But woe to the Christian parents who mistake the world’s derision as moral validation. That Venn diagram is not as big as you think, and this season provides some teachable examples.

To wit, a nice suburban dad of girls (“girldad,” some say) has been getting the pile-on for two weeks now because he hates the “scary” Halloween decorations.

“So many people with young kids seem to love Halloween - I don’t get it. I despise it,” wrote Colin. He is “literally encountering the forces of hell.”

Here’s another mom with a similar gripe, though I don’t know her faith background:

Well, look. Is all the lawn decor tacky? Yes. Is it scary for little kids? Yes! That’s the point. This is the one time of year when our hyper-sanitized society, where kids barely know how carrots grow, much less how their pork was fattened and slaughtered, or where their goldfish went after it learned the backstroke. This is when our entire community dares to inch a little closer to the concepts of evil, decay, and mortality. Where even the least churched, if not dogmatically atheist, allow themselves to ponder the unseen realm, even if unseriously, even in purely theatrical ways. While I’m obviously not endorsing actually dabbling in witchcraft, we all benefit from this collective willingness to think about supernatural evil and death.

The instinct to shelter your kids is strong, but they don’t need shelter all the time. I have three little girls—trust me, I get it. Their sweet big eyes make you want to banish every evil thing, make you hate everything grotesque and low-class and crude. But your protection must give way to their own fortitude as they mature, and in between your paternal or maternal shelter and their fortitude is a bridge of character. Some of you haven’t built this bridge yet: the practice of teaching and modelling healthy attitudes to your little ones. In this case, you’re modeling healthy conceptualizations about death and evil, and fake and real, earnest and pretend.

On a psychological level, you must not prevent your children from growing a skin tough enough to handle the neighborhood playing pretend for a couple weeks of the year. You can’t just slap the “sensitive” label on them and complain that the world isn’t accommodating. This is maladaptive, and indulging it is a dereliction of your duty as a father. Real or fake, scary things are part of life.

It’s not the worst thing that Colin’s little girl is telling scary blow up skeletons that she is a daughter of the King, but it’s not the best, either. It’s a doll. It’s pretend. She doesn’t need to be afraid of it; it’s merely a cultural representation of death. If she goes on like this as she matures, she will be clutching pearls over everything, because behind every severed head and menacing scarecrow is some Deeper Meaning or Hidden Agenda (“literally the forces of hell”). I’m very familiar with this fundamentalist attitude, because it used to be my attitude. But I’ve found since becoming a parent that this is not healthy, and we are not biblically mandated to see all cultural presentations of evil and death as tacit devil-worship.

I’ve been doing my own teaching this year. My five year old asked me why God made “being afraid.” I told her it’s to keep us safe, so we avoid things that can hurt us.

“Well, I’m afraid of the scary clown next door,” she replies, “and that can’t hurt me.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You don’t need to be afraid because it’s just a decoration.” Every kid is different, but this seemed to quiet her anxiety. Can you imagine if I had launched into a diatribe on how scary clowns are the glorification of evil or she needs to pray protection from the occursed object or some bullshit? How would that go over with the neighbors, an easygoing Boomer couple of whom we are mutually very fond?

That’s another thing Christian Halloween-haters are missing: you need to teach them how to coexist with neighbors, most of whom probably don’t share your faith. They are observing how you behave on Halloween, you know. Some folks are just waiting to see you clutch your pearls, so they can roll their eyes and tell themselves Christians are sanctimonious little shits, that Jesus was just a moral teacher and there is no hell, and the world is just stuff. Maybe Rome was right to toss the little zealots to the big cats.

For your kids to walk up their driveway and get a jump-scare from a cackling witch, smile and earnestly wish them a happy Halloween is doing more than you think. As an adult, this is an opportunity to chitchat, to inquire on their new shingles, to observe if anything is broken or if there’s a new baby, and can you bring them a meal, or a spare carseat? This is when you should be Peak Neighbor, unironically living out the Golden Rule on “a pagan holiday.” Demons hate that, you know.

