Yes, she's suffering from clinical depression and a profound inability to connect with her children and therefore desperately seeking connection with people to whom she owes no demands of care and self-mastery. This is more common of women than we want to acknowledge, and it's not just some sort of post-modern phenomenon that can be cured by telling the little women that their highest fulfillment can be found in the home. Not even 100% of female cats have perfect maternal instincts.
This really is a matter of you got the stuff or you don't. Our Judith is sublimating her desire to escape actual real motherhood by pretending--perhaps most profoundly to herself--a maternal care for the earth and its creatures. Plenty of parents, male and female, like her. You might say Gandhi and MLK Jr. were part of her tribe, too.
As someone who'd've been better parented had I been actually raised by wolves, I learned that the ability to mother one's child is not dependent on prior modeling by others. It just requires loving your child above and beyond every other thing in life, including yourself. No one and no cause should ever come firster.
my mother was very similar to frau beadle, and at least as frustrating, though she sought her escape from us children and my father via the path of extreme Catholic piety rather than environmentalism. constant travels to various cult sites, a new society of similarly-minded 'friends', the command of a higher moral perch from which she could snipe at anybody who disagreed, that same dead-eyed determined stare. i know the type very well.
The only privilege I was born with, was exceptional parents. I didn't realize how lucky I was until I started university.
I think my parents were exceptional because their maternal modeling was so terrible. I discussed the issue with them many times and they both acknowledged the intention to be the exact opposite of their own mothers.
I am one of four. We are all middle-aged, with families of our own. Yet, we know in a crisis, our parents would drop everything and come to our aid.
It is a privilege I never deserved but am so grateful I received.
In generations prior to the 1980's, kids that had shitty, neglectful parents usually found a 2nd home with another family in the neighborhood or with extended family. Now they are stuck with a stupid, narassistic mother, a cucked father and social media.
When I was a teen it was very common for families to end up with a sort of floater kid. They came to have dinner and that just stretched out for a few years.
Odd you should write that and very timely. Last night I dreamed I was protected by two wolves. And yes my mother would have seen a kindred soul in yours and eugyppius' mother.
My mother had no sublimating other interests. She was an exemplar of what happens when you thwart the intelligence of women. She relentlessly turned herself stupid after marriage, She came from an extended family of women who were excellent cooks and knitters; her mother was a seamstress who made me the most beautiful clothes when I was a little girl.
She always talked about the wonderful meals her own grandma made and she fed us on Minute Rice and canned green beans etc. Of course, after my father left (I was already out of the house) she began cooking lovely meals for my brother.
We should do one of those fundraising collaborative books and call it "Monstrous Mommies, A Horror Anthology."
I was estranged from my brother for 35 years, give or take a few. But he has been very good to me in my latter adulthood. I regret what's been missed but am grateful for what there is.
It might've been a baby krait I flushed down that toilet 40 years ago. Picked it up with a stick since I didn't want it to go where I wouldn't know where it went.
The cobra that got into Baba's bedroom was a lot bigger. I don't remember how they got it out.
My mother told me (1/4 in jest?). She could never measure up to God's demand that she love him first. She would always love her children most. She was the best ol' mom. But not the most pious.
All of these stories are unfortunate, and I'm sorry that everyone had to endure these trials in their upbringing. I suspect that most people had less than *perfect* home situations as children.
That being said, I don't care if this woman had a hard time growing up or that she's depressed. We're all depressed now due to what the government is doing to us.
Want to solve the green protests? Every time one of them is blocking traffic, throw out a stink b**b. That will train them to stop these attention getting antics and force them to get some help or drown their sorrows in alcohol. Their choice.
Agreed. My mother was abusive and severely mentally ill. I myself am not a perfect mother but love and connect to my kids. In fact, I didn’t realize the severity of my own upbringing until I married well and had children of my own.
I have wonderful relationships with many members of my extended family and my husband’s family, yet I haven’t spoken to my own mother in six years. I imagine this woman will have a similar experience of estrangement with her own kids if they are lucky enough to heal from the experience and not continue it themselves into the next generation.
Those who don't know a parent like Jennifer might say as you do, but for those of us unfortunate enough to have met such "mothers", to be no contact is the only way, especially when it comes to breaking abuse cycles and protecting one's own children from the malignant grandparent.
Funny thing. I was estranged from my mother for four years or so, and neither the before nor the after were what even a deranged optimist would call congenial, and I sure would wish her parenting only on a worst enemy, but she was a wonderful grandma. Her help in raising my son was essential, and he loved her very dearly. Being a grandma extended her life by two decades and they were happy ones.
And this is a common thing. Many wretched parents are surprisingly good grandparents. Each case of course must be taken individually.
Being abusive and have what appears to be a mental illness is symptomatic of alcohol/other-psychoactive drug addiction. I go with the odds. Root causes are crucial.
Intra-family non-communication is nearly always rooted in alcohol/other-drug addiction. The reason root causes are important is because you solve that problem, you resolve all the others (over time).
My mother never touched alcohol and drugs in her life and is abusive. She's a victim of incest and neglect. Drugs aren't the cause of all of this at all.
I never desired to be married or have children but I ended up doing both. The moment my first child was born I felt in my innermost core a love I'd never experienced before and knew I would die for for my son.
