Women Are Crazy

I’ve been around the internet in some form or another since it began. My husband is an IT professional, so even when I was uninterested in using it myself, I was aware of it in a contemptuous, sneering sort of way. At that time, only computer geeks and gaming dorks used the internet.

At the risk of sounding like an aging dowager…I remember when you had to pay by the minute and you had to use a proxy service like AOL or Compu Serve. I also remember hitting the roof when I found my husband had racked up a $400 AOL bill playing a now antiquated, but then cutting edge RPG.

When the information superhighway exploded I was a young wife with a new infant who had quit her full time job to stay at home and care for my baby. Like everyone else, I was looking for something. I got on the net to find some way of connecting to people like those I had once encountered daily with no thought to their presence in my life, but whom I now missed dearly in my isolation.

What I found, were message boards. People talking to one another about anything and everything. Expecting Club boards, Playgroup Boards, Debate Boards, Recipe Boards, Book Club Boards...it was a dizzyingly diverse array of people, opinions and knowledge. I was dazzled and immediately drawn in.

Now, many years later, the internet has evolved and with it, my perception of those who populate it.

What I have learned, is this: Women are crazy.

Now, I don’t mean dress your doggie up in evening clothes and serve him snausages at the table kind of crazy. I mean, Single White Female Crazy. Squeaky Frohm crazy. Munchausen By Proxy Crazy.

But I have also learned that for every mean, crazy, desperately unhappy woman out there, who needs to spread the misery, sorrow, and discontent that poisons her soul, there are TEN women of immeasurable kindness, incalculable generosity, inexhaustible strength, undying passion, and unceasing tenderness.

For every woman is who Texas Cheerleader Mom crazy…there are ten who are give the mortgage payment to a homeless family so they can have a Christmas kind of crazy. Drive 500 miles in the middle of the night because a friend found out her husband is cheating on her kind of crazy. Sell everything she owns to finance a trip to Africa to care for dying AIDS patients kind of crazy. Rent out her uterus to help an infertile couple have a much longed for child kind of crazy.

At times, it has been tempting to simply give myself over to the belief that all women are contemptible human beings. But there are women I have been privileged to know that have taught me that is not so and I thank them for reminding me that I have plenty of reasons to be proud of my gender.

So yeah. Women are crazy. Thank God.


Crazy Woman Canyon, Big Horn National Forest;As beautiful and formidable as its many namesakes.

(This is a repost from the early days of my blog when only a handful of close friends knew of its existence and the meaning behind this piece. I can't help feeling that it is particularly apropros right now, and I am compelled to repost it. Forgive me for taking the lazy way out today.)