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The Newborn Baby, by Matthijs Naiveu (Metropolitan Museum of Art) |
Back when my friends were having babies, I sometimes greeted the happy news of a pregnancy by describing what I called my "parenthood epiphany." It went like this:
The week we brought Ross home, I was sitting in the new blue rocking chair about 3 a.m., staring numbly down into his red, distorted, howling face. And a startling thought formed in my exhaustion-sapped mind: Ohhhhhhhh, so this is why those teenage girls kill their kids. Now I understand. We're 35 years old. We have all the money in the world. We desperately wanted this baby, for years. It's the third night. And we're going OUT OF OUR MINDS!I told that story, not because I'm a bastard — well, not entirely — but because I wanted the expectant newcomer before me to realize that they were embarking upon a rocky journey. That if they found it difficult at times, it wasn't because they were bad parents, necessarily. It was just the nature of the beast
Only the story didn't comfort the listeners, it concerned them — I can still see one colleague, an editor at the paper, backing away, eyes wide — and I eventually stopped telling it, so not to constrict my social circle smaller than it already was.
This came back to me when I saw Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance being pilloried on social media for his remarks from 2021 that people without children do not have a "direct stake" in the country, but are, "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg ... the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children."
There's a lot to unpack there.
First, he's completely mistaken. Harris has two stepchildren, and the suggestion that they somehow don't count is simply wrong, as anyone who knows anyone with foster or adopted children — like Pete Buttigieg and his husband — or stepchildren knows.