Writes Lydia Kiesling, in "Yearning for a Third/Did I really need another baby for my family to be complete?" (New York Magazine).
That's how the essay ends — with commitment to a cold left-wing platitude and italicized wistfulness about the life she decided the "systems" had denied to her.
The author calls herself away from the question "Who was that phantom baby?" That felt so sad to me.
I don't know if this really connects, but what swirled up in my mind was the last thing Andre said in "My Dinner with Andre": "People hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?"
I don't know if this really connects, but what swirled up in my mind was the last thing Andre said in "My Dinner with Andre": "People hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?"
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32 ટિપ્પણીઓ:
There are writing gigs exclusively for progressive women:
Why I don't want children.
Why I'm cheating on my husband.
Why I'm disappointed in my masculine son.
Etc.
A gal could cycle through these every year.
I guess there are specific gigs for men, just not nearly as many in the most influential outlets.
we have created a society without danger and where there’s so much abundance that people are allowed to act like children, forever.
These late life babies are a hallmark of no grandchildren in the house in our late 40's and early 50's. My daughter didn't have her child until her late-ish 30's and so there was no 4 year old grandchild zooming around the house till we were in our 70's - almost too old to enjoy the little rug rat. Remember when couple got married right out of high school and had an entire family up and thriving by 24 years old?
Some single mothers don't want to let go of their little boys ever. Sons leave. Mom's might remarry a forever little boy...
The work we do to fight these systems is reproductive labor even when there’s not a single baby in your house.
"Compelling yet tedious. I feel spent like a man who forced to wear his genitals like a pendant."
“Our society is designed to enable and reward parenthood for some women and guarantees a thriving existence for basically no children. The work we do to fight these systems is reproductive labor even when there’s not a single baby in your house.”
The vapid stupidity of this is amazing.
One of the interesting phenomenon of my social media exchanges is people claiming that the world is going to hell and some “system” of deliberate malefaction is behind this. I like to present a couple of charts showing the global decline in people suffering hunger from 1980-2023 (21% to 7%) and extreme poverty during the same period (42% to 8%). Everything is getting better, much better. Hunger and poverty are being eradicated, despite the claims of the catastrophists.
"I guess there are specific gigs for men, just not nearly as many in the most influential outlets."
"Why I am personally redefining my masculinity by letting my wife sleep with anyone she wants to."
"Why real men are vegans."
"Why transitioning to female helped me understand women."
My observation here is that this writer and article illustrate a profound difference between left and right, namely, the nature and significance of the nuclear family: mother, father, and children (regardless of their number) and its role in creating a lifetime of shared happiness and sense of fulfillment. People on the right have experienced it, want to continue it, understand and accept their role in it, and generally tend to have a sense of overall satisfaction with their lives (as has been noted in numerous studies).
The left on the other hand, don't. They tend to come from broken or dysfunctional homes, even if their "family" nominally had all the individual pieces. They haven't had that experience. And so their focus is always "Me". What will make Me happy, fulfilled, satisfied, etc.? And thus, they never are. They worry about phantom babies. They dispose of inconvenient real babies. And it's OK, because Me, in their reality, is the sole survivor of their family experience.
Geez, lady.
Prog women seem to spend a lot of time interrogating straw men. It’s comic but I’ve seen the damage it does to the Prog chick’s mental health.
--- the question I need to ask myself
The giveaway phrase.
Everything that follows will be: a) virtue-signaling; b) rationalization; c) irrelevant & mistaken; d) all of the above.
More navel-gazing intricacy written for those who need a distraction from examining their own lives.
Why ask why?
I’m quite all right with leftists choosing voluntary extinction. The future belongs to whoever shows up for it, and that is looking like Mormons, traditional Catholics, orthodox Jews, Amish, “Quiver-Full” evangelicals, and sadly, Muslims.
