The Rise Of Performative Motherhood

Instagram helped here, as did a few other things.

I guess before we get going here, we need to acknowledge the large elephant in the room, which anyone who has read a bunch of my stuff might know about — is that I’ve been trying to get my wife pregnant, via science and organic methods (that means sex) for a while now, and it hasn’t worked, and it’s probably my issue. I’m also a dude. You combine those two elements — “can’t impregnate wife” and “a dude” — and it’s easy to think anything I say about motherhood is inherently resentful. If you want to take that angle on this, you absolutely can and I would understand why. Let’s now move on.

First I think we need to acknowledge that multiple children has long since ceased to be an economic necessity (“work the farm”) and is now an economic luxury and/or even a burden, especially given inflation, child care costs, how we re-contextualized the role of schools during COVID, etc. I still know plenty of people with five and six kids, and some of them are good friends of mine. I also know people who dreamed of 3–4 and stopped at one via economic constraints. I think we all know that global warming is a thing, climate change is a thing, food production is a thing, overpopulation is a thing, and automation is a thing. All these “things” are going to change what the future looks like for a current newborn. We don’t always admit that stuff, but I think most of us know it. The argument women had to other women for years was that it was selfish to not have a kid. Now I think you can flip the argument and say it’s probably selfish to have one. All that said, I’d still like to have one.

Now, though, am I having one for the “right” reason? Has anyone truly defined the “right” reason to have a kid? I think some of us stammer over stuff about expanding love and moving the race forward and doing better than our parents and “a full household” and all this stuff, but in reality I think in modernity a lot of people have kids for these reasons: