The way my jaw dropped reading that! It would have emotionally destroyed me if my husband was like "hey, I know you just had a baby but I really think now would be a good time to explore my sexuality."
Reading between the lines a bit, to me the biggest takeaway is that our relentless societal focus on "efficiency" leaves little or no slack for anyone with the result that a butterfly flapping it's wings the wrong way leads to crisis.
There's always a tension between efficiency and resilience, as we discovered with global supply chains in the wake of COVID. But modern life values efficiency much much higher.
With the exception of the Kenya couple (why didn't he see the kid for a year?) a lot of their marital and parenting issues feel pretty overcomable if everyone has a chance to take a step back, breathe deeply, get trusted friends and family and maybe even a therapist involved, etc. Maybe this is just Darby's retelling, but it probably reflects the reality, all of these stories have very little mention of any external help other than perhaps government provided counselling.
Maybe in addition to nursing consultants, hospitals and governments need to start providing (male) fathering consultants.
Yes I agree- their issues don't seem insurmountable, and I think the dads all started out at the beginning of the book wanting to be involved, and then ran into various obstacles.
It is insane to me how in so much of the world men are almost expected to ignore fatherhood, or treat their kids as a hobby they participate in for a few hours a week. I live in Quebec, and on top of 18 weeks of maternity leave for the parent who gave birth the government offers dads five weeks of paternity leave (that can't be transfered ) and 32 weeks parental leave that can be split between parents (and if both parents take at least 8 weeks of leave, they get an extra 4 weeks of benefits added on. I don't know any dad who hasn't taken time off to be with their kids, and while a lot of them still struggled with feelings of uselessness in the early months and a general lack of community built around fatherhood, they've all managed to bond with their kids. Reading articles like this reminds me of how privileged we are here!
Interestingly, I have hetero friends in Burlington, VT who have a 2yo. They are both still involved in gendered birth cohorts for moms and dads, and the father's group is WAYYYYY more active and supportive. They have open brunch and coffee every Saturday morning (babies welcome) and so much more social support. The moms group is less supportive and active, and I think part of this is that the dad's group had some selection bias in it. Only the raddest dad interested in parental community opted in and maintained connection. There's more ideological and identity heterogeneity in the mom cohort, and what keeps them bound together is their experience of pregnancy.
These same friends have also been pretty successful with a nanny share with another family in their birth cohort, which seems unusual to me. People who have enough money for a nanny typically do not want to give up enough control to split the nanny, so it doesn't seem to work out as often as it should. I think there's something in the water in Burlington that we should pay attention to. (Then again, a POS starter home in Burlington costs $700,000 now, so it's quickly becoming insanely expensive.)
Thank you for writing this! Was so interesting to read your perspectives. I also thought a lot about the fathers as I was reading it and was saddened by all of their experiences in some way, and also was interested in how much the mothers’ experience with new motherhood and their mental health was associated with culture/policy, and how much of it was affected by their partners’ involvement, or lack thereof. Thank you also for the shoutout!
The Apple TV documentary on fathers was actually pretty good. Some of these experiences resonate with me though I am more fortunate than the fathers here. I didn’t feel much of an attachment until 6 months which many fathers echo. The biological realties just can’t be overcome with children. We should recognize these differences and build our social policies and expectations to accommodate those within reason (1955 was not reasonable)
Well, that was a rough read. I of course totally support expanded maternity and paternity leave, and I'm very thankful that I got 6 weeks paid from my employer, but my main takeaway is that marriage is extremely important and pregnancies are best left to committed couples who are not at risk of dissolving their relationship.
This made me so sad. Slightly different, but when my mom and mother-in-law were visiting recently after my child's birth, both women told me that their husbands had been back to work within days after me and my partner were born. (And my dad apparently went back to work while my mom was in the hospital, though he took a few more days off when she and I came home.)
My initial reaction was to feel terrible for my mom and MIL - left alone so quickly with a newborn?! I still feel that way, but this is a good reminder to think about how that set of policies and cultural norms might also have harmed my dad and my husband's dad.
I had just sent one of my readers to your stack, Darby. She's a mom of a 6-mo old and her husband has started telling small lies, then blaming it on her 'overreacting to innocent things.' He's having a mental breakdown and she's caught between feeling sympathy and feeling anger that she's now taking care of him and the baby. I thought your perspective might be good for her.
