ON HATING YOUR CHILDREN

ON HATING YOUR CHILDREN.

By Paul Merkley.

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 On Hating Our Children and Being Applauded For It.

What must be the future of a civilization whose most privileged voices are celebrated for declaring that they hate their children and that they have told them so? 

Here is the link : https://www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers.

And here, to spare you, are a few salient lines:

French psychotherapist Corine Maier stoked an international firestorm and condemnation in 2008 with her manifesto No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children. Her two children, the manifesto proclaims, left her bankrupt and exhausted. 

Also summoned to the spotlight to receive applause is “Isabella Dutton, a 57-year-old British mother of two grown children [who] created a furor with a Daily Mail  Essay headlined: ‘The mother who says having these two children is the biggest regret of my life.’”

These researchers  have cornered a number of mothers who describe the happy day when they sat their “kids” down and explained that they hated everything about them. “Hated” is the very word they use. In the words of one, the new life of liberation began with discovering that “their amazing life comes at the expense of my own.” This heart-stopping truth – this truth which Maclean’s  magazine imagines is the hottest bit of psychology off the press — has been the homeliest of home-truths, proclaimed by our ancestors back in cave -man time.  But now expunged is all sense that something of priceless value has been gained in exchange for this “expense.”

Children are Exhausting.

Maclean’s refers us to “a French psychotherapist Corinne Maier [who] stoked an international firestorm and condemnation in 2008 with her manifesto No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children; her two children left her ‘exhausted and bankrupt,’ and she couldn’t wait for them to leave home, she wrote.” And there is “Isabella Dutton, a 57-year-old British mother of two grown children [who] created furor with a Daily Mail essay headlined: ‘The mother who says having these two children is the biggest regret of her life.’”

A special heroine of the anti-motherhood cause is Lauren Byrne, who “rejects the idealized script, and with it the silencing of mothers. That’s why she set up her Facebook page, she says: ‘Everyone was talking about how fantastic it was. And I was, “Who are you people?’ I’m exhausted. … Even saying you want time away from your kids is verboten… People say, ‘You shouldn’t say that. They’re blessings. You should feel lucky.’ But it’s not unicorns and rainbows all the time. But women can’t complain that ‘this is really hard’ because people think you’re a bad mom.”

Angela, who lives in Newfoundland, went for months with debilitating undiagnosed post-partum after the premature birth of twins. She felt cheated, she told Maclean’s, when she didn’t experience the instant bond she was told mothers are supposed to have. ‘I felt I had been robbed.’ She wasn’t prepared for the difficulties: ‘Everyone talks about motherhood like it’s this wonderful thing and you’re going to love those children the second they come out,’ she says. ‘Nobody talks about how hard having children can be, how exhaustion can affect you and how sometimes love has to be developed.’ She doesn’t feel she can be candid, even with health professionals.”

 **Discovering Sex and Suffering and Motherhood.

Imagine telling your children that you hate them, that you regret ever having born them, and that your wish they were out of your way for ever! This is exactly what these exemplary Canadian mothers have told Maclean’s  magazine that they have done. These are people who imagine that their generation invented love and sex and suffering. They are, in short, people with no sense of history. In more seemly times homicidal intention along this line, with the right names embedded, would lead immediately to calling in the police.

But all of this is to the good: “In pushing the boundaries of accepted maternal response, women are challenging an explosive taboo.”

As to how these children –no doubt now famous among their peers at school – reacted to Mother’s refreshing declaration, we are left to our own imaginations. 

***Some Demographic Realities.

Since 1971, the fertility rate in Canada has dropped from 2.1—the replacement level needed for the population to renew itself without immigration—to 1.6 in 2016. Maclean’s“ scholarly source explains the decline in fertility rates to “older, more educated first-time mothers.” “Being older than mothers used to be in previous generations, these better-educated, mothers,  Maclean’s believes  are “entitled to expect a bigger boost from the experience of child-bearing.”

There is a revealing line of thought! No until this jaded, morally-bankrupt generation has anyone stooped to describing child-birth as about “a bigger boost!”

And why are precious upper-income, better-educated women entitled to anything more than their less educated peers? The thinking here is downright feudal – and very ugly.

These older but not wiser mothers confront the reality of motherhood just like all mother before them: “incontinence,  boredom , weight gain, saggy breasts, depression, the end of romance, the lack of sleep, dumbing own “ (that is, adjusting  to the intellectual demands of conversing with infants and toddlers.)

But this cohort of educated mothers is, we repeat, “entitled” to exemption from the experience of women down through the ages. So they are fighting back. There is a  Facebook community having more than 2,600 members founded by Lauren  Byrne, a 32-year-old ER nurse and mother of two who lives in Newfoundland. “Angela, who lives in Newfoundland, went for months with debilitating undiagnosed post-partum after the premature birth of twins. She felt cheated, she told Maclean’s, when she didn’t experience the instant bond she was told mothers are supposed to have.”

I Work, Therefore I Am.”

Isn’t it amazing that this cohort, described as educated several levels above the level of mothers of yore, should have to start so far before the starting line of all these other mothers in the matter of common folklore about having babies! Maclean’s  ideal of a mother takes out all of her rage at the low-down-ness of it all – and they take it out against the appropriate object: the children. Dealing with the ugly truth of mother hood, “Augustine Brown says she ‘s candid with the children, telling them that being a mother is not the most important aspect of her life. They know that It (that is, the most import aspect of her life) “ties with my work and who I  am… They cry when I leave [on a vacation by myself]…  but I feel it is important for them to know they’re not the centre of the world.” 

Another Mother tells her children that she “hates them for having prevented her from becoming a success in life.”

What room is there for doubting the long-term future of Canada, in light of this testimony of the best and the brightest—the people who have for half-a-century-or-so turned out Maclean’s  magazine?  

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