Men Want to Be Sons, Not Parents
Your assumptions about motherhood give me the ick
Welcome to The Ick, Season 4: DISGUST. This season I’ve invited a brilliant cast of writers and friends to explore what makes us recoil and why.
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Now, over to eurydice:
I grew up hearing that motherhood would be the best thing I’d ever do—from men.
From women, I heard a comfortable familiarity. It’s just what you do.
I was confused often when meeting people, especially in the conservative Mormon community where I grew up, who wanted to convince me that I should—that any healthy, normal girl would—look at motherhood as a haven of soft, clean bed sheets. A refuge of giggling, cherubic infants. A Vaseline-smeared bliss.
The problem was that I had eyes.
I saw mothers who didn’t seem to find parenthood fun, warm, or cozy. It was clearly a demanding job, more demanding in terms of downtime and intensity than the vast majority of paid jobs held by anyone I knew, and more demanding by far than any paid job I intended to take on.
I didn’t have trouble believing that the men who spoke of motherhood in these glowing tones were telling me the truth. I didn’t have trouble believing that when they looked at their wives’ experiences, they saw happiness. They were in no hurry to read into, much less publicize, the not-so-rosy bits. In some cases, the wives considered it an important part of their obligations not to trouble their husbands with any difficulties they experienced.
I could sense some baked in assumptions that it seemed even the speakers weren’t aware of, perhaps especially the men. There was a difficulty in acknowledging or tolerating the idea that anything about motherhood is hard, or at least was hard in a “ugh this sucks I can’t wait for this year to be over” way rather than in a “my suffering is profound and purposeful, like that of Christ and the holy martyrs” way.
And I detected a whiff of anxiety in these conversations. Uncertainty about maternal love is laced into these ideas. Women know that they can love their children, but also get tired and frustrated sometimes.
Men, operating in and on a different plane when it comes to parenthood, are more likely to hear female concerns about motherhood and housekeeping from the perspective of a son of a mother, rather than a fellow parent.
This makes them very invested in pressing the narrative around them into the one most flattering to children: not only are women never frustrated by motherhood or housekeeping in a reasonable, defensible way—that would indicate pathology—they find the greatest joy in raising their children.
This lack of frustration and difficulty is the key way that you know these mothers love their children. Naturally, it’s also how you know that these children are loved and valued.
In this framework, the tie between how mothers feel and the worthiness of their children is woven implausibly tight. What could possibly matter so much about mothers occasionally feeling tired and frustrated with or by their children?
A child feels profound shame and unworthiness when his mother has a bad day, particularly if she manages that poorly. Because of his childish, innocent solipsism, he assumes it is his fault. A grown man may unconsciously bring this framework with him to conversations about how mothers feel and what women need.
To the man who sees as a child, a sad mother either makes her children feel unworthy or actually has unworthy children. Either way, she should not be a mother or she should be a different person.
Pro-Life and Pro-Motherhood
I even see a bit of the above in abortion rhetoric.
Similar to the fatherhood example, pro-life men are more likely to let their perspective of being sons creep in—an existential terror at the idea that women do not find motherhood the best thing that could happen to them, their children the most important thing in their lives no matter what.
Amid the earnest and honest positions of pro-life men, I sense a need to ensure that women think of their children the way that these men believe they were thought of by their mothers: unimpeachable, in her eyes without blemish. Every moment spent away from him tinged by grief, every moment spent with him, no matter how difficult, tedious, or full of poop, a reason for her to keep living. He needs to believe that there was not a single hour of her life as a mother that wasn’t more joyful than it was unpleasant, because that was how much her child was worth to her. Abortion is a hellish, even demonic contrast to an ideal like that.
Who but the most unimaginably evil woman could contemplate abortion when compared to this model of motherhood?