That's why I feel sorry for so many young women today (and dopey young beta boys). They seem to be turning against marriage and will miss out on one of the greatest things in life: parenthood. Cats and fast cars are no substitute
Yes I’m sad to say my mother was also a bit on the neglectful side, completely oblivious to me most of the time, combined with intense occasional interest. I realized 40 years ago that not everyone is a good mom automatically. I also met women who openly admitted they never wanted kids and regret having them. It was the 70s after all.
I also met women who openly admitted they never wanted kids and regret having them. It was the 70s after all.
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I try not to throw around words like "evil" with careless abandon, but my feeling about women who will invite fate's worst by expressing out loud the desire to unmake their children ought to receive gilded invitations to the harakiri chamber we keep in the basement.
I think of myself as a pretty useless mom because of depression, but I must not have done to bad as my youngest son, in his wedding speech, thanked us and said we did a lot more right than we think. Some consolation.
Depression makes you feel useless, Magrietha, but it often hides from you the many good things you do. The fact that your son thanked you means that you probably did a lot more good than you think.
Most marry and have kids simply because they had sex but did not think of the consequences ,like getting pregnant .When getting pregnant anyway ,the ..future mommy asks honey when are we getting married ,i'm pregnant .So lover boy has no way out but to say tomorrow honey .
From experience (some personal), I've noticed that people with psychological challenges react in two ways: either they admit the problem and deal with it, or they refuse to accept responsibility and take it out on the rest of the world. This sad woman is clearly in the latter category.
What an amazing insight. That had never occurred to me. Substitute actual children with their inevitable demands with an undemanding cause that makes you look selfless.
I think you’re analysis is spot on - and incredibly depressing. How do you even start to make the case that motherhood, for all it’s challenges, is better for women than the alternative, in a culture that essentially teaches young women that their own biological best interest = oppression ?
Motherhood isn't better for all women. Women and men should have children *if they want them.*
I was lucky. I realized I wanted a child just absolutely in the nick of time. Not a lifestyle accessory; not a trophy; not to prove anything; not because anybody else wanted me to have one. Because at that moment in my life I wanted my own child more than anything else ever.
Not better for all women agreed, but it would be interesting to see how much better it would be for many women, in the absence of the constant and relentless propagandising against motherhood that is often referred to as ‘feminism’.
I think for the younger women it is absolutely relentless and primarily enforced via their peers. Women are significantly more agreeable than men. Plus men are dropping out because of all the MeToo stuff. And the family courts don't help either.
Considering how hard it is to raise a child well, I see no problem with the weeding out of the unlikely-to-succeed crowd. School shooters didn't make themselves.
I would argue that men benefited most from feminism in many ways. If you are a young man surrounded by women who don't want long term relationships or commitments, what's not to like? As long as you can avoid the "MeToo" lawfare, that is.
And what happens when a few years down the line, the majority of people realise that "climate change" is a load of rubbish and that they wasted their lives and destroyed their families for a pack of lies? However, knowing these kinds of people, they will either refuse to accept the truth or simply move on to the next Big Cause.
This is why I love talking to tradesmen (plumbers, electricians, people who DO and MAKE things, simple as feeding the population at large when you are a farmer) and engineers.
The ideologues like a good beautifully created supposed utopia structure, then they grab you and tell you, ¨FIT IN OR ELSE¨. This is why some intellectuals (if you may call them that) are so downright dangerous).
My son, that is German, lives close to large wind farms. For a week now not the slightest little breeze, windmills standing there useless! So much for renewables, someone please tell her
Nothing wrong with first-wave feminism. Good for you for fighting for a genuine cause. However, all revolutions end up going crazy. Women have won nearly all the battles they wanted to win, yet I'm amazed at how ANGRY the latest bunch of feminists are. I watched a vid of some young women at Princeton Uni in the US banging on about how oppressed they are. Truly bizarre.
True. No-one should be forced into having kids. However, there is a stark demographic reality that goes beyond personal wishes here: our societies are literally dying out because so few women are having kids. For a society to survive, 9 out of 10 women need to have 2 kids, and the 10th needs to have 3. Demographics is destiny.
Tik Tok, in a word. There is a growing army of older ladies on there who drank the Kool-Aid and are demonstrating where it leads. Singledom, wine and cats. Nice apartments though.
Difficult to watch mind you. But the message seems to be growing, plus the feminists have done themselves no favours backing the trans crowd.
You might not realize this, but a good, stable, loving, dependable life partner ain't waiting in the Connubial Bliss Superstore. I myself did not find a good, stable, loving, dependable life partner. But he did supply the Golden Sperm at the right moment during the time I spent waiting for him to become those things. Many women are not as fortunate to find even the momentary instrument of facilitating a life treasure.
But that is a recent thing, as in the last few generations. Significant changes to society have led to greater numbers of women being involuntarily childless. And it seems to be a growing problem in the west.
I also agree the perfect person isn't waiting in the wings like a movie. I am definitely a realist. But I think social media and dating apps have fundamentally changed people. That is what I am reading anyway.
Maybe read a little history instead. Surplus women got shipped to convents or were household servants for their families. Before retirement/nursing homes were the spinster daughters. Even in traditional Eastern societies with an extremely high preference for marrying off one's girls, there were plenty of unmarried women serving the needs of others to justify their keep.
I guess the spinsters, in those days, were the ugly ducks no one wanted in their bed... While some beautiful girls would marry an ugly guy with a wallet. Tough.
