[Originally published March 17, 2017]
I was privileged to share this essay with UN delegates at the annual Commission on the Status of Women in March 2017:
A societal movement to diminish motherhood has been in the propaganda mills of elite central planners for generations. This is spelled out in new policy being considered at the UN, and calls for "measures to recognize, reduce and redistribute women's [and girls'] disproportionate [burden] of unpaid care of care and domestic work..."
Apparently, the propaganda has culminated to this bold moment of honesty, or, the central planners have decided they can wait no longer to win you over with spin. Bottom line: the State wants your children. For over a century, the most forward thinking elitists have prepared for victory on this point: a well-ordered State can raise a child to serve the State better than its parents can.
The State is right. If the end of raising a child is to see it serve the collective well, then the incubator of cradle to career oversight is perfect. Devoid of any real nurturing, the State can raise serfs to its service much more efficiently when love, nurturing, and family loyalty are removed.
But, if the world still wants thinkers, innovators, and people with a sense of humanity, they still need homes with mothers and fathers. Children still need to see adult human beings - appropriately sacrificing for them - to know that this is the surest way to have a life of purpose and joy.
The elitists have made a fatal mistake: they say "burden" like it's a bad thing. C.S. Lewis once said that homemaking was the ultimate career that made all other careers possible. Policy crafters and influencers forget something as they deride and dismiss motherhood and family life: once upon a time, someone took on the burden of raising...them.
It's a glorious burden to lose your figure, your sleep, your mind - so you can bring another human being into the world, sit up with her when she has croup, help him get his science fair project finished, and teach him to ride a bicycle. It's a glorious burden to lose all dignity as you leave your house in sweats that have spit up on them because you're out of milk, and wear last year's dress to a piano recital - your stomach in complete knots as if you were the one performing. It's a glorious burden to read a seventh bed-time story to your children, the words slurring into near-drunken incoherence, as you are the only one who gets sleepy in this night-time ritual nearly as sacred as the family prayer.
It's a glorious burden to be given a necklace made of macaroni, a sloppy kiss that smears spaghetti sauce on your cheek, and a tiny wad of a love note that says, "I love you, Mom - you are the BIST!" It's a glorious burden to wander, sleepless, through a darkened house, stopping at the beds of each of your sleeping children, pouring out wept prayers of gratitude and pleading that God will watch over them when you can't.
Here is what the elitists don't know, or have forgotten, so far removed from such realities as humanity can be: the very thing that makes motherhood glorious is the fact that it is a burden - a back-breaking, mind-wracking, heart-stretching, soul-forging burden. It's a glorious burden because it turns us into better, higher human beings for having taken it on.
Every human on this planet started life with a mother and a father. Not everyone takes to parenthood, and tragically, there are still too many children who don't have the love and sanctifying sacrifice of present parents. But through the millennia, there is no alternative way of raising children that can hold a candle to it. To buy the lie that this is a burden that should be "recognized, reduced, and redistributed" is absurd and dangerous. The glorious burden of motherhood is most definitely to be recognized - as the highest thing a woman can choose to do with her life. Motherhood should be recognized, but it should be reverenced - and protected - for the endangered species that the central planners are trying to make of it.
In spite of the spin, this is the cold hard reality: in spite of the imperfect execution, there are still more parents, around the globe, that freely choose to take on parenting, because it is a glorious burden worth shouldering. Civilization depends on it.
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