There’s a gag in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which Halloween is the deadest night for supernatural evil. The demons all take the night off. I think this is more accurate than people realize, because when we are conscious of evil and yet banded together as families and local communities, we are more insulated from evil than when we are floating through our daily lives on autopilot, isolated, ignoring our mortality and the fact that the world is not merely material, that there are spiritual forces at work in the heavenly realms. The things you should pray on Halloween should be the same things you should pray every day: that God meets His children where they’re at, that He delivers souls, that He materially provides for the needy, that His kingdom advances.

Halloween is an opportunity for you to be the hands and feet of Jesus, and I’m not even talking about handing out tracks. Teach your children well, to be sensible and not overly sensitive, to love their neighbors and remember that Christ died to conquer the grave, so even if some people are indeed wallowing in darkness in these short autumn days, it has no claim on our souls. If a skeleton springs from beneath a fake tombstone down the street, it’s all the better a reminder.

Go on, enjoy the night.

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I have historically lamented his reactionary zeal, but I recognize that politics has felt broken for a long time, and the menfolk deserve better than a feminized gerontocracy.

I have often rolled my eyes at his racist humor, but I acknowledge how easy it is to be jaded in a world that pits white against color and tries to hamstring the former.

If my brother finds my Substack, let him know I think Pepe memes are pretty funny in the right hands, and friends are more important than getting politics exactly right.

If he finds my Notes, let him know there aren’t many subjects I find taboo anymore, or are worth clutching pearls.

If he finds my follows, let him know I find normie politics boring now, and I will dialogue with pretty much anyone who isn’t clinically insane or mean to me.

If he sees my followers, let him know you are a merry band of chuds and easygoing lasses. That I attract such good humor and ecumenicism should tell him I’m really not likely to punch him again, even metaphorically.

If my brother finds my essays, please don’t read the ones about sex—that’s awkward.

If my brother finds out I’m on Chudstack, it’s okay for him to laugh, but it shouldn’t surprise him, really. I have always liked to play in the dirt.

If my brother finds my Substack, please tell him I won’t punch him ever again, I swear.

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It should be appreciated as not only an effort at beauty, but a utility. Knowing what manner of dress makes you look more you is dead useful, and this applies to both sexes. Yet it is not the only kind of style you should be practicing, and I’ve found it less and less useful for my own life.

On some level, the body-typing craze is just another way to get at how to look more appealing (not just sexually, but in a variety of ways). The difference is that body-typing/essence analysis and application (for the uninitiated, you may look up Kibbe or Kitchener) is aimed at the female gaze—that is, even as a man may accept aspects of this approach as beautifying, it’s really the woman who is far more likely to appreciate it as a whole. I really doubt he’s thinking about the shape of her handbag or how she’s tied her scarf.

More broadly, even when women say they’re dressing for themselves, they’re almost always really dressing for female peers or for men, (though looking at Gen Z fashion, I’d argue dressing for the male gaze is not exactly hot right now). It’s good to admit we are dressing for others. The most self-aware and integrated minds accept this is still dressing for yourself, because whatever vibe you’re generating is going to both make you feel better and aid you in some way. You don’t really want to wear sweatpants to the office, even if leisurewear “captures your essence”; you’re dressing for the people you work with.

Not only is it good to admit this, but I think we should embrace it. Not just for the aforementioned demographics, but for a far less-considered demographic, and the reason for this post:

When was the last time you considered your impression on children when you dress?

Would someone please think of the children?

This will only be useful to those of us who interact with kids, mostly women. But it’s worth thinking about. In an increasingly non-natal society, this is just one of many ways we’ve forgotten kids. You understand what I mean already; you’ve just forgotten. You can recall certain figures from your childhood that left an impression, that delighted the senses, that comforted or inspired you: the scent of hair, the crinkle of a jacket, the shine of an earring.

