I came across an interesting thread on Twitter today from Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a senior editor for Reason. The thread was about parenting, specifically the idea that maybe our culture is a bit too down on the idea. I’ll get to the thread in a moment but Brown wrote it in response to a book review for a book called “The Nursery” which is described as the story of a first-time mother told in a style of Kafka-esque horror.

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” It’s a line that raised a half-laugh, a yelp, of recognition in this reader — I remember feeling exactly like that, a milk bar, in those shocking early postpartum days. As happens with stunning regularity in this book, Molnar’s sentence gives up riches and terrors. She is describing a transformation that is total, painful and deeply baffling. The joke holds a dumbfounded recognition of absolute metamorphosis, its drama evident in the evenly weighted balance of the sentence structure. I was that and now I’m this. Midsentence, the narrator changes her identity entirely. And she can’t go back.

“The Nursery” concerns itself with something every new mother goes through: the discovery that she’s gone from being a (relatively) free entity roaming the earth to a bleeding, exhausted body that exists mostly to nurture her baby. Molnar pushes this transformation into the stuff of quiet horror. In doing so, she’s written an essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood.

The reviewer makes clear that this isn’t Rosemary’s Baby. The infant isn’t the spawn of the devil. Her husband isn’t a monster. There’s nothing particularly unusual about the story except for the mother’s occasional desire to murder her own child.

A sense of looming violence stains the entire book. The narrator harbors dark feelings toward the infant; even as she cares for it, she weaves fantasies of harming it. (Her attitude toward Button has clearly rubbed off on me — the baby is in fact a girl; a “who,” not an “it.”) She says to the infant, “Let’s wring you like a wet cloth.” She muses, “I mean, sometimes I picture myself crushing her with my foot.” She Googles: “how common is wanting to kill your baby?”

I like a good horror movie but this one doesn’t sound very pleasant, at least not if you have kids you love. And that bring us back around to the Twitter thread in which Elizabeth Nolan Brown suggested that maybe we’re presenting motherhood as a little too dark these days.

It seems like every literary or journalistic depiction of motherhood these days is dark af and somehow always elicits ample praise for being brave and truth-telling. It's… bizarre https://t.co/nbOc7do66E

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) March 20, 2023

She describes the kind of advice that parents of grown children give to new parents, which sometimes sounds a bit grim.

Related to this, people love to tell expecting or new parents that their lives are going to be miserable. @swin24 & I got sooooo much of this — often from internet strangers, but also friends & acquaintances — when I was pregnant.

Parenting needs better PR

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) March 21, 2023

We're only a year and a half in but, ftr, we get plenty of sleep & do not feel like shells of humans & both agree that we're happier now than at any point in our lives

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) March 21, 2023

Honestly, there are moments when kids are young when it can be grim and sometimes you just have to walk away for a moment to maintain your own sanity. Those moments are real but they’re at most one side of the coin. There are just as many moments (and probably many more) with young kids which seem genuinely magical and which parents never forget. And it does get easier as the kids become more self-sufficient over time. Mom isn’t a milk bar forever. Parents don’t change diapers for life. It’s an intense moment in time but it does pass. The big picture, at least in my experience, is that kids occasionally drive you nuts but they’re also the thing that matters most to you in the world and which can bring you the most joy and pride.

But the messages of parental doom don't just come from people lacking financial resources or stability — if anything, it's relatively well off professionals & upper classes who seem most anxious and least happy with parenting?

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) March 21, 2023

(and not just from overtly conservative media or influencers performing traditional motherhood)

— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) March 21, 2023

Notice her suggestion at the end of the thread that right-leaning media and influencers are already giving a positive message. She doesn’t linger on that or explain it but it caught my attention. The phrase “performing traditional motherhood” in particular seemed to suggest it was something put on or a sugar-coated version of reality.

Maybe that’s true or maybe the problem has to do with modern progressive culture. As Matt Yglesias suggested recently, progressives are taught to catastrophize everything. It’s taken as a sign of seriousness. Yglesias was writing about the crisis of teen depression and the fact that left-wing teens are significantly more depressed than right-wing ones.

I think the discussion around gender and the role of social media is an important one. But I also don’t believe that liberal boys are experiencing more depression than conservative girls because they are disproportionately hung up on Instagram-induced body image issues — I think there’s also something specific to politics going on.

Some of it might be selection effect, with progressive politics becoming a more congenial home for people who are miserable. But I think some of it is poor behavior by adult progressives, many of whom now valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment.

Yglesias also talked about how progressive culture seems to be the opposite of the kind of professional advice therapists give to people suffering from depression. That advice can be summarized as don’t always focus on the negative and try not to see yourself as without agency in the situation. People who are clinically depressed often fail to realize how easy it would be to change things for the better. And that sounds a bit like the contents of the book described above.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Maybe motherhood has become just one more area where progressives are depressed and catastrophizing everything because they exist in a culture that teaches them to be that way. Anyway, it strikes me as a possible explanation of the trend Brown is pointing to, one that’s worth considering.