Why do you suppose that unmarried women end up with cats and depression? Old unmarried women are NOT all 3rd wave ¨feminists¨ hysterical men-hating harridans!
Can't you understand that it is better for either a man or a woman to live alone than to live in awful company?
Lost my lifetime companion, now alone, no children many friends, no cats, no TV, and happy! Why do you want to box in people and generalise? With all due respect.
The cats are a humerous stereotype of spinsters. The rise in unhappiness is a well documented phenomenon. Over the last fifty years women's unhappiness has increased considerably while mens has declined. It used to be the other way around. Women in western nations seem to be having a hard time of it, with about one in four on antidepressants. In the US the group with the highest use of drugs are childless women in their 40s.
There are also the guys who NEVER EVER got married.
Yet, when the approach old age, they eagerly look for a
Wife, no sorry! I mean unpaid-free-home-nurse-with-wife-status-attached! Depends changing and all!
There are also the BAD fathers who, when death is getting close, are trying to re contact the family they pretend to love so much all of a sudden. I have seen that.
I did notice that bad selfish people close to death soften up before croaking because with what they have done, they s!it their pants, terrified by what may be ahead... Not sorry for them. Too little, too late!
True, but we also expect too much these days. We watch Romcoms and expect perfect, ever-lasting love. Few young people seem to realise that a long-lasting relationship is as much about compromise and working bloody hard at it. We tend to sneer at western men who get mail order brides from Thailand. The man wants sex and a reliable wife (not always in that order!), while the woman wants material comfort and a better place to live. However, up till recently, most marriages were similar arrangements and trade-offs. Maybe today we no longer have the commonsense and humility to make relationships last.
For most of human history, extremely large numbers of people--women and men both--were trapped in dreadful marriages they had no decent way of escaping. For most of human history the sacrament of marriage has been socially-condoned prostitution and the selling of one's children for social and material advantage.
I don't agree. There are all sorts of people who love their children but are either forced or make difficult choices and are then seperated from their children. That doesn't mean they have an inability to connect with their children.
I see this woman like the covid-a-holics: easily brainwashed, easily ruled by their fears, prone to cults and a tyrant. She bought in to the climate change kool-aod and thinks the world will end soon and so she's taking action just like the mask, lockdown and vaxx mandate fanatics.
She can't think for herself, heaven forbid she do some actual research, grabs on to whatever popular 'cure' she buys in to and thinks she has the right to dictate to everyone else.
If her husband were any kind of a father, he'd put his foot down and try to curtail her loony behaviour but it seems 2 of a kind have paired up and I do feel sorry for their children.
My meaning of the word love is wanting what's best for the one(s) you love without being a tyrant. Ms. Beadle in this article is a tyrant. She wants what she thinks is best and will force it upon anyone in her way, just like the fanatical covid-a-holics as I described above.
I don't think she's a tyrant. I think she's a desperately unhappy woman who had two children she doesn't want with a useless man she got tired of supporting in his pathetic fantasy of showbiz glory. Perhaps she had severe postpartum depression that was never treated because no one, including herself, recognized she was suffering from it.
Because it wouldn't be acceptable in any area of society for her to have just packed her bags and said "I'm done; I can't endure this any longer," she found people who'd celebrate her wonderful sacrifice to save the world for everyone's children. It's not abandonment now; it's magically transmuted into the highest form of love.
Perhaps she spent her life up to now being the dutiful daughter, the supportive girlfriend and the wonderful wife who lifted up her idiot husband's dream. Now she's a cut-rate Joan of Arc.
I could not agree with you more. An out of control childhood illustrated these potentials, so I never added the stress of children. Too difficult for everyone, with a risk of familial depression.
I believe that this behavior will become even more prevalent, and that there should be alarms sounding everywhere. Social Media feeds this with a vengeance. (I have avoided Social Media with the same regard).
Life is more accidental luck than anything else. Every idiotic choice I made turned out to be another step on the right road. (Surviving, of course, was key.) And based on everything, including multigenerational history, I should have been a horrible abusive incompetent failed useless mother.
I wasn't. Having discovered myself to be a good mother is the second-greatest gift in my life. (The first, of course, is the child.) Nothing could have possibly predicted it.
I think this is an excellent insight. One thing I ask myself is the extent to which the ability to escape creates the desire to escape from drudgery? In other words, are there women (and men) who are on the margins of this, and in other cultures or in times where life was just less full of choices, would just have made the best of it? I think that family breakdown rates suggest there is something in that.
You are definitely right though. There is a very good book by François Mauriac called Therese Desqueyroux about an extreme case of this type.
I've seen the extent of mental illness in a South Asian culture where the average woman--whether an impoverished peasant or an outwardly-greatly privileged one--has no chance of escape. Plenty of them take no joy in the kids they're forced to have. Talk about intergenerational trauma.
There's so much scorn in the right-leaning gardens of Substack for women who find great sufficiency in themselves, and ain't it weird how men with cats are persons of taste and discernment, and women with cats are crazy?
For a great many women--maybe most--throughout history, the traditional life has been in reality socially-acceptable prostitution. For men it has often been an indentured servitude too.
All these guys blaming birth control and divorce as the twin evils that have destroyed Western civilization--not hardly. The means of obtaining intentional childbearing are the greatest gift to humanity ever. The dignity of a no-fault divorce is a great unshackler.