You might say, “Yes, Georgi, but that’s just kids’ perception of your peer-focused dressing. This argument is moot.”

Except it isn’t, because many adults these days have nothing interesting in their manner of dress that would even capture children’s passing thoughts. I’m sorry, millennial Erin, but your leggings aren’t very inspiring to a five year old. And Zoomette Errynn: your giant oversized ivory sweater is reminiscent of a renters’ cheaply painted walls. It might convey “effortless” and “cozy” to peers, but it does nothing for kids. Kids do have aesthetic sensibilities, and they differ from your adult intuitions.

It’s not that children necessarily need you to dress with them in mind, but it does benefit them. Your clothes are the first words you speak. What are you speaking into their little lives? That a mother’s life is summed up in grey leggings, Amazon 3-pack shirts, and claw-clips? That dads wear basketball shorts and crewnecks? That there is a uniform to adulthood, and it isn’t particularly exciting?

This isn’t just a contemporary problem. When I was young, I struggled find anything admirable in the style of the mothers around me. Perhaps this is why I eschewed feminine clothes myself. I had no model worth emulating, a lack of exposure under which I developed a tacit belief that mothers are not particularly cool, and if I couldn’t be cool, was motherhood even worth pursuing? (My mother is now very stylish, but it wasn’t always this way.)

How juvenile!

But that’s kids. Again, our appearance speaks volumes to the next generation. They are already forming mushy notions about gender and status, and we should take that more seriously.

The chicken nugget-eaters have tastes, you say?

I’m not saying you should dress like Miss Frizzle or take on some other eccentric persona. Just consider what children appreciate. They want women to look feminine in ways that are dulcet and a bit cliche: They like flowing dresses and sparkly eyeshadow, braids and curls and ribbons. They like you to smell enchanting, warm, or bright, like peonies or pomegranate or vanilla, and for your jewelry to be interesting if not sophisticated. Though they cannot articulate it, they want you to dress like a smile.

For men, kids like anything that that conveys competence, authority, coolness. They want you to look like you’ve been doing something manly, and now you are taking time away from your Very Important Work to pay attention to them (yes, women also like this). I remember my dad’s tan workpants and how they were crusted at the bottom with spackle or bits of concrete mix. His boots were heavy and well-worn. It all spoke of his respectability and toughness as a man that built things. That may have zero applicability to you, but think about the things in your wardrobe that you might’ve thought were cool and manly in elementary-school, and instead of wearing basketball shorts, wear some of that. Or lean into a nerd aesthetic by wearing comic book graphic tees kids can appreciate, distinctive spectacles, peculiarly patterned ties. Or be cooler than them with nice shades and sneakers they wish they had the allowance to buy. Grow a mustache. If nothing else, stand up straight and look like you give a damn, and that they should, too.

I realized how deep an impression can be made on children after I’d missed a week of facilitating homeschool co-op last year. Another mom came up to me and said her son had asked, “Where was the lady that wore the pretty dresses?” A melt-emoji level of kindergarten sincerity. I don’t wear dresses everyday, but I wear them often when I’m teaching kids. They adore it when you play the part, perceiving that women occupied with caring for and shaping young children are manifestly feminine, and intuiting that their manner of dress should reflect it.

This intuition is good, and it is wise to reinforce it. For all the complaints of solipsistic feminism and the anti-human gender ideologies that pervade society, we should not neglect that the concepts of masculine and feminine are manifest to young children. It’s impossible to fully deceive them about the nature of the sexes, but it is very possible to disappoint them: in our attitudes, our habits, and yes, even our style. Your choice to wear what charms the little ones instead of what’s easy and purely peer-focused is a bulwark against bad impressions of manhood and womanhood. At the very least, you gain their goodwill, and that is a fine thing to wear indeed.

