Motherhood

[pegkerr]

From Arts & Letters Daily:

Given all the hits a mother is liable to take, is motherhood worth it? Trouble is, you can’t know what kind of motherhood you’ll get... more

Gee, with all the ink that gets spilled on motherhood each year, you think people would figure out how to make so many aspects of it less depressing.

Never heard of Maternal Depletion Syndrome (MDS) syndrome before, but I'm sure that at various points in my journey of motherhood, I've had it.

Hmm. I might investigate the magazine this article's published in. Haven't heard of it before. It looks interesting.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Children grow up to be the next generation of workers. Their wages will pay the Social Security checks that our generation--those who were in the workforce, anyway--will collect in old age. What's more, today's chubby-cheeked darlings on the playground will become tomorrow's adults who take care of the sick and elderly, run the government, collect the trash, hold the hands of hospice patients, fix our cars, cure our diseases, harvest our food, create our cultural masterpieces, and generally keep the economy trucking along.

This is something that some people who don't have children seem to overlook when they don't want to pay the taxes for schools or make some other social commitment for the good of children. Anyone who hopes to live past the age where their own peer group does all these jobs is going to be depending on the next generation or two. It's in their own self-interest for those generations to be well-educated, healthy, and well-disposed toward their elders!

I had to laugh at
"Their depletion may last into their children's teenage years, and then collide with the challenges of the transition to menopause."
When I started into menopause, our two oldest were about 4, our third hadn't joined to family yet, and our youngest wouldn't be born for three years. Granted, I started menopause early, at 40 (and had what must have been one of the longest on record), but by the time our oldest hit 13, I was 49, and I was post-menopausal quite a while before the youngest turned 13.

As for the substance of the article--it makes me uncomfortable in the same way that a lot of health-diet-lifestyle stuff does: The underlying premise seems to be that if you just do everything exactly right--eat the right foods in the right amount, do the right exercise and the right amount at the right time, have the right amount of sex at the right age with the right partner, have the right number of kids at the right time--if you get just the right combination, you'll have a trouble-free life and live forever. The corollary, of course, is that if your life isn't perfect and you don't stay healthy and live forever, you've done something wrong and it's all your own fault. It gives me the creeps.