And for that drudgery: I had no choice but to work full-time, with three-months' maternity leave because I had a good job at that time, until my kid was in middle school. I refused to continue after that so I could be home for my kid for those last years before he went off to adulthood. I still had to get a part-time job.
I promise you, I didn't think I'd survive the exhaustion of those early years. I survived a lot more things, too. The price I paid to raise my kid to the very best utmost of my ability was costly, but worth every bit of it. But it took its toll on my girlish complexion.
This is a very helpful corrective to the “it was great in the old days” mentality, which I definitely don’t believe to be true. Life in a traditional society is hard and often unpleasant.
Anyone familiar with peasant societies will know that mixture of bitterness, realism and a sense of inferiority which does not make for happy people.
However, I do think that having to face up to and deal with challenges is the making of people. If it is too easy to escape, people will do that, often with very little justification beyond it is a bit inconvenient to stick with something hard.
A balance is needed, and romanticising traditional societies does not help. It is Utopianism of the Right, and just as silly.
Honesty is a useful trait. Raising children *well* is extremely hard work. It requires you to find in yourself resources and capacities you didn't think you had. It requires you to remind yourself, maybe a gazillion times a day, that your kid will never forget the awful thing you said in a careless moment. They'll forgive you, they'll love you--but they'll never forget you said that. You must hold your tongue so hard you can feel it on the edge of gangrene.
You must ignore the glossy advice to "self-care." You must learn self-mastery. You must do what needs to be done because it needs to be done.
It does happen to be a wonderful thing that we have longer lifespans now. A parent can enjoy the life that comes after raising kids to adulthood. It's now, in maturity, and with no responsibilities, that I can use my gifts, such as they might be, for myself, and enjoy them because this is the right time for them to flourish. I didn't deplete all my resources by putting my kid first at the time that was essential.
If people want to save Western society, they need to ensure women's economic security in their older ages so they won't risk impoverishment if they stay out of the workforce during their kids' early childhood years, or choose lower-paying reduced-hours work so they can be much more available to their kids. There are lots and lots of ways to lose the income contribution of a spouse.
If I hadn't worked all through my kid's early years I'd be eating the cheapest grade of catfood now and not liking it.
I think your comment about ensuring mothers a living if they take time out of their career to care for children is an excellent point.
To my mind, our society refuses to incentivise good and desirable behaviour, while going out of its way to encourage irresponsible and selfish behaviour.
Is this deliberate? I don’t know. It’s definitely bad however.
Everything is done backwards, and the more libertarian among us, though they have excellent foundational principles and are correct to mistrust the govmint in just about everything, are a little reluctant to recognize that the average person has little real, actual chance of putting aside sufficient private retirement resources to protect against penury and horrible old-age housing.
And even the most happy devoted marriage can turn out to be a mug's game when a woman (for the sake of this discussion let's say it's the woman in this scenario), after raising the kids and having no or few social security credits, finds herself dealing with a spouse who's trading her in for a new improved model bringing along a step-kid or so and the family home must be sold in the divorce agreement and she's got to go back to work at the age of 50.
If her childraising homemaking was recognized by the government as retirement-credit earning (and all sorts of means testing can be factored in at the time of accessing benefits), more women could more safely risk more of the childraising homemaking.
Anyone thinks I'm exaggerating about the catfood dining had I not worked full-time for so long, we should have a nice friendly non-generalized chat about golden years impoverishment when you've been a little deficient in your character-analysis skills.
Yes, she's suffering from clinical depression and a profound inability to connect with her children and therefore desperately seeking connection with people to whom she owes no demands of care and self-mastery. This is more common of women than we want to acknowledge, and it's not just some sort of post-modern phenomenon that can be cured by telling the little women that their highest fulfillment can be found in the home. Not even 100% of female cats have perfect maternal instincts.
This really is a matter of you got the stuff or you don't. Our Judith is sublimating her desire to escape actual real motherhood by pretending--perhaps most profoundly to herself--a maternal care for the earth and its creatures. Plenty of parents, male and female, like her. You might say Gandhi and MLK Jr. were part of her tribe, too.
this seems very right to me.
As someone who'd've been better parented had I been actually raised by wolves, I learned that the ability to mother one's child is not dependent on prior modeling by others. It just requires loving your child above and beyond every other thing in life, including yourself. No one and no cause should ever come firster.
my mother was very similar to frau beadle, and at least as frustrating, though she sought her escape from us children and my father via the path of extreme Catholic piety rather than environmentalism. constant travels to various cult sites, a new society of similarly-minded 'friends', the command of a higher moral perch from which she could snipe at anybody who disagreed, that same dead-eyed determined stare. i know the type very well.
I'm very sorry to learn that you do. A lot of us would have benefited from the care of a good wolf pack.
The only privilege I was born with, was exceptional parents. I didn't realize how lucky I was until I started university.
I think my parents were exceptional because their maternal modeling was so terrible. I discussed the issue with them many times and they both acknowledged the intention to be the exact opposite of their own mothers.
I am one of four. We are all middle-aged, with families of our own. Yet, we know in a crisis, our parents would drop everything and come to our aid.
It is a privilege I never deserved but am so grateful I received.
In generations prior to the 1980's, kids that had shitty, neglectful parents usually found a 2nd home with another family in the neighborhood or with extended family. Now they are stuck with a stupid, narassistic mother, a cucked father and social media.