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You have some things right, sure. Rape is definitely a spectrum. Some acts are more rapey than others, and how violated a receiver of rapey-ness feels does depend on factors like drug or alcohol abuse. You don’t have to call it rapey-ness, if that disgusts you. What we all mean is that it’s exploitive, and the concept of coercion comes along somewhere on the upper end of the rape spectrum. Certainly we can all agree that exploitation, however you feel about it (hopefully bad!) is common on the casual sex scene.

Your problem is not in insisting (as Deep Left Analysis has just done), that sexual misconduct deserves lesser punishment, both legally and socially. It’s that this whole tangle of sexual misconduct and regret and feelings of exploitation and violation wouldn’t be an issue if people just didn’t have casual sex.

I know, I know! Here come the fundamentalists to ruin everybody’s fun. But the fact remains this isn’t a problem in marriage. It’s not even a problem in simple my-boyfriend-picks-up-rocky-road-for-me monogamy. This kind of rapey mess is a casual sex problem, and if you don’t participate, there’s zero risk of you getting entangled in it.

Compare this to marriage, the gold standard for non-regretful, non-coercive sex. Actually, the gold standard for sex, period.

Not “safe sex,” which is a gross and unerotic term practically designed to ensure people violate whatever safe sex is deemed to be at any given moment. But fun, fulfilling and intimate sex. At bare minimum, sex you don’t regret the next morning. It’s sex that doesn’t need affirmative consent (also deeply unerotic) and doesn’t need some complicated female rationalization for why it should or shouldn’t happen.

(Here is where I do the land acknowledgment that if your husband is abusive and you do feel violated and are being manipulated or coerced, I’m not talking about your situation and please seek outside help.)

I’ll scramble out onto a slightly more precarious limb and say the feelings a lot of people want to experience in sex (not all, but a lot of people) find their highest fulfillment in marriage. Spontaneity and ecstasy, power and surrender, possession and belonging. If your marriage is truly a union, truly two becoming one flesh, then to be entirely frank, even Walt “lead with your fetishes” Bismarck put his finger on it in saying, albeit crudely, “if your wife experiences you grabbing her and taking hole as rape then it’s not a real marriage.”

The security of the committed man you love and who loves you is the blanket on which you play, and a man can make those kinds of moves because she is safe. Not just that her feelings are given some consideration. Don’t give me this shit about aftercare. No amount of aftercare can compensate for what a covenant monogamy is. If she doesn’t have to protect herself and doesn’t have to rationalize, she unfolds into the fullest expression of femininity. It cannot be achieved with casual sex, and I would argue it cannot even be achieved with a live-in lover. This is the exclusive claim of a God-ordained, rightly ordered covenantal union.

On the question of rape, such things that would be rapey in casual circumstances are not rapey or exploitive in marriage. If a wife has a few too many hard seltzers, and her husband scoops her up and takes her to bed and there makes love to her, that isn’t rapey and it isn’t exploitive. She is safe and she knows he loves her. In another context, with a man she doesn’t know very well and hasn’t made any kind of profession of love, much less proved it, much less made any commitment, this is a little bit rapey.

But in the morning, is it the wife or the casual participant in drunkenness and flirtation with strangers who’s more likely to smirk playfully over her cup of coffee and good-naturedly nurse the hangover, with nothing to ruminate on or rationalize or emotionally untangle, and no next steps with who to text or questions of who should and shouldn’t know about it?

I don’t know the details of the Cornell 7 situation, and I don’t really want to. They are immaterial to my case here, which is that the definition of rape isn’t the problem on a society level, on the level of human flourishing re:sex. Casual sex is the problem. Allowing your body to be used by strangers is the problem. You cannot fix casual sex by adjusting the rule book to more properly reflect the violations and poor outcomes that are happening in this domain all the time. You can’t fix it by outlawing sex while intoxicated. You can’t fix it with affirmative consent.

My most Christian culture take is that you can’t fix casual sex. Stop trying, and put your effort into more fruitful endeavors. I can’t find you a wife* but I am just self-deluded enough to think I can be an encouragement.

*tbqh I am keeping an eye out for a couple of you, just fyi.