My job, as I've self-assigned it ;-) is to give the out-of-the-box alternative, including how things were 6000 yrs ago in matrifocal Goddess cultures. The temples were hubs of activity, where weaving, bread-baking and medicine-making were practiced as sacred activities. The temple grounds had agriculture and ample room to house 5000 women and children. It was surrounded by homes for families, although the women might go to the temple and choose other sexual partners. Men had no ownership of a child as 'his' and women had no need for a man to claim her child. A man's involvement with a child was with the mother's permission. The purpose of this society was to raise children.
But we don't have to go that far back. What makes parenting so precarious is the cost of housing. If income needed to be 5X the rent or mortgage, the cost of housing would be cut in half. Working for a boss is a relatively new invention, especially for women. With a reciprocal community economy that distributed credits for food, wellcare, education and home improvement, women and men would have flexible ways to prioritize their family and make a living equal to the cost of housing on the side.
Those societies disappeared because if men aren't motivated to care for their offspring, they would do nothing to protect mothers from wild beasts and the fury of the elements, building safer homes and villages, make access to clean water easier or dig wells, improving agriculture with better tools, carry metals and stones from far away. The same is true today.
Women have a safe playground essentially designed, buily and maintained by men. Matriarchy is a sign of deculturation and psychological, material and moral regression, and I'm not surprised that early-stage decline societies such as ours find that appealing.
You couldn't be more wrong, Giuseppe, although it's not surprising that you'd reach that conclusion since all we have to go on is the histories written under patriarchy. The word 'matriarch' is an oxymoron because the archons could only be men. Hierarchy is the inheritance order of who has the right to rule and heir was the original spelling of Aryan--the destroyers and conquerers of Egypt, Iran, India, Greece, Canaan--and of us today through the religions and languages they wrote.
The walls to keep out feral animals were built by men for all women and children, regardless of whether they were their own/ed. It was feral men who broached them and slaughtered the women and children of Harappa in the Aryan invasion, for the purpose of owning the women and forcing them to bear them heirs.
Flourishing 6000 yrs ago, the Harappens had indoor plumbing with channels that reached the end of town where it was composted for agriculture. Women actually created both agriculture and writing, from the evidence of the Vincas.
In Egypt, the 'sphinx' was actually the Goddess Mehit in lioness form that existed since 10,000 BCE in precise alignment facing the equinox of Leo. In 2500 BCE it was defaced with the Pharaoh Khafre carved out of its lioness head. Was that built 12,000 yrs ago because men carried stones? Or did the Goddess societies know something that's been erased by 4500 yrs of patriarchal amnesia?
There are no weapons--stone or otherwise--depicted in all the artifacts of matrifocal societies before the Aryan invasions, starting around 3100 BCE. The 'safe playground' cities were destroyed by violence enacted by men who shaped the metals--mined by slaves--into weapons, not agricultural tools.
When women were the designers of society, it served the purpose of raising children. When they were displaced through terrorism, it served the egos of the rulers. A mom and I were just talking about how her teenage daughter can't get from school to her dance class without encountering homeless men--I wouldn't describe our cities today as 'safe playgrounds'.
Dear Thereza, I understand that under the fragmentation of modernity, each is free to create one's own myths. About the Harappan civilization, I admit that I don't know much but - from a quick search - the idea that it was a feminine religion/civilization doesn't seem to be widely accepted. IHowever I need to read more - at any rate, it's a fascinating civilization so thank you for mentioning it.
(I observe passingly that the lack of safety of our cities is because of the feminine tendency of our times to privilege a therapeutical perspective and empathy with perpetrators-as-victims instead of vigorous prudence)
Deciphering from manspeak, you're saying that everything I just wrote is a myth that I made up. Your quick internet search trumps the books and online research I've done in writing my book. Typical.
By a "myth" I don't mean a falsehood nor something made up, I mean a narrative that has a foundational meaning for a group of people and that can be called up as the mean-giving symbol of a worldview. The word "myth" doesn't necessary have negative connotations.
And sorry, have you really said manspeak? That's a funny word!
Thanks for the links, I'll read them through. And would you mind providing a pointer to your book, fhanks? (PS apart from Jordan Peterson, who I know by fame, I don't know the other people you mention)
The book containing this research, called OMGdess, is in process.