It is a privilege I never deserved but am so grateful I received.
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Every child on earth deserves decent parenting at the rock-bottom bare minimum. They deserve more than the minimum though.
When I was a teen it was very common for families to end up with a sort of floater kid. They came to have dinner and that just stretched out for a few years.
Well done for mentioning the father/husband. I suspect his testicles are in a jar of formaldehyde in the basement. What a weakling.
Odd you should write that and very timely. Last night I dreamed I was protected by two wolves. And yes my mother would have seen a kindred soul in yours and eugyppius' mother.
I dreamt that once too. I woke up with no legs. :)
My mother had no sublimating other interests. She was an exemplar of what happens when you thwart the intelligence of women. She relentlessly turned herself stupid after marriage, She came from an extended family of women who were excellent cooks and knitters; her mother was a seamstress who made me the most beautiful clothes when I was a little girl.
She always talked about the wonderful meals her own grandma made and she fed us on Minute Rice and canned green beans etc. Of course, after my father left (I was already out of the house) she began cooking lovely meals for my brother.
We should do one of those fundraising collaborative books and call it "Monstrous Mommies, A Horror Anthology."
I was lucky in that last -aka siblings!
I was estranged from my brother for 35 years, give or take a few. But he has been very good to me in my latter adulthood. I regret what's been missed but am grateful for what there is.
I'd choose cobras over kraits every time. But we didn't get to choose.
It might've been a baby krait I flushed down that toilet 40 years ago. Picked it up with a stick since I didn't want it to go where I wouldn't know where it went.
The cobra that got into Baba's bedroom was a lot bigger. I don't remember how they got it out.
[these are true anecdotes]
My mother told me (1/4 in jest?). She could never measure up to God's demand that she love him first. She would always love her children most. She was the best ol' mom. But not the most pious.
Sounds like my aunt. My cousins are forever scarred, having been pulled into the cult as children.
We may have been raised by the same mother and yet never met. Greetings and salutations, my brother!
Sorry - that had to suck!
All of these stories are unfortunate, and I'm sorry that everyone had to endure these trials in their upbringing. I suspect that most people had less than *perfect* home situations as children.
That being said, I don't care if this woman had a hard time growing up or that she's depressed. We're all depressed now due to what the government is doing to us.
Want to solve the green protests? Every time one of them is blocking traffic, throw out a stink b**b. That will train them to stop these attention getting antics and force them to get some help or drown their sorrows in alcohol. Their choice.
Agreed. My mother was abusive and severely mentally ill. I myself am not a perfect mother but love and connect to my kids. In fact, I didn’t realize the severity of my own upbringing until I married well and had children of my own.
I have wonderful relationships with many members of my extended family and my husband’s family, yet I haven’t spoken to my own mother in six years. I imagine this woman will have a similar experience of estrangement with her own kids if they are lucky enough to heal from the experience and not continue it themselves into the next generation.
Call your Mom
Those who don't know a parent like Jennifer might say as you do, but for those of us unfortunate enough to have met such "mothers", to be no contact is the only way, especially when it comes to breaking abuse cycles and protecting one's own children from the malignant grandparent.
Funny thing. I was estranged from my mother for four years or so, and neither the before nor the after were what even a deranged optimist would call congenial, and I sure would wish her parenting only on a worst enemy, but she was a wonderful grandma. Her help in raising my son was essential, and he loved her very dearly. Being a grandma extended her life by two decades and they were happy ones.
And this is a common thing. Many wretched parents are surprisingly good grandparents. Each case of course must be taken individually.
Was she a narcissic pervert? Because with those people, being out of reach is the only answer.
Great point. Sorry you have to go through that. Be well.
Being abusive and have what appears to be a mental illness is symptomatic of alcohol/other-psychoactive drug addiction. I go with the odds. Root causes are crucial.
Intra-family non-communication is nearly always rooted in alcohol/other-drug addiction. The reason root causes are important is because you solve that problem, you resolve all the others (over time).
My mother never touched alcohol and drugs in her life and is abusive. She's a victim of incest and neglect. Drugs aren't the cause of all of this at all.
Her abuser, then.
A fierce and unshakable devotion is all it takes — a simple formula. 😉
It is simple. And yet so many fail at it.
I never desired to be married or have children but I ended up doing both. The moment my first child was born I felt in my innermost core a love I'd never experienced before and knew I would die for for my son.
That's why I feel sorry for so many young women today (and dopey young beta boys). They seem to be turning against marriage and will miss out on one of the greatest things in life: parenthood. Cats and fast cars are no substitute
Ain't nature something?
Thank you for that perspective.
Yes I’m sad to say my mother was also a bit on the neglectful side, completely oblivious to me most of the time, combined with intense occasional interest. I realized 40 years ago that not everyone is a good mom automatically. I also met women who openly admitted they never wanted kids and regret having them. It was the 70s after all.
I also met women who openly admitted they never wanted kids and regret having them. It was the 70s after all.
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I try not to throw around words like "evil" with careless abandon, but my feeling about women who will invite fate's worst by expressing out loud the desire to unmake their children ought to receive gilded invitations to the harakiri chamber we keep in the basement.
Why that? Why the need for ¨abortion¨ when women have ALL THE MEANS AT THEIR DISPOSAL FOR BIRTH CONTROL! Abortion used to be for desperate situation.