If you follow for my zany notes and are still with me, we pals now. Thanks for reading and being chill. Honest and civil comments welcome. Like and Subscribe, nerds.

Men gloat: “No other man is capable of this.”

Women gloat: “Every other woman is capable of this.”

The reasons for this should be obvious to even moderately attuned social observers. Men need to stand out and prove themselves over against other men in competition. Women compete subtly while also maintaining a sisterhood that protects them and their children (the female stigma against loose women is a good example—they’re lowering the cost of sexual access). To keep the sisterhood, we must all maintain the illusion we are operating on the same level. No one is allowed to feel inferior or superior, as this disrupts the peace and fractures the unified front vis a vis men. We need the sisterhood because we are physically weak; by setting behavioral norms we are bargaining collectively. This is the way, this is the expectation, this is the price. Not just the price for men, but your dues—the price to be included in what is basically a massive union. Rabble-rousing for a break with Sisterhood Union norms is a good way to get a high heel to the temple.

When a woman implies that other women are capable of doing what she’s doing, she’s usually saying, “I am not that special. We are all kweens.” Equalizing is the default socialization mode for women. There is no more potent an ingratiating statement for a female than “I am not better than you; I am not a threat.”

But when women feel your generalization isn’t true, that you are in fact just thinly veiling your superiority while giving lip service to the sisterhood, they’ll spit it back at you like sour wine after a particularly passive aggressive meeting of the book club.

If, as a woman, you are doing something feminine better than too many others, your best bet to stay in good standing with the Union is to add a diaperbag full of nuance and caveats to anything you say on the subject. Well, this is just my experience. Well, you do you, but. Well, I’m so privileged. Well, I know this is a struggle...

I became intimately familiar with this relational style through a writers’ forum I was active in for many years. I’m very good at it. Those were conservative, mostly religious women—I can only imagine what it’s like to keep the sisterhood tight with women who don’t even believe in objective truth and feel no moral obligation to rise above pettiness and resentment.

The problem is that the desire to express all the exceptions and devalue your own observation or experience through deliberately over-indexing its uniqueness often makes it impossible to say anything worth saying at all. You cannot make a sweeping pithy statement, because someone is going to get their feelings hurt. You cannot systematize any set of observations, because there is always an exception. Believe me, I ride my intuitions pretty hard, and I think female intuition is critical to healthy social functioning. We are constantly looking for nuance, constantly sussing out the particulars of any given social context. We look for what is unique, not what is the same.

But one must use discretion in speaking to, and about, the Sisterhood in this highly relational, highly nuanced way. It is effective to a fault, because if you give women enough exceptions and nuance, they will find a way to fit into those categories and absolve themselves of accountability, rob themselves of agency, and surrender their power to improve their lives.

I’m sorry to say that subconsciously, women want to be helpless. At least a little bit, and sometimes a lot. The instinct to deflect blame for why she isn’t this way or that, why she can’t lose weight, why she can’t sleep with her husband, why she can’t beat her shopping addiction, why she literally just can’t, is always with her. By diluting your expression of an ideal, a standard or a norm with too many caveats, you are just giving her rope to hang her better self.

So when I write that “post partum women shower, shrink, and fuck,” I write it knowing that some mothers don’t do one, two, or even all three. I’m saying this what the norm should be, it is attainable, and if you are not doing it, you can try harder. See what needs to be fixed. Don’t cheat yourself.

Believe it or not, I’m not trying to “mog the foids.” If I was, gurl trust my selfies would look a lot different. In fact, some reply guys have mentioned their own wives have done far better than I probably ever could in post partum recovery, and those are examples worth elevating in a feminine discourse that’s shot through with apathy, pessimism, and body horror. Sometimes it is beneficial to float a standard that some women can’t meet, but which many more would absolutely meet (and be happier for it) if they were not constantly given shovels to dig themselves deeper into inagency and discontentment. They deserve better, their men deserve better, and their present and future kids, too.

