January 20, 2004, by s.z.

Behind the Ineptitude

When we last saw Meghan Cox Gurdon's children, they were living in a condemned house, using silverware as toys, hoarding fruit, and chasing a feral rabbit through traffic.  And where was their mother, you (and Child Protective Services) ask?  Busy taking notes for her NRO column.

Just how did Meghan get to be America's Worst Mom (registered trademark of TBOGG Industries)?  We'll find out today on this edition of "Behind the Ineptitude."  Through the marvels of Google, we will try to piece together how it came to this, and offer it to you as a cautionary tale.  

As mentioned previously, it all began with an unwanted pregnancy.  Not Meghan's, her grandmother's.  Her husband came from a similar shotgun marriage (with the resulting bitterness, despair, and shattered dreams).  But Meghan is glad, GLAD that Grandma got into trouble, because it allowed her to exist and write conservative blather for YOU, the reader.  

Anyway, since they owe their existence to their ancestors' inability to figure out how contraceptives work, Meghan and spouse continued the tradition, and within six years had four children.  (The hubby's unexplained absence has apparently put a temporarily hold on the breeding.)

But who was Meghan Cox before she got married?  And what was her career before "horrible mother"?  We get some clues from a piece entitled High-Priced Emancipation; in it, Meghan reviews Why There Are No Good Men Left (a tome which tells women that it's their own damned fault they aren't married, because they wasted their young womanhood having careers and shacking up and stuff), and reveals that she herself was almost one of these pathetic old maids:

In real life, we all know them, for they are sisters, friends and daughters: smart girls who went to college, knocked themselves out launching impressive careers, took apartments in edgy urban areas and now, somehow, closing on 30 -- or seeing it in the rear-view mirror -- can't seem to get hitched. Some of us (ahem) barely escaped being one of these ever-questing achievers, who abound to a degree never before seen in history.

So now Meghan gives copies of Why There Are No Good Men Left "to the pretty college students who occasionally baby-sit for my children.  Better they encounter the great social forces at work in their lives now than in five years' time."  Because once these girls hit 23, it may be too late!   

Thus, we've learned that Meghan was reportedly once a "smart girl" with an impressive career of some sort -- and that she wants to save other women from that fate. 

We are given more clues about her pre-mother life in an issue of Woman's Quarterly for which Meghan wrote an article about "the intrinsic and extrinsic values of being a housewife."  The notes indicate that Meghan is "a convert from the radical feminist teachings of the 1970s and 1980s." Thank heavens Meghan met a man who could take her away from all that.  He may not be a prince, but as she indicated previously, she was almost on the shelf, and willing to settle.

Anyway, the former feminist and her savior-from-spinsterhood got married and had the four children mentioned previously (Eglantine, Florence, Hyacinth, and, um, Ant), and Meghan dedicated her life to hearth and home.  "Outwardly, you perform mundane tasks.  Inwardly, you feel you are the heart of your family," as she wrote in that Woman's Quarterly piece.  But what if you are a plaque-blocked heart who just doesn't do its job?  When we return to "Behind the Ineptitude": Meghan locks the babies in the pantry.

Welcome back to "Behind the Ineptitude."  As we've seen, Meghan Cox, an only child and a former career woman, came to motherhood without any real experience with children and with no natural aptitude for the job.  But that didn't stop her from positioning herself as a High Priestess in the Cult of Conservative Housewifedom.  The signs of trouble were apparent shortly after the birth of her first daughter, Eglantine:

So forgive me if I sound smug. I shouldn't, because our attempt to impose domestic tranquility succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Without any idea of how to run a proper nursery, and no experience of babies, my husband and I stumbled on a superior method of training children to sleep through the night with our very first. Our method, simply put, is to break the poppet's spirit before the child is old enough to remember things any other way.

[snip]

Six weeks and three days after Molly was born, the whole household was sleeping through the night. When Paris came along, a couple of years later, we had only a gloomy unfinished basement for him to gnash in at the age of six weeks. In due course, the same happened with Violet and Phoebe, who both learned to sleep in a pantry.

Brutal as this method may seem, I can't recommend it highly enough.

While such brutality may seem shocking, what is even more shocking is that Meghan would boast of her methods in print.  And even worse, be rewarded by the National Post (where hubby worked) with the title of "seasoned" parent (and presumably some money) for writing about her bad parenting skills.

Thus the dynamic was established: Meghan would receive attention and money for revealing her horrible mothering practices (which made other women in similar circumstances feel better about themselves), and the notoriety would encourage her to continue with her Munchausen-by-Proxy personal essays.  After the family relocated to Washington, D.C., Meghan got the gig at NRO.  Last year she was even invited to speak at an event sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.  Her talk was called "Raising Right-Thinking Children . . . in a Left-Leaning World."  This is the description:

Meghan Cox Gurdon’s acclaimed column, "The Fever Swamp," found in National Review Online, brings us the misadventures of a family of six, run by the author in a cheerfully haphazard fashion. . . . Please join AEI as Meghan Cox Gurdon reads what sounds like fiction-but isn’t.

Or is it? We hope it is.

But what about Mr. Cox Gurdon?  Doesn't he bear any responsibility for this mess?  And who the heck is he?  We'll find out when "Behind the Ineptitude" returns.

