If you haven't heard by now, you are probably a deaf, mute hermit who has been living in a cave, the royal couple had a new prince. The news coverage of this has been so ridiculous, I've had to relegate my television to a "Wii-only" device, so as not to vomit a little in my mouth every time I see an aerial shot of that freakin' hospital.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy for the couple and their new baby, as I would be for any couple who eagerly awaited and had a successful, problem-free birth of a first child. The problem I have with this, aside from the disgusting level of news coverage, is the absurd idea that the prince and the duchess are going to be parents just like the rest of us.
In this amazing age of technology, we are able to have access to people like never before. If you would have told my 13 yr. old self that at some point in the future, I would be getting weekly messages directly from John Taylor of Duran Duran, I would have been on Cloud 9 and spent the rest of my early teen years anxiously waiting. On a lot of levels, this new access is cool, but the downside is believing that access is an equalizer.
Yes, I see FaceBook updates from famous people, but they are a one way communication of only the information that the person/artist wants me to see. I find them interesting, they are also helpful if it's an artist I like to see live, and always entertaining, but I don't believe for a second that if I met that entertainer in person I could walk up to them like an old pal and consider myself in their circle. However, I don't know that younger people, perhaps around the demographic of 18-25, think the same way.
This belief is re-enforced when I see op-eds penned by writers in their late 20s/early 30s giving Duchess Kate advice on late night feedings and play dates. I saw the same thing when Kim Kardashian had her baby. Does anyone with half a brain really think that these women are getting up in the middle of the night with their infants? Let's face it, I'm a dedicated mom, but if I had the ability to hire staff to deal with my infants at night, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
The truth is that Duchess Kate, Kim, and other celebrity mommies don't have the same motherhood experience as the rest of us, because they can pay someone to deal with most of the shitty parts of being a mom. The late nights, the diaper changing, the loss of sleep and personal time, having to make a choice between working and staying at home, none of these issues come up when you have people whose sole purpose is to make sure they never come up, no matter what their Twitter twits say.
Yes, they are mothers in the respect that they gave birth to a child who will, hopefully, be the amazing focal point of their lives. They will feel love, worry, joy, frustration, anxiety, anger, happiness, and all of the other emotions that go along with the role of motherhood, but until I see Duchess Kate leaving the palace at 2:00 am in her pajamas, hair disheveled with bags under her eyes, getting into the minivan to drive her screaming newborn prince around aimlessly just to get him to go to back to sleep, I'm going to ask that we stop pretending that her motherhood experience is the same your average suburb mom's.
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