Parenting

They say immersion journalism is dead, but I just might have proven them wrong. The night before I wrote this column, I took on a most unfamiliar role, one my wife has been playing for the past two months: waking up in the night to take care of our baby son. We recently started bottle-feeding him, which allowed me to overcome my, er, biological inabilities in this department. This won’t be so bad, I thought around 5 a.m., as I sat in the dark while he cooed and sucked down formula. Cut to an hour later as I lay in bed, my mind churning through the latest NFL trades. While my wife can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, I have a giant spinning turbine of an overactive imagination.

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.

‘A woman’s place is in the House and the Senate’, read the shirts assembled by slave labor in Myanmar, the messaging likely dreamed up by graduates of a small liberal arts school whose annual tuition would make a generous stimulus package for a city in any developing country. I like seeing women in the Senate, don’t get me wrong. I just see the former option, the house, as much more preferable for myself for a variety of reasons. I went through my Girl Boss phase in my late teens — my hard working immigrant parents, the descendants of a long, long line of ‘tradwives’, wanted different things for their only daughter.

My parents didn’t care if I had extracurricular enrichment and free play. They sent me outside after Saturday chores and didn’t want me home until dinner. In old jeans and a t-shirt, I’d look for arrowheads in the woods with the neighborhood kids. Once, one of the dads from the housing development saw us out there, yelled ‘Get off my property,' and pulled a shotgun on us. We scrambled away as the shot crackled in the air. I didn’t see any reason to tell my parents about it. I was on my own until dinner. Today’s young adults cling to the remnants of childhood like dying men to a life raft. Adulthood no longer has the feel of freedom, but the sting of bondage and the musty smell of the parental basement.