When a first-time mom says, “Thank you, this made me feel less anxious about my ability to recover,” I’ve done a good thing—a much better thing than if I had added so much feminine waffling the blackpillers never felt the need to bray at me for making them feel bad.

The sisterhood exists for a reason, and I’m not here to fuck over womankind, or to trashtalk my own sex in some convoluted pick-me status game (it’s unwinnable anyway). I’m saying this because I love you and I want you to thrive: you are not the exception.

If you are an exception, it will be obvious to you first, and you won’t need to look for it in the words and experiences of other women. Don’t give in to excuses; deny the impulse toward helplessness. If you want to do better, you can.

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Never have I heard such an old-fashioned term part your pouty hyaluronically plumped lips. I’m a little concerned because you seem to be changing, Ashleigh. You already cancelled your plans for expanding your lower back tattoo, saying “I just don’t think I need it.” It’s only been three months and you’ve already cancelled your Tinder and Hinge. You stopped posting thirst traps on IG, and now your profile picture doesn’t even highlight your ass, which I frankly don’t understand because you worked so fucking hard for that.

I can’t put my finger on it. You have this look about you and frankly it’s putting some distance between us. Emmalyn and Tinsley have confessed they see it too, and it’s just…uncanny? You stopped taking your birth control, didn’t you. Shit, Ashleigh, you look like you could pop out like nine kids. I’m seeing how other guys look at you when you come out with us (which is, like, never anymore) and it’s like they’re sniffing out your fertility. Like, gross?

I can’t believe you’ve done this to yourself. You were on your way to the executive floor. Just a couple more years of keeping your head down and working 60 hours and you’d have your own office and way more PTO. We could’ve gone to Italy like we’d planned! We used to talk about traveling all the time, but you left your browser up the other day and I saw Pinterest, Ashleigh. PINTEREST. There were nurseries on it, oh my God.

This is too much. You’re only 27. You have time, girl. What’s the rush? What is it about this “man?” He makes you feel safe? That’s it? He doesn’t waffle on random shit, you say. What is this business about following his lead? Did you get church-pilled? This sounds like fundamentalist b.s. (no offense). Like what is in your algo right now? Since when did you lose your agency, Ashleigh? Don’t you have a mind of your own? Women didn’t spend the last century breaking the glass ceiling just so you can hurl the shards at us like we’re the lame ones.

Christ, it’s like you just go with whatever he wants and you’re happy about it. You even let him help you clean up your finances. There’s a fucking spreadsheet shortcut on your homescreen. Geez, that’s so intrusive and…misogynistic? I just don’t have any other words for this, honestly.

I mean, yes, he did fix your car. That’s actually pretty hot, no cap. And he did help his aunt move into her new place and didn’t even complain about it. I guess that’s cool. Does his endless scroll of contacts who owe him favors and invite him to shit really make you that hot?

He’s just a guy. Maybe you need to book a solo trip and think about things, you know. Get some distance. Like really evaluate your next steps. It’s just happening so fast, Ashleigh.

But real, no cap? I’m so happy for you. He does look like he loves you, I guess.

I don’t want you to think I’m jealous or bitter, I just genuinely care about you. High-key, I’m happy, too! I finally got my landlord to let me have the second pug I’ve always wanted (I’m obsessed) and I just booked that Airbnb in Huntington Beach for late November. Tinsley is joining me there for Friendsgiving (it’ll be so fire) but I see you won’t make it because you’re spending the weekend with his family. You have his mom in your contacts already. I’m not even going to get into that.

Just…I’m still processing. You’re changing for a guy. Sorry—man.” I mean, what do I get you for Christmas, Ashleigh? A milkmaid dress?

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And our newborn baby is in the NICU with Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn and a massive, overworked heart. She’s on a ventilator, and she has to be life-flighted to Omaha Children’s Hospital.