If motherhood is a fairytale where her children are the Chosen Ones, abortion is a cartoonishly evil force. If motherhood is an extremely high stakes part of life, with high highs, low lows, and a lot of elements that can make it easier or harder, abortion may still be considered immoral by reasonable people, but it becomes clearer and less charged to imagine why it’s on the table for others.
Idealism can be a real hindrance to moral calculations.
Liking this rosy idea of motherhood doesn’t make a person broken. I wish we acknowledged it more as a bit of a silly self-indulgent fantasy to protect one’s self-image rather than the reality of a mother-child dyad.
Good Mommy Thought Policing
A lot of male narratives about motherhood boil down to thought policing women for being less than Saint-Theresa-of-Avila-style ecstatic about parenthood, and I don’t think they have any idea that they’re doing this.
There’s been increased discussion in the last ten years of individual citizens thought policing one another—social control rather than government-mediated. This was my experience being told about motherhood for most of my life by men. The men reliably painted a less realistic and more rigidly rosy vision of what it meant to be a mother. It was clear that not only would motherhood mean that my time, body, and energy would become not my own any more, even my own thoughts, including frustrations and struggles and feelings, would be treated as a matter of public approval or disapproval, required to be kept to myself with little to no guarantee of even a sympathetic husband, to say nothing of anyone else.
It is the wives and not the children—not directly, anyhow—left behind by this framework.
I noticed that mothers blessed with spouses who inhabited the “fellow parent” role rather than the “imagined child” role did considerably better. Their spouses were capable of recognizing motherhood as work rather than maternal ecstasy. They were capable of pitching in to help with this work to preserve the well-being of their wives, not just their children.
Mothers with spouses who saw their wives as similar to their own mother were harder on them for unhappiness, personally offended by their dissatisfaction, and angered by requests for differently shared domestic burdens.
Good mommy thoughts form a staggeringly narrow tightrope, narrower by far than the most stringent wokeness speech restrictions. Wokeness was concerned about ~20 vocabulary words and maybe five topics. It’s cumbersome, if it’s not your bag, but plenty of human existence lies outside the realm of cancellable speech. In contrast, good mommy thoughts have essentially one form: “Everything I do and have to do is centered on my children, and all of it is both worth it and wonderful.” All deviations are strictly punishable by social censure.
I see men all over social media who are scandalized by women who acknowledge motherhood wasn’t what they thought it would be. They’re furious that women are saying in public that it’s hard, or that parts of it don’t satisfy them.
Take a representative example of such overreach: an article from the enemy’s girlboss herself, The Grey Lady. With the headline “How Could I Not Love My Baby?” it explores motherhood’s many expectations and how it can fail at the individual level. This was interpreted by many angry men as normalizing not loving your child.
Despite claims that women do more social censure than men do, I would strongly argue that policing mommy thought is a man’s game.
The best of us fail in our reading comprehension when our identity is at stake. And many men have such a strong identity as sons of mothers who loved them too much to have nuanced feelings about this. Thus, they interpret relatively normal discussions about the complex emotions around childbirth as alarming admissions of sociopathy and mental illness.
The women who write these articles know something these men don’t. These women know the darkness of newborn nights: when it feels as though the sun will never rise, they’ll never stop bleeding, the baby will never stop screaming, no matter how many diapers, feedings, and colic holds they try. The “imagined child” man who polices mommy thoughts is not there. He is asleep. This kind of man knows only what it is to be a son.
Eurydice is a writer and social analyst. You can find her on Substack at eurydice lives, and intermittently on Twitter/X.
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Fascinating piece. Definitely provides a useful interpretation for why men are so eager to push motherhood onto women, and so annoyed (or even enraged) by women who choose not to have children or to end a pregnancy.
I wrote a criticism of "Selfish Reasons to Have more Children" saying it should have been "Selfish Reasons for Men to Have More Children" because the costs for women are higher such that it requires selflessness. A man responded I was wrong, and then when he made no headway convincing me, accused me of being selfish for only having two kids.
Yes! That is my point!