To define manspeak, it's declarative sentences that assume the statement to be fact, without the qualifiers women use of 'I think,' 'it's my opinion,' 'I feel,' 'in my experience ...' etc.
This isn't necessarily bad, as long as it's assumed that everything is what someone thinks--including yourself.
You say "By a "myth" I don't mean a falsehood nor something made up." However your statement to me was, "under the fragmentation of modernity, each is free to create one's own myths." That's contradictory. You first say I'm creating my own myths and then define a myth as having foundational meaning for a group of people. By 'the fragmentation of modernity,' you see the problem as people finding their own meaning and worldviews without sticking to the traditional narratives--the ones provided by patriarchy.
I'm not seeing how 'creating one's own myths' is not an insult in response to my citing of anthropological research.
Everyone hates fathers, Péguy wrote as much in the 1910s. I'm not surprised about the narrative choices of the book.
By the way, all sad, unhinged people. The detritus washed up by the waves of modernity on a polluted beach.
(Later add on) to add more context, those are all examples of deculturation, that is, of societies in various stages of decline.
A culture is mainly defined as a shared set of solutions to the common problems of human life. After mere survival, the most pressing problem of human life is how to reproduce itself - the problem of family.
Here, we have three examples of cultures, Western, Japanese and African, all at different deculturation stages.
Absent culture, mothers fall back to the mere biology of motherhood, stripped-off of any cultural structure. Which, ironically, at least provide them with some anchoring.
Fathers, on the other hand, are completely unmoored, and without the frame of a civlization and having lost the vitality to return to a feral stage, are at a loss about how to feel and behave.
Main takeaway for me is to not start dating other dudes during the pregnancy
Yeah that definitely gets in the way!
The way my jaw dropped reading that! It would have emotionally destroyed me if my husband was like "hey, I know you just had a baby but I really think now would be a good time to explore my sexuality."
these dudes are some real weirdos tbf
Reading between the lines a bit, to me the biggest takeaway is that our relentless societal focus on "efficiency" leaves little or no slack for anyone with the result that a butterfly flapping it's wings the wrong way leads to crisis.
There's always a tension between efficiency and resilience, as we discovered with global supply chains in the wake of COVID. But modern life values efficiency much much higher.
With the exception of the Kenya couple (why didn't he see the kid for a year?) a lot of their marital and parenting issues feel pretty overcomable if everyone has a chance to take a step back, breathe deeply, get trusted friends and family and maybe even a therapist involved, etc. Maybe this is just Darby's retelling, but it probably reflects the reality, all of these stories have very little mention of any external help other than perhaps government provided counselling.
Maybe in addition to nursing consultants, hospitals and governments need to start providing (male) fathering consultants.
Yes I agree- their issues don't seem insurmountable, and I think the dads all started out at the beginning of the book wanting to be involved, and then ran into various obstacles.
It is insane to me how in so much of the world men are almost expected to ignore fatherhood, or treat their kids as a hobby they participate in for a few hours a week. I live in Quebec, and on top of 18 weeks of maternity leave for the parent who gave birth the government offers dads five weeks of paternity leave (that can't be transfered ) and 32 weeks parental leave that can be split between parents (and if both parents take at least 8 weeks of leave, they get an extra 4 weeks of benefits added on. I don't know any dad who hasn't taken time off to be with their kids, and while a lot of them still struggled with feelings of uselessness in the early months and a general lack of community built around fatherhood, they've all managed to bond with their kids. Reading articles like this reminds me of how privileged we are here!
That seems like a fantastic set of policies!
Interestingly, I have hetero friends in Burlington, VT who have a 2yo. They are both still involved in gendered birth cohorts for moms and dads, and the father's group is WAYYYYY more active and supportive. They have open brunch and coffee every Saturday morning (babies welcome) and so much more social support. The moms group is less supportive and active, and I think part of this is that the dad's group had some selection bias in it. Only the raddest dad interested in parental community opted in and maintained connection. There's more ideological and identity heterogeneity in the mom cohort, and what keeps them bound together is their experience of pregnancy.
That’s really cool to hear!
These same friends have also been pretty successful with a nanny share with another family in their birth cohort, which seems unusual to me. People who have enough money for a nanny typically do not want to give up enough control to split the nanny, so it doesn't seem to work out as often as it should. I think there's something in the water in Burlington that we should pay attention to. (Then again, a POS starter home in Burlington costs $700,000 now, so it's quickly becoming insanely expensive.)
