On Motherhood: What They Don't Want You to Know

in which I discuss why mothers are one of the greatest threats to the cold, inhuman machine we've come to know as "modern society"

There’s a lot they don’t want you to know about motherhood.

They don’t tell you what you’ll become when you walk across the battlefield to meet your child. They don’t want you to know what it’s like to love someone so small and dependent and vulnerable so utterly; they don’t want you to understand the full scope of your own humanity. They don’t want you to know what it’s like to look into a tiny face and feel you are beholden to something else—something that isn’t them.

Our brave new world hates mothers. But you know what they love? Corporate purse dogs. More workers in their giant cosmopolitan beehives. And, of course, fewer children.

So, they lie.

They’ll tell you that being a mother is diminishing to your “potential as a woman.” Because, of course, your “potential as a woman” is to “climb the corporate ladder” and “shatter the glass ceiling” and sell your soul to the ravenous gods of the machine with names like GDP, Academic Achievement, and the ever-opaque-but-useful Progress.

They’ll tell you other lies, too: lies like, “You’ll lose yourself when you have kids,” whether that’s your time, your body, or your previous identity as a participant in their glamorized rat-race. All are certain (they claim), and all are Bad. All make you less-than, although less-than-what, they won’t tell you because that would be bad for business.

And make no mistake, it’s all about business in our hyper-commodified, mechanized world. Hence the abundance of anti-mother propaganda. If you’re to remain their slave, they must have you believing that, really, you’re liberated! Liberated from the oppression of a husband and children who love you—who need you—into the arms of a faceless corporate overlord who’ll have no qualms about yeeting and replacing you for calling in sick one too many times. Ah, sweet freedom! Sweet progress! How advanced and enlightened a society we live in—including, of course, the finest breads and circuses to keep you from revolting! How grand it all is.

They’ll tell you all the difficulties that motherhood involves: the sleepless nights, the endless days, the periods of chaos where it seems like you’ll never have peace again. These things are real, but what they don’t want you to know is that they’re worth it. If you were to realize this truth, you might leave the cubical; you might touch the grass; you might decide—and this is the worst thing—that, no, actually, you’d rather not outsource the raising and wellbeing of your children to some mechanical, regime-approved “expert.”

This would be a disaster, see.

Motherhood is the opposite of mechanical, and this is why it’s dangerous. The machine needs women to be drones, and motherhood puts them in touch with the deepest, most fundamental core of their design and humanity: to love and be loved, to need and be needed, so viscerally and so intrinsically that it forges a spine impossible to bend or break. This is the core of femininity.

To experience connection with a child—your child­—is to experience a break in the conditioning meant to facilitate your seamless and unquestioning integration into your approved slot within our hyper-efficient System, where your purpose is to live in ze pod, eat ze bugs: to own nothing and be happy. It’s simply no good if the pawns walk off the board.

And so, they must obscure the truth. They must bury it beneath as much “liberation” propaganda as they can manufacture. They must ensure that mothers, in practice if not in actuality, become extinct. Their own survival depends on it.