I don’t understand why more women don’t want to be mothers in this country that doesn’t support mothers
But for real, can we all stop bashing on childless women?
Happy Mother’s Day, loves!
I wanted to re-share this satirical piece I published last year. Especially since now our current administration is offering women a $5,000 “baby bonus” for each additional child, which should easily cover the $331,933 average cost of raising a child in this country (and that number is pre-inflation).
In all seriousness, watching Republicans disparage childless women who may or may not have chosen to have children makes me want to smear glue on some cretins’ toilet seats. Until these clowns offer legislation to help raise our children and not just performative awards or $5,000 bonuses, no one should be commenting on anyone's decision to have or not have kids.
Lest we forget, these are the same bros who voted against helping women conceive via IVF and would save the life of a fetus over that of a woman. Good Goddess. I can’t even keep a straight face, much less want to make a baby, because just living in the same country as these asshats is such a boner killer.
Indeed, the only proper response is satire. So here you go. Shout out to Donnie Gott, who helped me write this piece. 🖤
Dear Childless Cat Lady,
Thank you for taking time from your sad life of Girl-Bossing while browsing boutique hotels in Portugal during work breaks to listen to why you should have children. As my friend Sarah Huckabee Sanders says, children make you humble, and you, Boss Lady™, are way too confident.
You should have kids so you, too, can have your favorite dry-clean-only pants used as a napkin by your syrup-smeared daughter. You need to experience the pleasure of only being able to buy clothing that is solely machine washable. Just kidding! You don’t get to buy anything because you already blew your budget on winter coats and boots for the kids.
You, too, deserve the ancient and sacred knowledge of a collapsed pelvic floor and the excitement of wondering, “Will I completely wet my pants in public today? Or just a little?”
As JD Vance said on that one podcast, “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working…instead of starting a family and having children… They don’t realize…that that is actually a path to misery.”
True, women’s liberation is found in working 168 hours a week, unpaid, and looking good while doing it. Take that, Audre Lorde.
As a mom, nothing brings me more joy than spending all my free time doing unpaid, invisible household and emotional labor for my children and husband. What could be more fulfilling than sacrificing all my needs, wants, time, low back, internet bandwidth, and sense of self to my children? Yes, I’m up with insomnia worrying about them getting shot up at school, hooked on drugs, or falling victim to online bullying because ’Merica. But all that time up at night frees up space for deep cleaning and meal prep!
Again, I refer to JD Vance, whose qualification to tell women they should have children is that he’s a man. Vance says that childless Americans are “more sociopathic” than those with children and make the country “less mentally stable.”
Boy howdy, is he right! I have never felt more mentally stable than I do when spending my Friday nights in the lap of luxury behind a locked door in my bedroom, folding laundry and processing my week of maternal and marital bliss. Turns out it DOES take a village — of voices in my head — to keep me from burning it all to the ground.
Why would you want to climb Annapurna with your girl squad when you can win all the Mother of the Year awards? Sure, those awards don’t exist, and if they did, they mean nothing, and wait — what’s this? Oh, the father just took the children to the pool for an hour and fed them one meal purchased from the grocery store deli — and the award has just been renamed, wait……wait for it….the Father of the Year award! And really, he deserves it because of this and that one time he picked up the children from school.
What it comes down to is this: who wouldn’t want to have kids in this late-stage capitalist hellscape that doesn’t support mothers or offer enough paid leave or affordable childcare, where if you’re lucky enough to find childcare, it takes half your wages to pay for it? Sure, it costs, on average, $331,933 to raise a child, plus your sex life and infinite expenses in out-of-network therapy. Absolutely, women’s salaries plummet by 40 percent after childbirth, while new fathers experience virtually zero loss in income. But to watch your child’s naked tush parading in the background of the Zoom? Priceless.
Sincerely,
A Mom
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~ Summer
I confess. I am a childless cat lady. Or I would be, if I had a cat. All of my kitties have gone to feline heaven. I am childless by choice, because I was so screwed up I could barely handle my own life, let alone someone else's. I blame no one for that and have come out the other side far more healthy emotionally and spiritually. But now I am a little long in the tooth to have kids. I figure next around I will be a much better parent because I took this life out to heal me. As a nation, if we are resorting to bribing women to reproduce, we have problems that $5,000 a pop isn't going to fix.
They’re ‘flooding the zone’ (I believe that’s the steve Bannon strategy of throwing so much shit at people they can’t think because they’re ducking too fast).
Choosing not to have children is a choice. A word they hate without a “no” in front of it.