Thank you for writing this! Was so interesting to read your perspectives. I also thought a lot about the fathers as I was reading it and was saddened by all of their experiences in some way, and also was interested in how much the mothers’ experience with new motherhood and their mental health was associated with culture/policy, and how much of it was affected by their partners’ involvement, or lack thereof. Thank you also for the shoutout!
Yes! Thanks for turning me on to the book- I’m so glad I finally got to read it!
The Apple TV documentary on fathers was actually pretty good. Some of these experiences resonate with me though I am more fortunate than the fathers here. I didn’t feel much of an attachment until 6 months which many fathers echo. The biological realties just can’t be overcome with children. We should recognize these differences and build our social policies and expectations to accommodate those within reason (1955 was not reasonable)
Well, that was a rough read. I of course totally support expanded maternity and paternity leave, and I'm very thankful that I got 6 weeks paid from my employer, but my main takeaway is that marriage is extremely important and pregnancies are best left to committed couples who are not at risk of dissolving their relationship.
This made me so sad. Slightly different, but when my mom and mother-in-law were visiting recently after my child's birth, both women told me that their husbands had been back to work within days after me and my partner were born. (And my dad apparently went back to work while my mom was in the hospital, though he took a few more days off when she and I came home.)
My initial reaction was to feel terrible for my mom and MIL - left alone so quickly with a newborn?! I still feel that way, but this is a good reminder to think about how that set of policies and cultural norms might also have harmed my dad and my husband's dad.
Yes, so important, these outcomes are often a mix of policy and culture (and personal preference, but that's often driven by the former).
Bleak but fascinating!
I had just sent one of my readers to your stack, Darby. She's a mom of a 6-mo old and her husband has started telling small lies, then blaming it on her 'overreacting to innocent things.' He's having a mental breakdown and she's caught between feeling sympathy and feeling anger that she's now taking care of him and the baby. I thought your perspective might be good for her.
My job, as I've self-assigned it ;-) is to give the out-of-the-box alternative, including how things were 6000 yrs ago in matrifocal Goddess cultures. The temples were hubs of activity, where weaving, bread-baking and medicine-making were practiced as sacred activities. The temple grounds had agriculture and ample room to house 5000 women and children. It was surrounded by homes for families, although the women might go to the temple and choose other sexual partners. Men had no ownership of a child as 'his' and women had no need for a man to claim her child. A man's involvement with a child was with the mother's permission. The purpose of this society was to raise children.
But we don't have to go that far back. What makes parenting so precarious is the cost of housing. If income needed to be 5X the rent or mortgage, the cost of housing would be cut in half. Working for a boss is a relatively new invention, especially for women. With a reciprocal community economy that distributed credits for food, wellcare, education and home improvement, women and men would have flexible ways to prioritize their family and make a living equal to the cost of housing on the side.
This is one step in the process, from Ch 19 of my book: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/19-banking-is-governance
Thank you so much for sending readers my way! I appreciate it. I agree that housing costs are such a huge barrier for family formation!
Those societies disappeared because if men aren't motivated to care for their offspring, they would do nothing to protect mothers from wild beasts and the fury of the elements, building safer homes and villages, make access to clean water easier or dig wells, improving agriculture with better tools, carry metals and stones from far away. The same is true today.
Women have a safe playground essentially designed, buily and maintained by men. Matriarchy is a sign of deculturation and psychological, material and moral regression, and I'm not surprised that early-stage decline societies such as ours find that appealing.
You couldn't be more wrong, Giuseppe, although it's not surprising that you'd reach that conclusion since all we have to go on is the histories written under patriarchy. The word 'matriarch' is an oxymoron because the archons could only be men. Hierarchy is the inheritance order of who has the right to rule and heir was the original spelling of Aryan--the destroyers and conquerers of Egypt, Iran, India, Greece, Canaan--and of us today through the religions and languages they wrote.
The walls to keep out feral animals were built by men for all women and children, regardless of whether they were their own/ed. It was feral men who broached them and slaughtered the women and children of Harappa in the Aryan invasion, for the purpose of owning the women and forcing them to bear them heirs.
Flourishing 6000 yrs ago, the Harappens had indoor plumbing with channels that reached the end of town where it was composted for agriculture. Women actually created both agriculture and writing, from the evidence of the Vincas.
