One reason why I started this blog is because I wanted to share my personal experience of how feminist beliefs have played out in my own life negatively, and in the lives of other women (and men!) I know. I would even go as far as to say feminism nearly ruined my life. I can directly account my being divorced and a single mom to its poisonous teachings.
And it started even before I was born. My own mother was of the boomer generation, and while she herself did not follow the feminist path and choose to be a wife and mother instead, she always seemed to feel like she had “missed out” on the things her two sisters who did not have children were able to do. Most especially my mom was bitterly jealous of her oldest sister, the only girl in the family who went to college and then spent her life working as a high school teacher.
My aunt taught home economics, so she was still somewhat traditional, but she and her husband (who worked for IBM) were your typical dual-income-no-kids (DINK) couple. They lived in a fancy house that was impeccably furnished with white carpet and white furniture. They traveled the world on my aunt’s summer breaks, and basically spent their entire lives indulging their every self-absorbed whim. They didn’t need to think about anyone else, and so they didn’t. My mom didn’t hide the fact that she thought my aunt had it all, and she hated her for it.
My mom didn’t really seem to like being a mom, and she clearly resented the burden of having children. She tried yo pass this view of mothering on to me, doing her best to tell me at every opportunity not to destroy my own life by having kids (Implied: like she had done. Ouch.) She raised me to be a good little feminist, to put my education and career before all else.
Even after I married she advised me never to trust my husband to be there for me, but to always be on guard with him, to always have my own income, and to always be on the lookout for him oppressing me and holding me back. If I was unhappy or when things weren’t going well, instead of advising me to work on my marriage or saying that sometimes tough times just happen and this too shall pass, she urged me to divorce, to unburden myself of male oppression. Not exactly the best way to approach a marriage.
Likewise, because of the negative view she (and feminism in general) painted of motherhood, I was in no hurry. When I finally decided to have a child at age 33, I can remember my mom acting more like I had ruined my life than her being happy. Perhaps her only joy in my becoming a mother was that she finally had something to lord over her sister — a grandchild. She made a very big deal of that, making sure her sisters without children knew these were HER grandchildren and her reward for “suffering” though raising her own kids. (We largely raised ourselves actually and did all we could not to burden her further with our presence.)
Despite this big show, she rarely ever visits HER grandchildren despite living only 20 minutes away, and she never offers to take them or spend time with them. She prefers instead to show her love by showing up at birthdays and holidays, swooping in with lots of gifts, taking photos which she posts on Facebook, and then quickly departing.
Over and over again my mom has always qualified her own parenting and then grand-parenting by saying she “couldn’t give what she didn’t get.” She feels absolutely no remorse at all for her attitude, and feminism only supports her view that she is most important, that it is all about her, that being a perpetual self absorbed 14-year-old girl is perfectly OK. It’s her “right” to choose freedom from any familial responsibility.
I am not saying all this to bash or disrespect my mom, although I could see how it might seem that way. In reality I feel sorry for her. She’s been poisoned by feminism, too, and that point of view has led to her resenting her own family rather than seeing it as a blessing.
She’s missing out on so much, big chunks of her children’s and grand children’s lives. The opportunity to bond and create relationships with us. To belong to something bigger than herself. Rather than heal her own childhood lack by being or doing different, she only replays it via denying her own children and grand children any maternal attachment or nurturing. I used to reach out to her, to try and have a relationship, but after numerous painful rebuffs, I stopped. Now I leave our relationship up to her. I am happy to see her when she comes around, but I don’t ask for anything more than she herself is willing to give. And that is not much.
My mother’s attitude colored my brother’s view of women and family so much that he never married or had kids. He’s struggled his whole adult life, trying to reconcile all of this.
In real life very few people know that I have these feelings. Every once in awhile someone I know will ask where my mom lives, assuming it is across the country because they have never met her or heard me talk of us doing family things. It’s embarrassing to see the shock on their faces when they realize she lives locally.
Ironically, there are several women in my life who didn’t have children themselves who are my mom’s age that spend much more time with me and my kids than she does. We’ve all sort of adopted each other. These two women followed the feminist path themselves, and while they both accomplished much in life, they now seem to regret that they don’t have a family legacy but a dead end. The older they get, the more acutely they seem to feel it. One is a widow and in her late 70s. She really worries who will be there for her if she ever becomes ill or can’t care for herself. Besides her older brother who lives in assisted living himself, she’s literally all alone in the world. And she knows it. I tell her I would be there for her, and she seems to find great comfort in that. And I would be there for her, just like she’s been here for me.
