Good Old Breeders

A piece by a devoted but realistic mother illustrates the daily sacrifice of parenthood.

The other day, I was trying to read the cover story of this week's New York magazine about a woman who is starting a TV network for Alpha Moms. I wanted to know who these Alpha Moms were. But my 41/2-week-old baby needed attention. So I cradled him in one arm, turned on the ceiling fan in the living room and stood there reading while he watched the blades slowly turning. He likes that.

The article suggested that Alpha Moms can do it all, but by the second page I found out how — they have help. "It takes a village," the mom in the article actually said. And she apparently hired a village to watch her kid so she could work 100 hours a week on starting a TV network. Not just a nanny or a babysitter as many parents do, but a nanny and a babysitter and a night nurse. The more she learned about successful motherhood, the more people she hired to achieve it for her, the article said.

Me, I'm a Beta Mom. Beta Moms fall short of Alpha Moms in terms of doing it all. But we do raise our kids. Oh, we can work at home or in an office, but we generally care for our own offspring.

Right now, I am typing this all lower case with one hand because I am holding the baby and can't hit the shift key.

The Alpha Mom gets a report on how many diapers her baby goes through in a day. I change our baby's diapers and report to myself. Oh, I don't change them all. My husband changes some and so does our wonderful ten-year-old daughter. Our sons, aged eight and five, sing to him, fetch bottles, wipes, and gently push the stroller back and forth on our porch. The dog licks the top of the baby's head when within reach. I think she thinks he's a puppy. The cat stares at him.

This piece appealed to me because one of my children loved ceiling fans. She became overwhelmed at six months when we went to a restaurant that had half a dozen such fans.

This piece also reminds me that the commitment to children (and its absence) is a major dividing line in modern culture. Europe seems to have lost its soul, and with it, the desire to reproduce. The red-blue divide, as Steve Sailer reminds us is in many ways a split between "married with children" and "unmarried with a cat."

To "sacrifice" means to make holy. The one rôle where ordinary souls practice altruism these days is in parenthood. It is one place where we imitate God in our limited human way.

A pat on the back for us breeders!

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