Aniston vs. O’Reilly: The Single Mom Saga

August 16, 2010 by Rene Syler
Filed under Featured, Motherhood

There’s been a bit of a dust up in the news of late and it centers squarely on the issue of parenthood. The issue – whether women need fathers to raise their children. Battling it out, Jennifer Aniston and Bill O’Reilly.

So here’s the story. Aniston is starring in a new movie called The Switch, about a 40-something woman who turns to artificial insemination to have a baby. During the promotion of the movie, Jen was quoted as saying that women “don’t have to settle with a man to have that child.” Well, that was the incendiary spark Bill O’Reilly needed and boy did he get fired up, firing back on his Fox News show…

Now I don’t think Bill O’Reilly heard what Aniston said. I mean REALLY heard, though of course that’s not much of a surprise, is it? What she said was that a woman doesn’t have to SETTLE with a man to have a child. In other words, she does not have to rush into a marriage with potentially the wrong mate just because her biological clock is making more noise than Big Ben.

But Bill still went on the attack; talking about how this is the wrong message to 12 and 13-year-olds and how this is “destructive to our society.” I would think that a divorce rate hovering around 50 percent would be more destructive to our society. And wouldn’t the chances of staying married be higher if you chose the right partner to begin with?

When Good Enough Mother was just getting started in TV, I read about an African American anchorwoman in Boston named Liz Walker. In 1988 Walker decided she wanted to have a child. Unmarried and pregnant (she would not say whether is was planned) she wound up on the end of some very blunt criticism, just like Aniston and the Murphy Brown storyline before her.

In Walker’s case, much of it came from the local clergy, who thought she set a bad example for young, African American girls. Here she was, a 36-year-old woman, (at the time, one of the highest paid anchorwomen in the country) who had accomplished most of her professional goals and had now turned to her personal ones. And yet she was taking shrapnel from all sides. Were the critics reaching all the way into her womb, suggesting she forego her dreams of motherhood because 16-year-olds who still lived at home shared the same existence? For me it was laughable.

Truth be told, I probably would have done the same thing. Please don’t get me wrong; I am not saying single parenthood is easy or even optimal. My own sister was divorced for a while and I saw up close and personal the struggles associated with raising kids on your own. But the question is, do I or Liz or the fictional character that Aniston plays in The Switch, go to our graves, regretting not having had a child so that we could please the local clergy/Bill O’Reilly/a host of others who ultimately do not matter in our own lives?

There comes a time when you decide this life is too short to worry about what others think/feel/say and you begin to practice – and believe – in number 3 on our TEN FROM GEM list – see the sidebar.

I don’t expect Bill O’Reilly to understand that though and you know what? I also don’t care…