The days of Ward and June Cleaver are long gone. Patriarchal families are not the format of the 21st Century. There are few households with one bread winner while the other one stays home as Mrs or Mr mom.You got men living in caves by themselves while women are out CEO'ING MAJOR COMPANIES. People in my era would stay together in farcial marriages, make believe family routines were the norm living lies. Those days divorces were shunned on even though the relationships were long divorced,the kids knew it and so did the communities .The lie stopped being the norm and time moved people on.The world was different in the 1800's and the 1900's and moving rapidly in the 2000's Its like 8 trak tapes they were popular for awhile then replaced. Some of the biggest set ups of the previous era was Religion, what your supposed to do. Living in lies is no longer the way the society has chosen to go. You cant get back a Mickey Mantle baseball card,women no longer tolerate as they used to,.kids are saying aint none of that for me. WELCOME TO THE MACHINE. You can live the life of Ward and June in your mind but you are in the minority , Life on Life's terms, deal with it.Our 45 years of marriage, 4 children and 8 grandchildren plus great grandchildren just happen to be a blessing for us,but we are part of the minority and so be it. Move on or get swallowed up.Time keeps on slippin into the future. The NEW WORLD 9th Beatitude' The meek shall inherit the earth,and the rest will leave for space"
All her self-obsessed navel-gazing irritates me, for a specific reason: My wife and I had two sons, probably would have had a third child. A daughter would have been a blessing. But our second son has cystic fibrosis. Any further children would have had a one-in-four chance of developing CF, which was fatal by age thirty back then. Not bad odds, but you don't gamble with other people's money. Let alone with a child's life. So no third child. No matter how much we wanted that.
Any woman who has gone through IVF to conceive a child probably finds Ms. Kiesling just as annoying.
I had my last (of many) children after 40. And yeah, it was a technicolor explosion for our family. That's not fake. Having a toddler around really brings out the best in me and my teenagers. Win. Win. Win.
People in my era would stay together in farcial marriages
For some definitions of "farcical." I think you mean "loveless," and certainly, some did.
But now, I think it's at least as common - my guess would be it's much more common, given the divorce rate - for people to enter marriage with a farcical idea of how it should go. How it must go, or else. One thing we've lost to no-fault divorce seems to be the expectation that marriage is not primarily a romantic endeavor, a stroke of luck that these two people meet and are effortless soulmates forever - it's a daily decision to keep on evolving toward one another, to keep accommodating the other, to keep doing the loving things even when you don't "feel" loving, to give 100% on both sides (not "meet halfway").
The chance of two people's meeting and being effortless soulmates forever is ridiculously tiny. Why should my auto-soulmate EVER cross my path, in a world of eight billion people? You become soulmates by being committed to growing together. Sometimes it's impossible, sure. But I doubt that it's impossible a full fifty percent of the time, and I refuse to romanticize divorce as "s/he just wasn't The One."
This may be the longest response I've ever made to a Dinky comment. For some reason the "farcical marriages" bit caught my eye - I seldom get that far in.
Our third child was a surprise. The best of my life. Which isn't to say that when I took that pregnancy test, I didn't experience a moment of stomach-dropping... I suppose "dread" is the word; we thought we were done, about to emerge from the diaper years, set up to fit in a sedan and a single hotel room and never to have to stray from man-on-man defense.
But we weren't, and that kid - that young man, now - brings the Technicolor all the time.
"The work we do to fight these systems is reproductive labor..."
This is feminist Marxoid bullshit that denies biological reality and tries to frame it as "oppression".
FAFO. It's a girl!
The modern Western woman’s penchant for navel gazing is unparalleled.
My wife and I were married for nine years before we chose to have a child--he just turned forty.
We discussed having another and decided not to. Son was a fantastic kid (up until 11th grade) and we didn't want to press our luck or strain the finances even more.
We both had multiple brothers, and knew the drawbacks of crowded houses and schedules, leaving aside the possibility of sheer bad genes.
Narr, nobody owes ann an explanation for their family... hth.
If it "goes without saying" then why did you say it?
Words are empty. Must suck to be a word person in the material world. Analysis paralysis in support of rationalization is an ouroboros.
Maybe I should have used a Venn diagram.
Comments are appearing, vanishing, and reappearing.
Wonder how her two actual children feel about reading this.
Things look normal again--
Sure, Not an oldster. But I'm not 'splaining to the Prof, I'm describing one couple's thought process and decision tree--we CHOSE to have a child and CHOSE not to have another.
By coincidence, I was at a retirement reception this morning catching up with old colleagues. Somebody asked about my son, who they had seen last as a pre-teen, and I said he just turned forty.
She said, "Man, you're old!"
I said, "I'm older than that. If we had started right away, he'd be fifty."
Jamie @ 10:23 AM,
I'm generally a DNFTT type, but wow something really good came out of DD's blathering: what a sublimely wonderful statement you wrote there, and it captures a lot of my approach to the subject. The fantasy of The One™ has done an awful lot of damage, and offered fake justification for all kinds of family abandonment.
Granted, other people might have experienced this differently, but for me neither meeting my wife-to-be nor actually marrying her magically caused me to stop finding (other) women attractive - - I just stopped doing anything about that.. Pretty sure that's the point of "forsaking all others"...
@Kirk--
Being married restricts your diet, but it doesn't mean you can't look at the menu.
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