Is this wrong? New mum that gives her baby the middle finger....

 

Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate Magazine and also a new mum who apparently likes to give her sleeping infant baby daughter the middle finger, and post the photos to her Facebook page.

  My daughter is 7 months old, and her existence encapsulates every clichéd emotional deluge of the new parent. She’s precious to me beyond any imaginable previous personal attachment. She has deepened and broadened and redefined my life and my humanity. I love her with a manic ferocity. Ad nauseum.

 That said, my daughter is a grade-A pain in my ass about going to sleep. (And yes, I’ve tried everything I think is safe to try, armchair pediatricians of the Internet.)

Did I mention how much I love my daughter, who is with me 20 hours a day and who co-sleeps with me and who is my whole life?

Schuman explained her reasoning for posting the questionable photos in a recent piece called “Baby Bird”:

“The reasons I take and post these pictures are varied. I crave emotional release after hours of increasingly desperate nursing, jiggling, rocking, walking, and, my personal favorite, walk-nursing (all wriggling, self-torpedoing 22 pounds of her).
I’m also trying to amuse my husband, to diffuse what could otherwise be even more strain on two adults pushed to the boundaries of civility. And, of course, there’s the defiant gesture of Parenting Realness…”

 

She added:

“…my daughter is a grade-A pain in my a** about going to sleep.”

 

The Slate scribe is also very effusive over her affection for her daughter, and writes, ” I love my daughter, who is with me 20 hours a day and who co-sleeps with me and who is my whole life…”
Schuman is so enthusiastic about her approach to parenting, she’s even started a blog called Pan Kisses Kafka. In it, you can read some of her variations on lullabies. This particular verse is apparently sung to “Amazing Grace.”:

O Lini Bean
You are so tired
Why won’t you go to sleep?
Fuckin’ A, fuckin’ A
You’ve been up all day
Why won’t you go to sleep?

 

Though Schuman isn’t certain that her decision to wield her middle finger in front of her sleeping infant is philosophically sound, she claims that it makes her happy, and will stop doing it if (or when) her daughter realizes what’s happening, and maybe doesn’t find it all that funny.
People have been bashing her parenting skills and mental health online but she apparently doesn't care because she keeps trying to justify why she does what she does. 

More fun times. I am sharing these specimens not to elicit pity. Not to ask for attention. But simply to show that when it comes to women expressing anything other than the placid maternal ideal, this is what happens. Yesterday Waldemar told me he thought I was brave for putting myself and my doubts and failures out there. I don't think of myself that way. I think of myself as a humorist who with a good heart, who knows that the best humor derives from making fun of oneself and not taking cheap shots at others. That is why almost all of my published work is self-effacing. I am not going to change myself or my writing style for anyone, but I want everyone to see that being me in public comes at a price. And by the way, Bruce, don't worry, I have an IUD again and the store is closed.