Mother’s day

Oh, mother! What’s the most subversive argument a woman can make in the topsy-turvy la-la land that is America in 2021? It is of course a point that would have been regarded as utterly normal and sane just a few years ago — i.e., that women shouldn’t necessarily be afraid to have children. Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion writer at the New York Times, this week made the shockingly transgressive point that ‘there are good reasons to wait to have children and good reasons not to’. She mildly suggested that the nation’s declining birthrates was a cause for concern, that the Biden administration was right to want to do more to support parents in need of financial help. She admitted that she found becoming a mother at 25 daunting but also a ‘relief...

This Mother’s Day, instead of booking an overpriced Sunday brunch, I am calling an emergency family meeting. I intend to sit both of my kids down and undo what the schools, the media and our political class are teaching them about 50 percent of the population, namely boys. I don’t need a Mother’s Day gift this year. I prefer my son’s integrity and self-worth be snatched back from the clutches of the identity-politics mob. That will do. First on my agenda is assuring my children there is no such thing as ‘toxic masculinity’. It is a baseless, unserious idea, made up by people who seek to elevate themselves by pulling others down. I want my son to hear his mother affirm for him that masculinity, like femininity, is natural, good, and nothing to minimize or malign.

Cockburn couldn’t get home for Mother’s Day because he was on the campaign trail in Los Angeles, covering Kamala Harris. Harris’s chances of being America’s first Matriarch-in-Chief may be slimmer than Beto O’Rourke’s waistline, but she’s always been a mother to Cockburn. She invited him home, to join her and her husband Douglas ‘Doug’ Emhoff for a quiet Mother’s Day dinner — just them, Cockburn, their children, her campaign team, and a photographer.‘Kamala, this is delicious,’ Cockburn said, masticating furiously over her jerk chicken as the juice ran down his chin. ‘You must give me the recipe.