At this point, I am a bit confused. What is the latest Twitter firestorm about Elizabeth Bruenig, the latest New York Times talent to hit the exit door for one reason or another? I may have missed a controversy or two in recent weeks.
You see, I am still stuck on the furor that greeting that essay published (May 7) just before she left the Gray Lady, the one with that terrifying headline: “I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m not Sorry I Didn’t Wait.”
I’ve been thinking about that one ever since and, thus, I have decided to treat it as a weekend think piece. But part of me still wants to argue that there was some kind of news feature that could have been written about that whole affair.
Yes, it was another example of folks in the blue-checkmark tribe losing their cool because someone triggered the urban, coastal principalities and powers. Can you say “fecundophobia”? However, this essay was also linked to some huge trends in postmodern America, especially crashing fertility rates and declines in the number of people getting married. There was news here, of some kind.
First, here is the Bruenig overture:
If someone had asked on the day of my college graduation whether I imagined I would still be, in five years’ time, a reliable wallflower at any given party, I would have guessed so. Some things just don’t change. What I would not have predicted at the time is that five years hence I would be lurking along the fringes of a 3-year-old’s birthday party, a bewildered and bleary-eyed 27-year-old mom among a cordial flock of Tory Burch bedecked mothers in their late 30s and early 40s who had a much better idea of what they were doing than I ever have.
Nobody was remotely rude to my husband and me, though our differences were fairly obvious; at most, they seemed a little surprised to find a pair of 20-somethings in a situation like ours. That much — and the dreamy gaze of one driven to distraction by love of their child — we had in common.
As you would expect, Bruenig knows that she is discussing a subject with clear hooks into political debates in the here and now. Thus:
As a rule, having and raising children is never easy; this is especially true in the United States, where, compared with similarly developed countries, parents enjoy relatively little support. And while recent conservative caterwauling over the push for subsidized child care suggests America won’t be joining the ranks of the Nordic countries in terms of parental benefits any time soon, the loss may be as much theirs as anyone’s — it is, after all, the right that frets most vocally about the nation’s declining birthrates. (The 2020 census data, released last month, showed that over the last decade, the population grew at its slowest rate since the 1930s, in case you’ve so far been spared the ensuing panic.)
But, methinks, this next part is where the fear and anger kick in. Read this carefully:
The case for young parenthood would be simpler to plead if it weren’t for that particular back-and-forth — snowflakes this, boomers that. Millennials stand accused of immaturity and selfishness, of lacking the grit and commitment to bring up children — who, I gather, get in the way of avocado toast and grapefruit mimosas. The reality is less contemptible and more prosaic: Young people are hesitant to start their families because of legitimate worries about money and stability, along with a variety of cultural concerns that, were their baby boomer parents honest, they would admit issued from their own design.
There are good reasons to wait to have children and good reasons not to; it’s that latter notion that I often consider but rarely mention to friends of mine who are on the fence, knowing that they are typically inundated with unsolicited advice from older acquaintances and relatives who all seem to know precisely how to fix this putatively immature, allegedly selfish generation. That kind of scolding about growing up obscures the truest thing about having children, which is that it isn’t a chore but a pleasure, not the end of freedom as you know it but the beginning of a kind of liberty you can’t imagine.
Did she say, “liberty”?
Oh, wait. Did I forget to mention that Bruenig is also a Roman Catholic?
Cue the screams in the Twitterverse. The quickest way to handle that is to point think-piece readers to a Commentary piece by Christine Rosen, entitled: “The Mother of All Meltdowns.”
Hang on. This is long, but essential:
… Bruenig experienced the wrath of left-wing Twitter. Kathryn Brightbill claimed, “She’s a Trad Wife masquerading as a progressive because she likes socialism.” Another feminist wrote, “Surely people must realize Elizabeth Bruenig is not being criticized for being a mother at age 25 — surely people realize it’s the subtext that we should start encouraging young motherhood & discouraging abortion that bothers many of us.”
Journalist Aura Bogado had one of the odder takes: “I’m troubled by . . . Elizabeth Bruenig’s white extinction anxiety, which [in my opinion] informs their shared fixations on immigrant/Latina/Mexican motherhood. I wish publications hired Latina critics and opinion writers. For now, everything is about us… yet without us”.
Salon writer Amanda Marcotte spent more time and energy than most tweeting through her feelings about the piece: “Just more confirmation that the audience for this crap is dudes so shitty they worry they won’t get a wife until they trap someone who’s too young to know better.” Later, Marcotte compared Bruenig to Phyllis Schlafly before turning the discussion back to her favorite topic, herself: “Every time I see Bruenig try to package her Schlafly-esque sexism as ‘leftism,’ I remember clearly one day when I was talking to some other kids in class about kids when I was 15, and I said I was never having kids. The teacher scoffed and said, ‘You’ll change your mind.’”
Writer Jude Ellison S. Doyle also seems to have taken Bruenig’s piece personally and attacked her in an equally personal (and unhinged) fashion: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing this woman it was a tremendous personal achievement to be repeatedly knocked up by an Internet troll she met in high school,” she tweeted, adding, “That’s right, I’m an affluent, white, married, straight Christian, AND a mother… TRIGGERED YET LIBS??? was always going to have shortcomings as a grift, but Christ, you could have chosen a less obviously off-putting dude to build the brand around.”
That’s just a tiny glimpse of the acid and anger online.
For readers, and maybe even journalists, who are still interested, I would also recommend digging into this Morgan Lee piece at Christianity Today: “Why Having Babies Is Controversial in 2021.”
But let’s end with one final stab of the knife from Bruenig. You know that, for many, this was the heart of the matter, the burning fire of a mother’s love:
One of the things they don’t tell you about having babies is that you don’t ever have a baby; you have your baby, which is, to you, the ur-baby, the sum of all babies. The moment they laid her damp rosy body on my chest, I knew she would envelop my world. I had worried about that very thing. In Sheila Heti’s novel “Motherhood,” the narrator, a cynical writer contemplating whether to have kids before it’s too late, laments the absence of new parents from their friends’ lives, a phenomenon she calls “that relieved and joyful desertion.” “When a person has a child,” she writes, “they are turned towards their child.” The risk of falling off the world haunted me. When you have a baby, you do turn toward your child — that “relieved and joyful desertion” may eventually affect your friends, but it first affects yourself.
What I didn’t understand — couldn’t have, at the time — was that deserting yourself for another person really is a relief. My days began to unfold according to her schedule, that weird rhythm of newborns, and the worries I entertained were better than the ones that came before: more concrete, more vital, less tethered to the claustrophobic confines of my own skull. For this member of a generation famously beset by anxiety, it was a welcome liberation.
Did she dare to say, “liberation”?
Read it all, or read it all — again.