Give Kate Gosselin a Break, Man

Every where you look, all you see is Jon and Kate, with our without their eight, and I have a bone to pick with humanity. Kate is getting the worst rap ever. She's being generally described in the media as a shrew-like control freak who barks orders at her husband while abandoning her children to a nanny, and taking advantage of her fame.

People, you've got it all wrong. Wednesday, I went to see the first grade music performance at nine in the morning, went home, packed up the car with all the stuff for the first grade party, for which I had made lists and shopped and planned. During the party, I served food, cleaned up, danced to the limbo song twenty times, and schlepped all the crap back to my car. Then I cleaned up all the party stuff at home, took a small break, made cosmos for the PTA party (finding that I didn't have enough triple sec even though my husband said we did) and, as Sissy Spacek says in Coalminer's Daughter, the best movie ever made: I was about ready to die. I still had to go to the PTA party, in cute shoes, and be charming, but, if you've read me at all, you know that was the easy part.

My point, at long last, is that I have one child; one child to feed and clothe, one child whose music performances I have to see, whose classroom I have to volunteer in, and my husband, bless him, has a secure (knock wood) job that provides for our family, and you want to know something? I still called him on his cell phone and yelled at him that he was wrong about the triple sec and made him get off the bus at a different spot so he could stop at the liquor store and buy some more. People with two or three or eight children have days like Wednesday ALL THE TIME. Of course Kate Gosselin is a controlling harpy! She's trying to raise eight kids and support a family of ten. Of course she yells at her husband and her kids, its completely understandable and not surprising to me at all. Reese Witherspoon, that sage master, was quoted as saying, If you don't yell at your kids, you're not spending enough time with them, and I think she is completely right. Same goes for the husbands. Do we go to their offices and rearrange their work spaces and mess with their routines? No. They're on our turf when they're at home, and we are entitled to a little eye rolling and snarkiness.

And another thing! If I had eight children to feed and put through college, and I had a popular show, I would be striking while the iron was hot and squeezing every last dime out of it while I could. She may not have a job next year, and the way people are going after her, she may not be able to show her face next year. I think her hair looks weird, too, but I also think she's doing the best she can. Anyone who thinks that moms are always sweet and nice and smell like freshly baked cookies and give their husbands BJs every day is wrong wrong wrong. The honeymoon is over, and it things can get ugly.

You go, Kate Gosselin, you shake your groove thing and rock on.