Колумнист Townhall осуждает публикацию в The Cut, где матери признались, что пожалели о рождении детей

I got genuinely angry reading this. Not annoyed. Not politically irritated. Angry. The Cut published a piece this week called “I Regret Having Children.” Three mothers explain why, given the chance to do it over again, they wouldn’t. And somewhere in all the brave honesty and therapeutic language and celebration of women finally saying the unsayable, I kept thinking about somebody apparently too unimportant to make it into the headline. The children. They can read this someday. One of these mothers has children who are six and three. Another has a three-year-old daughter. The third has a one-year-old son. They have names. They have lives. They love their mothers. And someday they’re going to know how to use Google. Imagine finding the article. Imagine being fourteen years old, sitting alone in your bedroom, and reading that Mom told the world she’d have been happier if you had never existed. Tell me again who’s being liberated by this. I want to be careful about something because it matters. Some of these women have suffered. There is postpartum depression here. Anxiety. A traumatic delivery. Sleep deprivation. Marital trouble. One mother describes hallucinating. Those things aren’t funny, and they aren’t character defects. Women suffering through them need help, husbands who show up, families who rally around them, doctors who listen, and churches and communities willing to carry some weight. Give them all of that. But somewhere along the way our culture made a very strange turn. We went from saying struggling mothers deserve help to saying motherhood itself might be the problem. And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of children being discussed as the obstacle standing between adults and their authentic lives. I’m sick of pregnancy being treated as a medical problem to be solved. I’m sick of babies being reduced to economic calculations. I’m sick of hearing that children destroy careers, destroy freedom, destroy bodies, destroy relationships, destroy the planet. I’m especially sick of a culture that calls virtually every adult desire an identity to be affirmed while treating the most defenseless human beings among us as optional accessories whose value depends upon whether they interfere with somebody else’s plans. Arthur Brooks, the Harvard happiness researcher, has talked about this, and here’s the interesting thing: he doesn’t dispute the premise. Childless couples often report more day-to-day enjoyment. Of course they do. More sleep. More restaurants. More freedom. More finished sentences. But Brooks makes a distinction The Cut almost completely misses. Enjoyment isn’t the same thing as meaning. Caring for children can score surprisingly low when people are asked how happy they are in the moment and extraordinarily high when they’re asked whether what they’re doing has meaning. Well, there it is. Children cost you something. That’s not evidence that parenthood failed. That’s part of what makes parenthood matter. Their exhaustion is real. The sleepless nights are real. The frustration is real. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise. But a baby is utterly unimpressed by your résumé. A baby needs you. Completely. And being needed like that does something to a human being that a life optimized entirely around personal enjoyment never can. Brooks has the research. I’ve lived it. My children didn’t interrupt my life. They changed what my life was for. Was every moment wonderful? Please. There were nights without sleep. Money worries. Vomit. Temper tantrums. Emergency rooms. School problems. Days when I was exhausted and days when I undoubtedly wasn’t nearly the father I should have been. Welcome to parenthood. Nobody promised transcendence every Tuesday afternoon. But here’s what my children never owed me: An apology for existing. That’s the part of The Cut’s piece I can’t shake. Adults are allowed complicated feelings. Mothers are allowed to struggle. Fathers are too. People should be able to tell a therapist things they’d never tell another living soul. But publishing those thoughts for millions of strangers to consume changes something. Now your child can consume them too. And perhaps that’s where a magazine editor should ask a question beyond whether the story is provocative enough to generate clicks. What happens to the kid? Because children hear more than adults think they hear. They wonder whether they’re wanted. They wonder whether they’re loved. They wonder whether Mom would be happier without them. Most good parents spend years trying to make sure their children never have to wonder about that last one. Now we’ve apparently decided putting the answer online is courageous. No. Some thoughts don’t become virtuous merely because they’re authentic. Some impulses shouldn’t be normalized merely because other people share them. And every private emotion doesn’t deserve a magazine spread. Sometimes love means carrying something difficult without handing the burden to your child. That’s adulthood. That’s parenthood. And there’s something else happening here that bothers me even more. The more our culture portrays children as burdens, the fewer people will want them. We’ve already spent years telling young adults what having children will cost them. Their money. Their freedom. Their sleep. Their careers. Their travel. Their bodies. Then we seem surprised when they decide not to have any. Now comes the next message: Even the people who did it wish they hadn’t. Wonderful. What exactly do we think happens when an entire generation absorbs that message without ever hearing the other half — the meaning, the purpose, the extraordinary dignity of being needed? Children aren’t a disease civilization needs to eradicate. They’re how civilization continues. They’re also human beings. And maybe that’s the simplest point we’ve somehow managed to lose. A three-year-old isn’t an impediment to somebody else’s self-actualization. She’s a three-year-old. She needs you. She trusts you. And for a few precious years, she thinks you’re approximately the greatest human being God ever put on Earth. Don’t make her someday discover that while she was busy thinking that about you, you were telling strangers you wished she’d never arrived. Struggling mothers need compassion. They need help. They may desperately need somebody to tell them they’re not alone. But children need something too. They need adults willing to sacrifice for them. They need parents who understand that love is frequently inconvenient. And they need a culture that stops teaching everybody that the highest purpose of human existence is avoiding anything that might interfere with personal happiness. The Left can keep preaching autonomy as the highest good. I don’t buy it. Some of the greatest things you’ll ever do will cost you something. Marriage does. Faith does. Caring for aging parents does. And children certainly do. They’re worth it. Every sleepless night. Every changed plan. Every dollar. Every sacrifice. Because one day those little people become adults. And they’ll remember who convinced them they were loved. They can also read what you wrote. Make sure those two stories match. Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth. Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.