What we are talking about now is downright MURDER! Baphomethan sacrifice! DIA-BO-LI-CAL!
Abortion is one of those necessary evils. Until the point of viability it's nobody else's business.
I think of myself as a pretty useless mom because of depression, but I must not have done to bad as my youngest son, in his wedding speech, thanked us and said we did a lot more right than we think. Some consolation.
Depression makes you feel useless, Magrietha, but it often hides from you the many good things you do. The fact that your son thanked you means that you probably did a lot more good than you think.
Never had kids, not my cup of tea. I have been told at times, it was selfish. How can you be selfish to someone who is not even born, I would ask.
Have seen people also who regretted having kids, and some absolutely happy at having them.
Anyway, you have kids you look after them and you love them, otherwise you are not normal, that's all!
Most marry and have kids simply because they had sex but did not think of the consequences ,like getting pregnant .When getting pregnant anyway ,the ..future mommy asks honey when are we getting married ,i'm pregnant .So lover boy has no way out but to say tomorrow honey .
From experience (some personal), I've noticed that people with psychological challenges react in two ways: either they admit the problem and deal with it, or they refuse to accept responsibility and take it out on the rest of the world. This sad woman is clearly in the latter category.
What an amazing insight. That had never occurred to me. Substitute actual children with their inevitable demands with an undemanding cause that makes you look selfless.
A self-deceptive substitute for Münchhausen by Proxy of sorts.
I think you’re analysis is spot on - and incredibly depressing. How do you even start to make the case that motherhood, for all it’s challenges, is better for women than the alternative, in a culture that essentially teaches young women that their own biological best interest = oppression ?
Motherhood isn't better for all women. Women and men should have children *if they want them.*
I was lucky. I realized I wanted a child just absolutely in the nick of time. Not a lifestyle accessory; not a trophy; not to prove anything; not because anybody else wanted me to have one. Because at that moment in my life I wanted my own child more than anything else ever.
Not better for all women agreed, but it would be interesting to see how much better it would be for many women, in the absence of the constant and relentless propagandising against motherhood that is often referred to as ‘feminism’.
Any person stupid enough to listen to slogans rather than their own inclinations is best not raising another generation.
I think for the younger women it is absolutely relentless and primarily enforced via their peers. Women are significantly more agreeable than men. Plus men are dropping out because of all the MeToo stuff. And the family courts don't help either.
Considering how hard it is to raise a child well, I see no problem with the weeding out of the unlikely-to-succeed crowd. School shooters didn't make themselves.
I would argue that men benefited most from feminism in many ways. If you are a young man surrounded by women who don't want long term relationships or commitments, what's not to like? As long as you can avoid the "MeToo" lawfare, that is.
And what happens when a few years down the line, the majority of people realise that "climate change" is a load of rubbish and that they wasted their lives and destroyed their families for a pack of lies? However, knowing these kinds of people, they will either refuse to accept the truth or simply move on to the next Big Cause.
I am first wave feminist. In my days, we never hated men. I remember it was about same work same pay.
Enter the commie infiltrator. 2nd wave looks at all men sideways, 3rd wave harridans, wait for 4st wave. I NOW HAVE TO DEFEND MEN!
Anything good is perverted by the commies.
Look at the green movement, now Gate-of-hell cuts and burries trees. Hahaha!
Great! Kick in the butt for the planetary wake-up! Silver lining!
Agreed - things always seem to go badly wrong when the ideologues get involved.
I call them the Ism-ists.
Box thinking.
They are not grounded at all.
This is why I love talking to tradesmen (plumbers, electricians, people who DO and MAKE things, simple as feeding the population at large when you are a farmer) and engineers.
The ideologues like a good beautifully created supposed utopia structure, then they grab you and tell you, ¨FIT IN OR ELSE¨. This is why some intellectuals (if you may call them that) are so downright dangerous).
They are leftists, which means that every aspect of life is political and that it's all about power.
My son, that is German, lives close to large wind farms. For a week now not the slightest little breeze, windmills standing there useless! So much for renewables, someone please tell her
Nothing wrong with first-wave feminism. Good for you for fighting for a genuine cause. However, all revolutions end up going crazy. Women have won nearly all the battles they wanted to win, yet I'm amazed at how ANGRY the latest bunch of feminists are. I watched a vid of some young women at Princeton Uni in the US banging on about how oppressed they are. Truly bizarre.
True. No-one should be forced into having kids. However, there is a stark demographic reality that goes beyond personal wishes here: our societies are literally dying out because so few women are having kids. For a society to survive, 9 out of 10 women need to have 2 kids, and the 10th needs to have 3. Demographics is destiny.
I'm really not on your side here, being an interbreeder.
??
Tik Tok, in a word. There is a growing army of older ladies on there who drank the Kool-Aid and are demonstrating where it leads. Singledom, wine and cats. Nice apartments though.
Difficult to watch mind you. But the message seems to be growing, plus the feminists have done themselves no favours backing the trans crowd.
You might not realize this, but a good, stable, loving, dependable life partner ain't waiting in the Connubial Bliss Superstore. I myself did not find a good, stable, loving, dependable life partner. But he did supply the Golden Sperm at the right moment during the time I spent waiting for him to become those things. Many women are not as fortunate to find even the momentary instrument of facilitating a life treasure.
But that is a recent thing, as in the last few generations. Significant changes to society have led to greater numbers of women being involuntarily childless. And it seems to be a growing problem in the west.