While I was pregnant with my first child, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of mother I wanted to be. I decided I wanted to be the mother I never had, to do my very best to give my own children what I didn’t get, to never play my own lack forward. I never want my own children to feel the pain of feeling like a burden, and I tell them often how much I love them and what a blessing they are to me. I tell them how happy I am to be their mother, how wonderful they are, and how proud of them I am. It brings me such joy to see their little faces light up at those words. It heals me to be the mom I wished I had myself.
And someday I hope that I will also be the grandmother I wish they had, that I can be there for them, support and encourage them in their marriages, encourage them to embrace family as a blessing not a curse, watch the grand kids so they can enjoy date nights, and to encourage them to put their husband and children first, to build their house upon that rock and not their careers.
When I was expecting my first I found a quote by Jacqueline Kennedy that I think pretty much sums it up: “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”
Regardless of what feminism may say about that, I think truer words were never spoken. The older I get, the more strongly I believe that. And that feminism is at the root of so many of the problems we see in society today. Babies don’t belong in daycare, they belong in their mother’s arms. A society who teaches moms and dads otherwise is shooting itself in the foot.
Let those who have ears hear.
———-
p.s. I know many women today would say they don’t have a choice to do the above, because their mate is unwilling or unable to provide for them so that they can. That “men aren’t men anymore.” And it’s likely true. Today women are raised to work and have a career, and men have been raised to expect and accept this, also. Again, I would say that’s the result of feminism. Women actually wanted that, demanded that. A pretty bum deal all around, if you ask me! But that’s a whole other post….
I would think that instincts would kick in and that motherhood would be the most natural thing in the world.
It’s not just feminism. I was born earlier and, yet, I am certain that my mother regretted going down that road. Her best friend, and my godmother, stayed single. I think my mother was always jealous of her lack of responsibility or freedom.
I am glad that you are not passing this on to your daughters.
In defense of your mother, didn’t she have to work because your father died?
Redpillgirlcontes,
Over at my usual haunt, someone new has written a post about this subject.
https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/a-thought-or-two-on-mothers/#comment-43011
That htere are two bear videos in the original post, gave the author away. 😉
Redpillgirlnotes,
At my ususal haunt, someone has written a post on this subject yoo.
https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/a-thought-or-two-on-mothers/#comment-43011
That there are two bear videos in tha post, gives the author away.
Sorry, for the double comment. I had thought the first got eaten by the internet.
This comment has more to do with the motherhood issue than the feminist issue. It has been my personal experience and observation that some parents treat their offspring like pets, not people. Showering children with presents but not their personal time is but one example.
There is a certain anti-family aspect of feminism that rationalizes this behavior. Trying to be a feminist “SuperMom” means the child rearing takes a lesser priority to career or cause.
Well said, Bloom. 🙂
Mom definitely raised me to be a feminist. She didn’t want me to have kids, and when I was pregnant with the first she was very unhappy and asked if I planned on “keeping it”. Then she said “you in for a lot a pain elizabet”.
But she didn’t want me to marry Mike either, she wanted me to marry someone I could more easily manipulate. Good grief! Thank God I didn’t listen to mom!
Mike saved me. 🙂
Over and over again my mom has always qualified her own parenting and then grand-parenting by saying she “couldn’t give what she didn’t get.”
Bantha dung this would be.
If true it was,
generations after generation condemned to pit they would be
Liz,
From what you tell us, Mike has been a very good influence on you.
Definitely, Fuzzie!
I’d be a different person now if we hadn’t gotten together I’m sure.
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There do seem to be lots of people with less than stellar Moms around these parts.
And apparently they turned out better than their Moms. So people can rise above their start in lif.
Farm Boy,
My brother was able to rise above it. I have been single all my life and my sister married late. She will never have children of her own.
How we react is up to the individual.
I was never under the impression that the majority of feminists believed that being a mom was an anti-feminist decision. It actually is quite feminist, the way I see it.
@ Farm Boy, agreed I am glad to see so many around here rising above!
@ Fuzzie, yes everyone reacts differently, there is no “right” way to respond, like JF12 said long ago, we are all wandering in the smoking wreckage. None of us had a say in any of these changes, we have just had to deal with the fallout of a huge social experiment foisted upon us.
@ Ashley I am glad to hear that is not universal. Perhaps things have changed. In my mom’s day, when the pill was brand new and not having children was for the first time a possibility, many of that generation were urged to not have kids.
Motherhood is not for all women, just as fatherhood is not for all men.
But it would seem that the vast majority of people are indeed desirous of having children of their own. For those that choose this path, it should never be looked on as a burden. It is a great responsibility and wonderful chance to not only help shape the next generation, but to create a loving family with their spouse.
