Touched Out: Is Motherhood a Scam?
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Anonymous
I’m not the PP with 3 kids so I don’t have a personal bias here. But I don’t understand your thinking. Like under your thinking, wouldn’t a mom of 1 have the same argument against moms of 2? “Quit complaining, you chose to have 2 kids” And wouldn’t a SAHM have the same bias against working moms? “Quit complaining, you chose to have a career and kids”. Or maybe you are saying that it’s just so objectively unreasonable to have three kids that those mothers don’t deserve empathy/grace/understanding? I worry when we (as a society) get too invested in the “right” path of motherhood - like motherhood should be limited to women with 1 or 2 kids, who work part time and have a household income well into six figures - we fall into the traps the author identifies. Basically we now pit mothers against each other for making choices we personally didn’t make and lose sight of the fact that society is failing mothers in general. Just food for thought. |
Anonymous
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Women have agency over their fertility but they act helpless.
-First, women should really become ok with not having kids. They are complete without children too. -Next, women should have the financial and emotional strength to be ok and have kids without a husband or a partner. If they are particularly ambitious, they should freeze their eggs. -They should not be in a hurry to have a child once they get married. Wait for several years and suss out what kind of husband and father the man will be before you decide to have a child with him. -Do not have more than 2 kids. -Create a support network before you have kids -Leave the marriage if the husband is particularly horrible and lame. |
Anonymous
It's not "objectively unreasonable" but just so obvious that it's hard. Like if I chose a job that was a gazillion hours to make $$$$ money (more than I needed). Or buying an enormous house and saying it takes forever to clean it. Or a very time consuming hobby that turns out to be very time consuming! I mean yeah it's hard but so what, there are a lot of other paths. I think having 3+ kids has never been "easy" under any circumstances (historically or elsewhere in the world) so to chalk the difficulty up to some broader societal issue is silly. |
Anonymous
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Yes but when we lived in Germany there was a daycare at the end of my street that had a drop in option and my hospital also had a play room I could leave my kids in so I got significantly more healthcare for myself while I lived abroad. If I had severe dental pain I could just go to the dentist without having to jump through hoops to find a babysitter. I could see a therapist for my mental health and my husband and I could get marriage counseling. The authors point is that American society makes everything so. Damned. Hard. And then hits women over the head with this line about how “you chose this.”
I don’t recall choosing to have a long wait list for daycare at my kids school, choosing for it to cost so much despite the fact that I have been paying taxes since I started working at fifteen, and choosing NOT to have freshly prepared healthy lunches offered to my kids at school for free like they do in France. I don’t recall choosing a government that does fund maternity leave not to mention paternity leave. Because if I had a choice I wouldn’t choose any of those things. |
Anonymous
| Does not fund |
Anonymous
No, because I love my children. Why would I ever think that? They can be with me whenever they want. That’s the point of being a mother. You all just want to pawn them on someone else. |
Anonymous
| That’s really simplistic. It’s possible to have complex emotions like loving your kids and also resenting missing out on other things. Having one dimensional emotions is a sign of immaturity. It’s not a virtue. |
Anonymous
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DP here.