I also agree the perfect person isn't waiting in the wings like a movie. I am definitely a realist. But I think social media and dating apps have fundamentally changed people. That is what I am reading anyway.
Maybe read a little history instead. Surplus women got shipped to convents or were household servants for their families. Before retirement/nursing homes were the spinster daughters. Even in traditional Eastern societies with an extremely high preference for marrying off one's girls, there were plenty of unmarried women serving the needs of others to justify their keep.
I guess the spinsters, in those days, were the ugly ducks no one wanted in their bed... While some beautiful girls would marry an ugly guy with a wallet. Tough.
Interesting.
Why do you suppose that unmarried women end up with cats and depression? Old unmarried women are NOT all 3rd wave ¨feminists¨ hysterical men-hating harridans!
Can't you understand that it is better for either a man or a woman to live alone than to live in awful company?
Lost my lifetime companion, now alone, no children many friends, no cats, no TV, and happy! Why do you want to box in people and generalise? With all due respect.
The cats are a humerous stereotype of spinsters. The rise in unhappiness is a well documented phenomenon. Over the last fifty years women's unhappiness has increased considerably while mens has declined. It used to be the other way around. Women in western nations seem to be having a hard time of it, with about one in four on antidepressants. In the US the group with the highest use of drugs are childless women in their 40s.
Hope that helps.
There are also the guys who NEVER EVER got married.
Yet, when the approach old age, they eagerly look for a
Wife, no sorry! I mean unpaid-free-home-nurse-with-wife-status-attached! Depends changing and all!
There are also the BAD fathers who, when death is getting close, are trying to re contact the family they pretend to love so much all of a sudden. I have seen that.
I did notice that bad selfish people close to death soften up before croaking because with what they have done, they s!it their pants, terrified by what may be ahead... Not sorry for them. Too little, too late!
True, but we also expect too much these days. We watch Romcoms and expect perfect, ever-lasting love. Few young people seem to realise that a long-lasting relationship is as much about compromise and working bloody hard at it. We tend to sneer at western men who get mail order brides from Thailand. The man wants sex and a reliable wife (not always in that order!), while the woman wants material comfort and a better place to live. However, up till recently, most marriages were similar arrangements and trade-offs. Maybe today we no longer have the commonsense and humility to make relationships last.
For most of human history, extremely large numbers of people--women and men both--were trapped in dreadful marriages they had no decent way of escaping. For most of human history the sacrament of marriage has been socially-condoned prostitution and the selling of one's children for social and material advantage.
It's that dead-eyed stare which Eugyppius pointed out that has me creeped.
She has that dead eyed stare because she’s a brain dead moron who’s been duped into believing we are killing the planet
I don't think she's brain dead. It's more like the stare you get from a sociopath - souless.
Hahahaha! They swallow up all the propaganda! Gloob gloob gloob gloob gloob burpp! It is incredible!
Gloob gloob! Gloob gloob! Blurp!
In the meantime, the Mother WEF's....
The Zucker stare!
I don't agree. There are all sorts of people who love their children but are either forced or make difficult choices and are then seperated from their children. That doesn't mean they have an inability to connect with their children.
I see this woman like the covid-a-holics: easily brainwashed, easily ruled by their fears, prone to cults and a tyrant. She bought in to the climate change kool-aod and thinks the world will end soon and so she's taking action just like the mask, lockdown and vaxx mandate fanatics.
She can't think for herself, heaven forbid she do some actual research, grabs on to whatever popular 'cure' she buys in to and thinks she has the right to dictate to everyone else.
If her husband were any kind of a father, he'd put his foot down and try to curtail her loony behaviour but it seems 2 of a kind have paired up and I do feel sorry for their children.
The word "love" is often misused. It's a very specific faculty.
My meaning of the word love is wanting what's best for the one(s) you love without being a tyrant. Ms. Beadle in this article is a tyrant. She wants what she thinks is best and will force it upon anyone in her way, just like the fanatical covid-a-holics as I described above.
I don't think she's a tyrant. I think she's a desperately unhappy woman who had two children she doesn't want with a useless man she got tired of supporting in his pathetic fantasy of showbiz glory. Perhaps she had severe postpartum depression that was never treated because no one, including herself, recognized she was suffering from it.
Because it wouldn't be acceptable in any area of society for her to have just packed her bags and said "I'm done; I can't endure this any longer," she found people who'd celebrate her wonderful sacrifice to save the world for everyone's children. It's not abandonment now; it's magically transmuted into the highest form of love.
Perhaps she spent her life up to now being the dutiful daughter, the supportive girlfriend and the wonderful wife who lifted up her idiot husband's dream. Now she's a cut-rate Joan of Arc.
St. Joan had been delusional, too.
I could not agree with you more. An out of control childhood illustrated these potentials, so I never added the stress of children. Too difficult for everyone, with a risk of familial depression.
I believe that this behavior will become even more prevalent, and that there should be alarms sounding everywhere. Social Media feeds this with a vengeance. (I have avoided Social Media with the same regard).
Best to you.
Life is more accidental luck than anything else. Every idiotic choice I made turned out to be another step on the right road. (Surviving, of course, was key.) And based on everything, including multigenerational history, I should have been a horrible abusive incompetent failed useless mother.