“I was never under the impression that the majority of feminists believed that being a mom was an anti-feminist decision. It actually is quite feminist, the way I see it.”
My mom was afraid having children would impact my career, which would make me more dependent on my husband. Which, no doubt, it definitely has.
Live long people now do.
Time for both “kids” and “not kids” there should be.
You are too young to think in terms of your life being ruined
Trying to be a feminist “SuperMom” means the child rearing takes a lesser priority to career or cause.
So being a super mom means that “inferior mom” you are.
Like with many “isms”, words mean opposite of truth they do
@ fuzzie it’s hard to say how much of this was the loss of my dad and her being a widow w a 2 and a 4 year old at age 27. That had to have been incredibly difficult, very.
Like Liz says of Mike, I have been told my dad really balanced my mom out, brought out the best in her. They met in 2nd grade, each other’s first boy/girlfriend, prom king and queen, football captain and head cheerleader, and all of that. My dad had a challenging family himself but was an eternal optimist, always looking at the positive. My mom’s family fostered the opposite, focusing on the downsides, glass always half empty. Perhaps with him she would have risen above. It’s something none of us will ever know.
I also agree women felt those things prior to feminism, and those feelings even fostered feminism – for women to be freed from the constraints of their natural gender role.
Perhaps to women at home with children all day, going to work like their husband’s did seemed like a ticket out of the endless round and round of housework and childcare, things that are never undone but merely done and undone and done again and again. Maybe it seemed like men “had it all” when they weren’t seeing firsthand that a job/career can be monotonous and often thankless too. A cog in the machine the majority of the time. Few were really living the thrilling high life.
And what did’t really seem to get factored in enough was that for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. The children often absorbed the brunt of the impact, shunted off to some cattle lot style daycare or left to care for themselves.
Parents in a two career household were often stretched too thin, stressed with the reality that all those housekeeping chores still needed doing, but now on evenings and weekends. Everyone now had two jobs instead of one.
The early feminists didn’t see that though, maybe couldn’t forsee how there would be as many downsides as upsides. Some still can’t, instead they just demand more accommodation from their spouses and children so they can live their every whim and fantasy. It was a very immature worldview, the Boomer one. Me, me, and more me! Perpetual adolescence. Our culture has paid dearly for it. (Says the Gen X’er!)
@ David agreed, my life is not ruined, and I think thanks to realizing all of this I have a better shot at finding a life of true meaning and contentment. So perhaps feminism also showed me what doesn’t work, in a weird way?
@ Liz my mom seemed to feel the same, that children would interfere w “options” like career and such. And of course they do. But there are as many upsides as downsides. The whole “be an island” mindset isn’t always the freedom it’s cut out to be. Dependance and interconnectedness create connection and meaning, too. 🙂
@ Yoda, yes the “Super Mom” thing seems to be more about either providing material goods for kids over time, or in running kids to all kinds of after school activities, or both. What kids probably want more than that is simply time with mom.
Redpillgirlnotes,
I hadn’t realized that your parents were childhood sweethearts. Ouch!
@ Fuzzie, that Panda mom got it right! Baby needs snuggling and nurturing more than anything. How sweet.
I keep chickens and have found them to be fantastic mothers, as well. Funny how animals know better than we do sometimes, despite all our “superior intelligence!”
the feminist leadership is anti motherhood.This cannot even be argued. rank and file feminist? doesn;t matter because they march lock step with the hate machine
Hell being pro abortion ie child murder is anti motherhood taken to the extreme
One of the things that we’ll see going forward is denial from feminists, especially those who consider themselves to be moderate. However, how many of them are condemning radicals?
the feminist leadership is anti motherhood.This cannot even be argued
Odd for a society to allow this to become dominant it is
The early feminists didn’t see that though, maybe couldn’t forsee how there would be as many downsides as upsides. Some still can’t, instead they just demand more accommodation from their spouses and children
If have them they do
early feminist wanted this stuff, often were lesbians and hostile to traditional family roles
stop giving these bitches the benefit of the doubt; this is what they wanted
@ton
I like lesbians. I’ll do missionary dating with them. They’re already set up for poly.
Ummm. Should have been “I like [pretty, feminine] lesbians…”
Yoda,
If not spouses and children, then, there is the government. No matter how far out their demands are, somene will always listen.
Bloom
How many more could you crank out? Not asking your age….
Artisanal Yoad,
It is kind of a difficult to answer question because i am sure she wants to be married to her next child’s father.
@ Toad lol, not the softball mullet haircut ones? 😉 I think you may be thinking of bi, not lesbians too.
