I’ve read this Bruenig type of motherhood article since I first started reading the papers regularly- maybe I was 14? 16? Back when The Age was in actual newsprint and a pain to read on a train. Without fail they appear, sometimes several times a year, sometimes just

as part of the whole palaver around Mother’s Day. The issue with this kind of article is not that someone found joy, purpose and meaning in motherhood- I’d be extremely worried if, as the brilliant Horgan and Delaney say in the master series Catastrophe, “if you loved me

more than the kids that would be weird. Of course you should love the kids more than me.” The tiresome thing about this sort of piece is that it seems impossible for women to write about motherhood without placing it as something in opposition to a current trend, some astounding

act of rebellion to have children as an upper middle class white person. Either you have bucked an imaginary trend - you rebel, you! - by waiting to have kids, or you have bucked an imaginary trend if you didn't wait to have kids.

As Kaitlin Byrd puts it, more elegantly and succinctly than I, this sort of article is an artificial construct aimed at an artificial construct of an audience. https://twitter.com/GothamGirlBlue/status/1391466416432455682?s=20

It's not that Bruenig wrote it. It's that it's the 1000th article of its kind slyly implying that everyone else who doesn't follow your path is somehow wanting, or that you are in some way extremely unique. There's six paragraphs in that piece where we don't really need

to hear the statistics about people waiting to have kids. When people have kids, including you, is dependent on other people's life circumstances and is also none of your gawd-damn business, so why should we put up with another article on it?

This sort of piece is still about pitting women against each other, against individual choices, which is the whole point of feminism - choice, and economic independence. By all means talk about the lack of support for mothers who want to stay at home.

By all means, talk about the denigration of women seen to put their careers ahead of their kids. What we should be doing is stop pandering to this bullshit binary about having kids. We can all agree on some things: Parents need more support in bringing up children, they need

flexibility around work, they need income support, they need parental leave, they need conditions where, if they want, they do not need two large incomes to bring up a kid. But these are societal problems, and they are not a problem caused by people choosing to have children

A society and economy that actually values families instead of just paying political lip service to it is something people so concerned about parenting should be asking for, highlighting, rather than whether a woman should wait or not.

or whether you are a special little snowflake in your economically and socially comfortable strata of the world. I've seen hardened career women want to give up their careers to stay at home; I've seen stay at home mums yearn for a career, I've seen women scientists somehow

become more efficient somehow, after kids: still publishing in high impact journals, doing wet lab work before heading off to pick up the kids from child care; to the utter befuddlement of their cis male bosses. Could it be that...motherhood and womanhood is a spectrum????

I've heard feminists talk about how feminist theory doesn't talk about motherhood at all; I've seen conservative women change after having kids, and vice versa. Amazed by motherhood? Awesome. Thrilled by the joy and pain of it all? Utterly marvellous, I want to hear about it

Have a go at other people's choices? Kids, we're not in high school any more.

I mean please, you're all wonderful writer's and you can do better than this tedious old essay. If you can't, maybe publish something more original, from someone from a non-upper middle class white background, or a truly difficult experience around birth, pregnancy and motherhood