I wasn't. Having discovered myself to be a good mother is the second-greatest gift in my life. (The first, of course, is the child.) Nothing could have possibly predicted it.
"Follow your instinct" is what I want to tell everyone. You do not need to hear that from me.
You are exactly right for you, and with great success. The empath in me is not surprised that you are a wonderful mother.
I think this is an excellent insight. One thing I ask myself is the extent to which the ability to escape creates the desire to escape from drudgery? In other words, are there women (and men) who are on the margins of this, and in other cultures or in times where life was just less full of choices, would just have made the best of it? I think that family breakdown rates suggest there is something in that.
You are definitely right though. There is a very good book by François Mauriac called Therese Desqueyroux about an extreme case of this type.
I've seen the extent of mental illness in a South Asian culture where the average woman--whether an impoverished peasant or an outwardly-greatly privileged one--has no chance of escape. Plenty of them take no joy in the kids they're forced to have. Talk about intergenerational trauma.
There's so much scorn in the right-leaning gardens of Substack for women who find great sufficiency in themselves, and ain't it weird how men with cats are persons of taste and discernment, and women with cats are crazy?
For a great many women--maybe most--throughout history, the traditional life has been in reality socially-acceptable prostitution. For men it has often been an indentured servitude too.
All these guys blaming birth control and divorce as the twin evils that have destroyed Western civilization--not hardly. The means of obtaining intentional childbearing are the greatest gift to humanity ever. The dignity of a no-fault divorce is a great unshackler.
And for that drudgery: I had no choice but to work full-time, with three-months' maternity leave because I had a good job at that time, until my kid was in middle school. I refused to continue after that so I could be home for my kid for those last years before he went off to adulthood. I still had to get a part-time job.
I promise you, I didn't think I'd survive the exhaustion of those early years. I survived a lot more things, too. The price I paid to raise my kid to the very best utmost of my ability was costly, but worth every bit of it. But it took its toll on my girlish complexion.
This is a very helpful corrective to the “it was great in the old days” mentality, which I definitely don’t believe to be true. Life in a traditional society is hard and often unpleasant.
Anyone familiar with peasant societies will know that mixture of bitterness, realism and a sense of inferiority which does not make for happy people.
However, I do think that having to face up to and deal with challenges is the making of people. If it is too easy to escape, people will do that, often with very little justification beyond it is a bit inconvenient to stick with something hard.
A balance is needed, and romanticising traditional societies does not help. It is Utopianism of the Right, and just as silly.
Honesty is a useful trait. Raising children *well* is extremely hard work. It requires you to find in yourself resources and capacities you didn't think you had. It requires you to remind yourself, maybe a gazillion times a day, that your kid will never forget the awful thing you said in a careless moment. They'll forgive you, they'll love you--but they'll never forget you said that. You must hold your tongue so hard you can feel it on the edge of gangrene.
You must ignore the glossy advice to "self-care." You must learn self-mastery. You must do what needs to be done because it needs to be done.
It does happen to be a wonderful thing that we have longer lifespans now. A parent can enjoy the life that comes after raising kids to adulthood. It's now, in maturity, and with no responsibilities, that I can use my gifts, such as they might be, for myself, and enjoy them because this is the right time for them to flourish. I didn't deplete all my resources by putting my kid first at the time that was essential.
If people want to save Western society, they need to ensure women's economic security in their older ages so they won't risk impoverishment if they stay out of the workforce during their kids' early childhood years, or choose lower-paying reduced-hours work so they can be much more available to their kids. There are lots and lots of ways to lose the income contribution of a spouse.
If I hadn't worked all through my kid's early years I'd be eating the cheapest grade of catfood now and not liking it.
Another excellent comment, thanks.
I think your comment about ensuring mothers a living if they take time out of their career to care for children is an excellent point.
To my mind, our society refuses to incentivise good and desirable behaviour, while going out of its way to encourage irresponsible and selfish behaviour.
Is this deliberate? I don’t know. It’s definitely bad however.
Everything is done backwards, and the more libertarian among us, though they have excellent foundational principles and are correct to mistrust the govmint in just about everything, are a little reluctant to recognize that the average person has little real, actual chance of putting aside sufficient private retirement resources to protect against penury and horrible old-age housing.
And even the most happy devoted marriage can turn out to be a mug's game when a woman (for the sake of this discussion let's say it's the woman in this scenario), after raising the kids and having no or few social security credits, finds herself dealing with a spouse who's trading her in for a new improved model bringing along a step-kid or so and the family home must be sold in the divorce agreement and she's got to go back to work at the age of 50.
If her childraising homemaking was recognized by the government as retirement-credit earning (and all sorts of means testing can be factored in at the time of accessing benefits), more women could more safely risk more of the childraising homemaking.
Anyone thinks I'm exaggerating about the catfood dining had I not worked full-time for so long, we should have a nice friendly non-generalized chat about golden years impoverishment when you've been a little deficient in your character-analysis skills.
Couldn't she just take Prozac like the rest of us?
You miss the maternal care substitution imperative. She didn't just need to feel better.
Clinical depression is often a symptom of alcohol/other-psychoactive drug addiction.
Such addictions are attempts at self-medication.
You can't "self medicate" if you don't have the biological predisposition to substance addiction.
We've got biological predispositions to just about everything. Devil is always in the details.
No, we do not. If you are not an alcoholic, try drinking addictively. You will not be able to. Your body won't let you.