Toad I am on the upper edge of having more for sure, at 44. Had my last at 40, pregnant no problem both times w/i 2 months of trying. I still have regular cycles and seem to be firing off eggs on schedule, so it should be possible…but… it would be lucky at this point I’d think.
Having a baby at 33 and at 40 I felt the difference, in how much of a hit it was physically on my system. I am sure it’s much easier in the 20s than the 40s. And I know some gals who were losing fertility by 27, it’s highly individual. I was lucky I had no problems. Other friends my age tried and tried, no dice…
And yes, there’s that too Fuzzie. With a forever and ever partner for sure, if ever again. Absolutely!
I had super easy pregnancies, loved being pregnant, felt great, did not have trouble with weight gain at all, was apparently built for the job. Too bad I didn’t start earlier! And know then what I do now.
Sorry if all that was TMI. I always expected pregnancy to just suck, so I was very surprised how easy it was and how great I felt!
Redpillgirlnots,
That makes me smile. It is an honest and worthy ambition.
I agree with Ton. All of feminism was and is bad. Right from the beginning it was built on arrogance, selfishness, and lies. You can tell a tree by it’s fruit, and the fruit of feminism is destruction, misery, and moral decay. It’s evil.
JDG,
Are you all right? You made a whole comment without the word “sandwich” in it.
Of course feminism is evil, it discourages women from making sandwiches for their loved ones.
Thanks for asking Fuzzie. I’ve been working the midnight shift lately and it can affect my ability to focus. I see you have my back though, and I do appreciated it. As you say, how can anything that turns a woman away from sammich making be a good thing?
“I’ve been working the midnight shift lately and it can affect my ability to focus.”
Ugh, sorry JDG.
Night shifts suck. 😦
Salubrious restorative: Sammiches Sammiches Sammiches!
🙂
and milkshake!
I just think someone should let you know that this lifestyle you talk about being taught to have is not feminism at all. You realize feminism’s primary advocacy is equality between all people, most commonly women receiving equal treatment to men. Feminism encourages women to feel empowered and promotes love rather than hate of any sex/race/religion etc. It does not mean women are only successful if they are unmarried & have a career. The idea of feminism supports the idea that a stay-at-home mom who takes care of her children & home is of no lesser value than her working husband and vice versa. If a woman chooses to have a career & stay single then good for her. If she chooses to have a career & be a mother good for her. If she chooses not to work or be a mother but get married good for her. Being a feminist does not mean living your life without men AT ALL. If you don’t believe me please feel free to look up the definition.
Syd,
You realize feminism’s primary advocacy is equality between all people, most commonly women receiving equal treatment to men.
If it’s primary goal is to advocate for equality amongst all people, when will it begin working toward making sure men recieve equal treatment to women?
If you don’t believe me please feel free to look up the definition.
There is a rather large difference between a dictionary definition of Feminism and what we see its followers doing in the real world.
Unlike most of the commenters here, I am egalitarian, but even I can see that.
I’m an unmarried man therefore I can’t really comment on the whole “freedom>marriage and children” thing. What caught my eye in this article was “men aren’t men anymore.” Funny because some of us feel the exact way about women. If women don’t like “weak men,” what on Earth makes them think that we want “strong women?” Discrimination of any shape or form stinks, however, men and women are not meant to be equals, we were meant to be opposites. Yes I was a MGTOW however, I left because there is way too much anger and resentment (I feel) within that community. No, I am not a feminist. Re-read that last statement. It does not mean that I support pay inequality or rape culture, what I do not support is a movement that started out about freeing women from the burden of “xyz” and has now become about the ability to destroy innocent people’s lives with devestating divorce and False Accusations. “When it comes to the law, the man is always guilty” said Officer Friendly.
“Hypergamy,” “Alpha Fucks Beta Bucks,” and “No Fault Divorce” is another conversation. The Red Pill was created to counter-act the Feminist Jaggernaut of a World that many men fell prey to simply due to ignorance. Every action has and equal and opposite reaction, which is the law of Physics.
“Nice Guys Finish Last.” I will never criticize a woman’s life choices out of respect for her as a person. However, I will not bite my toungue either when asked my honest opinion either. The reason that “men aren’t men anymore” is because a lot of us were taught that masculinity = evil by the very women who grew up and started saying things like “A weak man can’t handle a strong woman, he won’t know what to do with her.” I, Jerald Ryan McClain, know exactly what to do with a “strong woman.” Bye Felicia.
This is the part where I get verbally attacked with common phrases like “You’re just mad because you can’t get laid” or “You’re a misogynist.” I’m in the mood for a debate.
Take your best shot…
Well feminism has certainly destroyed many of us good single men’s life already since it is very difficult for many of us men to meet a real decent normal woman today altogether.