admin As the proud daughter of a party mom—or, I should say, dinner-party mom—I took special offense to the recent news item leaked to TMZ by a “source with direct knowledge” (sure) that actor Sophie Turner had reportedly been partying while her soon-to-be ex Joe Jonas stayed at home with the couple’s two young children.
The same source said that Jonas had been caring for the children “pretty much all of the time” for the last three months while Turner filmed a series in the UK, to which I say: Tough break, sounds a lot like being a parent! (I obviously don’t know the intricacies of how Jonas and Turner divide up time with the kids while one of them is working, but you’re simply never going to catch me feeling bad for a dad for…doing dad stuff.)
These allegations against Turner are cut-and-dried examples of mom-shaming, but they’ve also made me think about why it is that our society has taught us to expect the world from mothers and very little from fathers. I noticed during my stint as a Brooklyn nanny that when I walked down the street with my nine-month-old charge strapped to me in a complicated fabric baby sling, I was assumed to just be another mom. However, when a guy friend of mine met us at the playground one day for Popsicles and slide time, it seemed like every single person came up to compliment his agility and prowess in the proximity of a child that he didn’t even know before that afternoon. “I love seeing dads at the park,” one mom told me conspiratorially, and I smiled back, but inside I was confused. Where else should they be, exactly?
The shaming of Sophie Turner for (gasp) enjoying her life while not in the immediate presence of her children has reached a new pitch of late, with Page Six seeming to scold her for “downing shots at a bar” shortly before Jonas allegedly filed for divorce. Leaving aside the fact that we don’t know the intimate details of what Turner is like as a mother (and the fact that if doing shots automatically renders one a bad mother, every single parent at the last bachelorette party I went to would essentially be Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest), I’m discomfited by the idea that simply stepping out in public and drinking with friends is enough to clinch a woman’s reputation as somehow less than in the mothering department. There’s a word for this—misogyny—and we shouldn’t be afraid to use it.
Even if Turner is a party mom…so what? I can attest that growing up as the child of a mother who regularly held raucous parties at our house taught me everything I know about entertaining a crowd, drawing people out, and figuring out which iteration of flavored vodka pairs best with an entrée. (Okay, that one I learned at college, so I can’t really put it on my mom.) I’m obviously not condoning drinking a ton or rendering yourself unable to hang with your kids on a regular basis, but Turner’s children were, as far as I know, not at the bar where she was so debauchedly daring to do shots. Is it really such a five-alarm scandal if this 27-year-old woman and mother wants to enjoy herself adult style while her kids are safe with their dad? Maybe we’d all be better off if we accepted that having kids doesn’t have to permeate every single aspect of your time and identity and just let mothers have some goddamn fun.
