) 334-9676
How to get there: B/D to Grand, J/M/Z to Bowery, F to Delancey
~~~
On Thursday, January 18th, Rachel Sarah will be reading from Single Mom Seeking at the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side
Thursday, January 18th
7 p.m.
2289 Broadway @ 82nd Street
New York, NY 10024
Tel: (212) 362-8835
The entire Literary Mama community mourns the passing of Tillie Olsen, who died on New Year's Day at age 94. She was -- and is -- a hero to women writers everywhere, especially to those of us who try every moment of every day to balance writing with motherhood.
Lengthier and more formal obituaries can be read in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and they do a fine job reciting the facts of Tillie's life. But Tillie was more to us than a resume, more than a prominent writer and early feminist.
She was a mother who wrote, and wrote well.
It wasn't easy. Born in 1912 and a mother at age 19, Olsen lived in poverty for years, working in one menial job after another while raising four daughters. In the nooks and crannies of her time, she wrote about women like her, women whose voices were silenced by the demands, needs, and expectations of everyone around her. But still she kept writing. In her own words:
Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishable began: "I stand here ironing."
Olsen's body of work is slim: only five stories, an unfinished novel and several poems written over seven decades. But her work was powerful; it unlocked and opened doors to other women like her -- like us -- who insist that art and motherhood are not contradictory, but complementary. "[Children and art] are different aspects of your being," she once said. "There is . . . no separation." A life combining meaningful work and motherhood "could and should be" possible for women.
And so we grieve, for the loss of a mother and writer who -- in many ways -- made the existence of Literary Mama possible. "Among women writers in the United States, 'respect' is too pale a word: 'reverence' is more like it," novelist Margaret Atwood once wrote about Olsen. "This is presumably because women writers, even more than their male counterparts, recognize what a heroic feat it is to have held down a job, raised four children, and still somehow managed to become and to remain a writer . . . The applause that greets her is not only for the quality of her artistic performance but . . . for the near miracle of her survival."
But while our grief is for a public figure who felt close to our hearts, there is one among us who mourns for a beloved grandmother. Tillie Olsen's granddaughter, Ericka Lutz, is a Senior Editor and columnist at Literary Mama. Her column, Red Diaper Dharma, explores the legacy of growing up in a family of strong people like Grandma Tillie, and includes her personal remembrances in the most recent installment.
Tillie's 95th birthday would have been this Sunday, January 14. Her family requests that on her birthday, people whose lives have been touched by Tillie gather with friends in their homes and public libraries to celebrate her life and to read her work together. For more information about how to email the family or to make contributions in Tillie's name, see the Tillie Olsen memorial Web site.
Our intrepid columnist Rachel Sarah reports from the front lines of the book biz:
Single Mom Seeking Live on Channel 4 Bay Area News!
KRON TV host says: "Probably the hottest single mom dating book out there."
Henry Tenenbaum was a sweetheart. I thought that were off air when the anchor Ysabel Duron asked me about a matchmaker -- and I essentially gave away the end of the book. Oh, poop.
Anyway, I had a ball.
xo,
Rachel
P.S. And I'm THRILLED that in the calendar for my book launch party here in Berkeley, they put Literary Mama in my bio. Yippee!! Hopefully, this will bring lots of readers to the site. You can see it here: http://www.blackoakbooks.com/calendar.html#11
Ok folks, my iBook gave up the ghost just before the holidays and despite expert assistance, I can't move my mail over to my shiny new MacBook. This means that submissions I've received for Op Ed (including accepted pieces) are (in the immortal words of the Violent Femmes) gone, daddy, gone.
If you've submitted an article to me ESPECIALLY if you had it accepted, please Please PLEASE send it to me again! I've learned my lesson and all of my email now goes straight to my gmail account, where it will remain untouched by computer crashes. That email is Dawn DOT Friedman AT gmail DOT com.
Thanks so much!