Guilty of Love After a few years of marriage, a woman's ardor seems to shift from her spouse to her children, resulting in an all consuming maternal desire that overshadows any romance in a once loving marriage. This is the stigma that Ayelet Waldman’s argument is founded against in “Truly, Madly, Guiltily.” Waldman goes as far as to say, ‘There is absolute unanimity on this topic, and instant reassurance. Except, that is, from me.” Truly, Madly, Guiltily has a wide display of rhetorical tools used by Waldman, from the relaxed format laced with satire, to the loads of empirical evidence from her experiences, to the authority of her own motherhood. She is not only shifting the stigma that moms must have kids as the centerpiece of their lives, …show more content…
She did not start out with critiquing their choices, in fact, she starts out much more timid, asking, “Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe?” Ayelet never says these mothers are in the wrong for loving their children, in fact she makes it clear that she loves her own. The tone of this article is much lighter at the beginning, she talks about the parental past time known as “God forbid” as a way of connecting with other mothers in a humorous and relatable way. I would argue it is this paragraph where the tone changes, and she takes a bold stand, “Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband.” Waldman tops the paragraph with this solid statement of who is the centre of her life. For a minute she uses the lack of satire in her writing to set a very serious tone, to show her audience that she really means what she says, before she picks it up again talking about her husband and his love for klingon politics. The author knows when to be serious and oppositional, as well as when to appease her readers who do not see eye to eye with her. She also knows when to get into the shoes of her audience and when to teach from her own