Topical Teaching

There’s only one thing worse than leaving your kids, and that’ s writing a book that encourages others to do the same.  Rahna Reiko Rizzuto may be a good writer, but her words, as eloquent as they may be, are bound to do far more harm than good.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto left her home in New York and traveled to Hiroshima, Japan, in search of her war-torn heritage in June 2001. Rizzuto had received a fellowship to spend six months interviewing the few survivors of the atomic bomb.

Four months into her fellowship, Rizzuto received a visit from her husband and children, and she had a revelation: She didn’t want to be a mother.

In an essay for Salon, Rizzuto writes:

Without a strong marriage to support me, after four months alone and in a new country I had grown to love but was only just beginning to understand how to navigate, I had no idea what to do with these bouncing balls of energy. Even feeding them, finding them a bathroom, was a challenge.

Rizzuto realized that motherhood was an all-encompassing responsibility and she didn’t want to be swallowed up by it.

Her choice is out-of-the-ordinary; less than 4 percent of children live with their father only and in most cases its because a mother has passed away.

Rizzuto lost many friends who viewed her decision as selfish.

Her children were 3 and 5 years-old at the time.  Of course she was selfish!  But that isn’t what makes me so upset.  It’s the fact she feels this decision is so positive, that she wants to reach out to other mothers who are struggling with the same feeling of entrapment.

People are entitled to make bad decisions, and in my opinion Rizzuto has made a shocking decision.  But what disturbs me more is that she wants to encourage others to do the same.  When a man or woman decides to make a family they must choose to make their family their number one priority.  Is it selfish to leave your kids for no other reason than you are not enjoying the role of parent.

I heard her interviewed on The View this afternoon.  One of the panelists made the point that if Rizzuto was a man, this story wouldn’t have received so much publicity.  To that assertion I make the following points:

1. Does that make it right.  No father should ever put the children they helped bring into this world second.  No father should ever tell their kids they don’t love being a father so they’ve decided to live down the street.  That is unacceptable and downright selfish!
2. Rizzuto wants publicity.  She seems to be having the time of her life appearing on all kids of media and flogging her book.
3. What if a man wrote a book encouraging other men to leave their children in favour of a more free lifestyle?  How do you think that will go down?

The following quotes from an article about her really upset me:

Today, Rizzuto is an author and faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, and she’s creating her own sort of motherhood that challenges our culture’s definition of what a mother should be. She lives down the street from her ex-husband and her children. The boys are teenagers and come to her house for dinner but they always return to Dad’s house to sleep.

I don’t think it is “motherhood” she is creating.  Let’s not let a selfish decision gets confused with a new style of parenting.  And why can’t she have them over for the night?  Is it going to remind her for a fleeting moment that she is their mother?

She says that leaving her children improved rather than hurt her relationship with them. “I had to leave my children to find them,” she writes on Salon.