Frankly, I only had two kids (one of each) and I did not feel touched out. I feel a lot of people who get stressed with parenting and reach their breaking point, have three kids and no support system. I also think I am really good with kids of all ages. My kids are in their teens and twenties now and I have not had any typical problems with them. We are also a very physically demonstrative family and perhaps it meets the needs of everyone who needs a physical touch? Being touched out is not an issue. |
Anonymous
95% that's what the mother wants, no what the father or the kid wants. |
Anonymous
The point is ok, you have one kid, you didn’t know what to expect cuz reality is different than fantasy, even two because the multiplier effect, but anyone with 3 kids knew good and well what they were getting into so complaining is silly really. |
Anonymous
Here’s an unpopular take from a millennial: Liberal feminism is the scam. We were sold a load of bs about how important it is to have a career and put “self first” (which again always means career) so that now we have no choice but to be a cog in the wheel. And we don’t have time to actual enjoy the mothering that comes with being a mother. So society gets us to blame the stress of motherhood instead of our pointless pursuit of a career that no one will remember us for ten minutes after we’ve left this earth. |
Anonymous
This is true in small numbers. But as a society, we are not prepared to care for a whole generation of lonely, aging, ailing elderly people with no children. So I hope this trend of diminishing the importance of women having children does not continue. |
Anonymous
I'm the PP you're responding to and your last sentence is the crux of the matter. It's not motherhood. It's feeling overwhelmed when children are young because your partner is crap and you have to pick up his slack. I still don't know what society is doing to back him up effectively within the confines of your living room but I get that's what you feel. I was raised by a single father who did everything. It never crossed my mind that my DH wouldn't also be capable of doing everything. We clashed early in our marriage because there was a mismatch of expectations. I would say we both prevailed and found a balance. He makes the kids breakfast every morning and make sure they get out the the door because h's an early riser. I help them wrap things up at night and get them to bed because I am a night owl. I genuinely have more energy and can take them to activity after activity without flagging. Not only can I do that, I want to do that. He isn't as robust but can stay in one place, figure things out with precision, and clean the house, which would drive me insane. I would suggest getting society out of your living room and say that he can choose either a house cleaner or a divorce lawyer. What would be cheaper? Because I agree, f that. |
Anonymous
The problem here is that you have objectively unusual experiences with men as fathers and partners but assume that everyone either has that experience or has the opportunity to have it. You are failing to exercise empathy for other women because you're falling into the classic trap of "well this works well for me without much trouble, so that must be the case for most people." Approximately 15% of all families are single-father households, and that's the highest it's ever been -- it was well under 10% when I was a child growing up. Among people who grew up with two-parent households, the vast majority grew up with fathers who made significantly more than their mothers, or where their mothers did not work at all. So statistically, most people grew up in families where their mothers did the vast majority (and not unusually 100%) of childcare and homeware, even if their mothers worked, and especially if their moms were single mothers. Even in households with some outsourcing, the management of that outsourcing was overwhelmingly managed by women. Now a generation or two later, the problem is this: women are in the workplace in record numbers, they make more than ever, have more responsibility at work, and the percentage of households where women outran male partners is higher than ever and growing. But women continue to do significantly more childcare and housework than men, and even in households that outsource these things, women are far more likely than men to management the outsourcing. And of course, who do these tasks get outsourced to? Women, many of whom have kids of their own. So whatever your personal experience, the truth is that we live in a society where women continue to do the lion's share of childcare and housework, and increasingly do a much larger percentage of the paid work. THAT IS THE SCAM. And it's not specific to my household or a single couple negotiating their chores. It is structural and cultural. If you can't see that, the problem is your own myopic fixation on your outlier experience as representative of all people, and also your false belief that your marriage is more equitable simply because you chose to make it so, and not because of many factors over which you had no control. Stop gaslighting other women. |
Anonymous
PP again. I also wanted to add that while I grew up in a family with a male breadwinner and a SAHM, my DH actually grew up in a family where his mom outlearned his dad for most of their working lives, and his dad did help out around the house probably more than the average father in the 70s/80s in that part of the country. BUT it was still enormously inequitable because while my FIL helped, he did not view childcare or the management of the home as a masculine activity or as belonging to him, so despite being the breadwinner and having the far more steady job with better benefits (she was a school teacher), my MIL still did most of the childcare and housework. However, they also had more support built into their lives via their community -- a church that offered free childcare on weekends, counseling, and other support, networks through the VFW and my MIL's school that helped families when they had a new baby or an illness in the family. This support? Largely offered for free by women, SAHMs or women whose children were grown, who focused their energy on offering community support instead of on either paid work or internally focused hobbies. So even in my DH's outlier experience, it was still women doing the vast majority of the unpaid labor, and even the mildly more equitable (but still not equitable) marriage of his parents, it facilitated by the contributions of other women. Like I just do not know what to do with people who can't see how this works on a macro level, and how it all impacts the choices we have on a micro level. The "you chose this" or "well this is specific to your husband and no one else's" people are so exhausting because it is like you are being intentionally blind to things that are all around you but you simply choose not to see. |