Welcome back.  Until cloning becomes feasible, women won't be able to have children without a man's contribution.  And just who is the man who enabled Meghan to earn the title of America's Worst Mom?  Let's find out.

Hugo Gurdon
Mr. Gurdon is a 23-year veteran of newspaper journalism. In 1987, he joined the Daily Telegraph, Great Britain’s market-leading daily broadsheet newspaper. . . .After three years in Toronto, Mr. Gurdon and his American wife, Meghan, and their four children, moved back to Washington.  He was appointed editor-in-chief of The Hill on January 2, 2003.

So, Meghan's husband is a newspaper man.  He's foreign (probably British).  

He looks like this:  

Why is he away from home so much?

I think we find the answer to that last question in this piece he wrote for the Daily Telegraph in 1997:

You are 13-years-old and your english teacher sets an essay on Little Women, the novel by Louisa May Alcott. You have heard that the Internet is the greatest advance in education since the pencil sharpener, so you tap out Little Women on your keyboard, click your mouse and find... what?

Persian Kitty's jumpstation - a pornography catalogue with words, pictures and a price list for those items which are not offered free. Here is a sample: Muscle Hunk Gallery - 40 pictures; Slutboys - gay video conferencing; Secrets of Speed Seduction - free "get laid" newsletters; and Cybersex toys. Oh, and finally you see Persian Kitty's purrfect pose of the week, in which two not so little women disport themselves. 

[snip]

If the Supreme Court rules that electronic red light districts are constitutional, fewer will wander down the wrong dark alleys - as I did with my two-year-old daughter, Molly.

Her name alone sparked off 33,299 Internet offerings. It was the fourth which suggested why some controls are needed.

"Up in the room," ran the teaser on the screen, "Mike figured that he had better take the lead because Molly was shy, so he began to take off his shirt ..."

So, he started doing porn searches for his children's names, and that takes most of his time these days.  At least, that's my theory. 

And since the home computer is broken, he has to do his porn research at work, as this recent piece from the South African Sunday Times reveals:

And when I asked Hugo Gurdon, the editor of The Hill in Washington DC, for his wife Meghan's e-mail address - so that we could gossip without paying for transatlantic calls - he told me the computer at home was down and to e-mail him at The Hill. His secretary would print out the e-mail for him to take home to Meghan.

Not quite the form of communication I had in mind.

As I send more and more messages intended for single recipients to joint destinations, I begin to wonder: are these smug couples sending cybersignals to the world that there are no secrets between them? Or am I misunderstanding the pathology of e-mail communication?

"Sharing an address is a way of discouraging too many e-mails," says Mary Killen, the social commentator, "and of making sure you don't encourage too much racy stuff. I have two friends who've fallen in love with people via e-mail, before they even met: it's such a fast and seductive medium that it makes people almost fall in love with themselves."

Did he just break the home computer to keep Meghan from seeing what's  in the cache?  Does he want to protect her from annoying spam?  Is he having an online affair?  Or just a regular affair with his secretary, the one who would print out the emails for Meghan? 

This paragraph from a piece he wrote last summer for the National Post helps clarify things: 

My wife, Meghan, is writing an article for a Time Warner magazine and, as part of her contract, she recently received a corporate questionnaire asking impertinently for all sorts of personal information. She is not seeking a job, a retainer or any other long-standing work relationship with the conglomerate, merely writing a freelance article about, um, a messy aspect of child rearing. Time Warner nevertheless felt the need to know whether she is an Illutian islander, a Hawaiian, an African American or other identifiable minority. Please check the appropriate box. The corporation also wanted to know what kind of sexual encounters my wife prefers; was she gay or lesbian? Just check the box, ma'am.

I think we see the situation: Meghan was writing about messy diapers for Drudgery magazine.  She was sent a questionnaire asking for demographic information, and Hugo had a jealous fit when he saw that it covered sexual orientation, imagining that it was asking his wife if she liked lesbian sexual encounters better than good, old missionary-position sex with him.  So, I think we see why he won't let her get her own emails -- he's afraid she'll have a lesbian affair.

And what kind of man would suspect that of his wife of many years, the mother of his four precious children?  Here are some possible clues -- citations that come up on Google when you search for "Hugo Gurdon" and "wife."  They are from that same internet that brings you Persian Kitty's Jumpstation, so be prepared for sleaze:

Hugo Gurdon agrees with me. ... Just because incest, wife-swapping and virgin-raping are different from ...  Hugo Gurdon. ... law enforcement practices; he seduced Dalton's mentally ill wife, telling her  Hugo Gurdon. ... A FORMER bedding company executive and his second wife installed a trapdoor between their flats to try to escape the attentions of the Child ...

Russian recruitment drive for spies By Hugo Gurdon in Washington  ... RADO (voice-over): His wife blames the culture of corruption

 think about giving up sometimes, but I have a wife and a ... Author: Hugo Gurdon

From the above evidence we get the picture of a wife-swapping, seducer of vulnerable women who installed a trap door to escape the attentions of the child (probably Ant).  A foreigner, it's not surprising that he recruits Russian spies in Washington.  He thinks of suicide sometimes, but has a wife and a family to consider, and doesn't want to give them the satisfaction (and insurance money) his death would bring. 

So, can we blame Meghan for the increasingly neglectful and lame-brained parenthood-style she portrays in her autobiographical writings?  I think not.  But we still like TBOGG's descriptor for her.

4:49:36 AM