In Egypt, the 'sphinx' was actually the Goddess Mehit in lioness form that existed since 10,000 BCE in precise alignment facing the equinox of Leo. In 2500 BCE it was defaced with the Pharaoh Khafre carved out of its lioness head. Was that built 12,000 yrs ago because men carried stones? Or did the Goddess societies know something that's been erased by 4500 yrs of patriarchal amnesia?
There are no weapons--stone or otherwise--depicted in all the artifacts of matrifocal societies before the Aryan invasions, starting around 3100 BCE. The 'safe playground' cities were destroyed by violence enacted by men who shaped the metals--mined by slaves--into weapons, not agricultural tools.
When women were the designers of society, it served the purpose of raising children. When they were displaced through terrorism, it served the egos of the rulers. A mom and I were just talking about how her teenage daughter can't get from school to her dance class without encountering homeless men--I wouldn't describe our cities today as 'safe playgrounds'.
Dear Thereza, I understand that under the fragmentation of modernity, each is free to create one's own myths. About the Harappan civilization, I admit that I don't know much but - from a quick search - the idea that it was a feminine religion/civilization doesn't seem to be widely accepted. IHowever I need to read more - at any rate, it's a fascinating civilization so thank you for mentioning it.
(I observe passingly that the lack of safety of our cities is because of the feminine tendency of our times to privilege a therapeutical perspective and empathy with perpetrators-as-victims instead of vigorous prudence)
Deciphering from manspeak, you're saying that everything I just wrote is a myth that I made up. Your quick internet search trumps the books and online research I've done in writing my book. Typical.
However, it's NOT a myth, according to you, that "the lack of safety of our cities is because of the feminine tendency of our times to privilege a therapeutical perspective and empathy with perpetrators-as-victims instead of vigorous prudence." And that myth certainly hasn't been made up by Jordan Peterson, Michael Tsarion, John Carter and Jasun Horsley--who I can name because I've written about them promoting this myth, which is quite popular with men: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/michael-tsarion-myth-of-the-terrible mother, https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-anti-matri-male and https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/eisenstein-and-the-toxic-ten.
By a "myth" I don't mean a falsehood nor something made up, I mean a narrative that has a foundational meaning for a group of people and that can be called up as the mean-giving symbol of a worldview. The word "myth" doesn't necessary have negative connotations.
And sorry, have you really said manspeak? That's a funny word!
Thanks for the links, I'll read them through. And would you mind providing a pointer to your book, fhanks? (PS apart from Jordan Peterson, who I know by fame, I don't know the other people you mention)
The book I have out, How to Dismantle an Empire, goes through 28 foundational myths of economics and looks at the system change that would enable our labor to serve families and communities: https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607.
The book containing this research, called OMGdess, is in process.
To define manspeak, it's declarative sentences that assume the statement to be fact, without the qualifiers women use of 'I think,' 'it's my opinion,' 'I feel,' 'in my experience ...' etc.
This isn't necessarily bad, as long as it's assumed that everything is what someone thinks--including yourself.
You say "By a "myth" I don't mean a falsehood nor something made up." However your statement to me was, "under the fragmentation of modernity, each is free to create one's own myths." That's contradictory. You first say I'm creating my own myths and then define a myth as having foundational meaning for a group of people. By 'the fragmentation of modernity,' you see the problem as people finding their own meaning and worldviews without sticking to the traditional narratives--the ones provided by patriarchy.
I'm not seeing how 'creating one's own myths' is not an insult in response to my citing of anthropological research.
Everyone hates fathers, Péguy wrote as much in the 1910s. I'm not surprised about the narrative choices of the book.
By the way, all sad, unhinged people. The detritus washed up by the waves of modernity on a polluted beach.
(Later add on) to add more context, those are all examples of deculturation, that is, of societies in various stages of decline.
A culture is mainly defined as a shared set of solutions to the common problems of human life. After mere survival, the most pressing problem of human life is how to reproduce itself - the problem of family.
Here, we have three examples of cultures, Western, Japanese and African, all at different deculturation stages.
Absent culture, mothers fall back to the mere biology of motherhood, stripped-off of any cultural structure. Which, ironically, at least provide them with some anchoring.
Fathers, on the other hand, are completely unmoored, and without the frame of a civlization and having lost the vitality to return to a feral stage, are at a loss about how to feel and behave.
Exactly!