My mother meets me in the Children’s Hospital lobby a few hours after the little plane touches down and our baby is transferred to the NICU floor where she’s getting O2 and nitric oxide. Not Cody, my mom. He wants to come, but our other kids are just toddlers, and they need at least one of us present after a full week away at the hospital. The plan is for him to spend a few days with them, then drive them down to Omaha so we can be together to fight whatever this was.

There’s a catch, though. The hospital has a strict two-visitor rule for each patient. They don’t make exceptions, despite the fact that both my mother and I have negative covid swabs. If they admit my mother as a second contact, that’s it: Cody won’t ever be allowed to see his critically ill newborn daughter at this hospital.

Looking back, it’s easy for even lockdown moderates to see how inhumane this policy was. But so draconian were the times that our first nurse tells me we were lucky: the policy used to be one contact. One parent. At a Children’s Hospital. Her voice cracked behind the mask, her eyes watered. “It was horrible.”

Cody and I talk about it, and of course I couldn’t let my mom up to the hospital room yet and potentially lock him out of there forever. But I was so fucking terrified and lonely. I couldn’t hold my newborn daughter, and there was nobody there to hold me in a world of six foot apart stickers, masks, elbow bumps instead of handshakes, and the stench of sanitizer that never leaves your skin.

“I’m working on it,” he assures me. And I believe him. But after all of 2020, spent mostly in heavy-lockdown Washington, and seven days in the NICU back in Rapid City, I already feel defeated. The administrators at Monument granted a mercy exception so my kids could at least meet their baby sister before she was flown out. But the medical bureaucracy in a lockdown state would be impenetrable, I feared, the lattice of nonsensical rules so tight and secured with “the science and the data” that fighting back would be wasting what energy we had left.

But I had seen Cody get his way too many times to fully give up hope.

Here’s how he puts it, in his typical matter of fact way, downplaying how much mental work and taming of the tongue it takes to deal with bureaucrats:

But I wasn’t going to leave my wife without a support person, so immediately began a negotiation with the hospital. After playing some phone tag, I was able to speak with a decision-maker. I explained to them the situation and requested they make an exception—not to their two person limit, but to their two-person unique limit. After all, any communicable virus, disease or sickness my wife had, my mother-in-law likely had because they were sharing the same residence, and vice versa.

After initial nasal swabs before the life-flight, testing was not being done on visitors, anyway. I requested that my mother-in-law temporarily take my spot while I was in transit, and when I arrived, she would then watch the older two children while I could be with my wife and sick newborn. I was clear, reasonable and appealed to the hospital administrator’s humanity. I did not open the conversation with anger or a raised voice, but with a clear compromise from the perspective of a father’s and husband’s pain. My wife shouldn’t be alone to go through what she was going through (especially when complex medical information was being dispensed and medical decisions were on the line), and I should not be barred from seeing my sick daughter when I arrived.

My initial plea was declined, so I escalated my case a couple times from there. It was discussed by their internal administrative team. After a tense few hours, they finally agreed to my proposal. My mother-in-law was let in as a “temporary designated visitor,” and when I arrived a few days later, I took her spot. Thankfully, through the prayers of hundreds and the incredible work of the medical staff, our daughter made an almost miraculously quick recovery and after several more months of supplemental oxygen and medication, became a healthy, thriving child. Heavy bureaucracies full of red tape are still run by humans (at least, at the time of this writing). Appealing to their humanity and basic logic can sometimes melt right through the red tape.

What’s all this have to do with masculinity? Well, there’s a pervasive myth spread on the internet and via pop culture that dads nerf their masculinity. Their testosterone lowers, true. They often get dad bods. But what gym bros and natal pessimists may not realize is that what would have been a long range big game hunt during a famine looks in modern times a lot like making a series of phone calls, refusing to give up, and using a shit ton of persuasion. Sometimes the mammoth is the bureaucracy.

A good husband and father acts along these lines: my family’s welfare is in jeopardy, and I’m not letting this go until I get what I want. I will do whatever it takes. It isn’t an explosion of frustration, performative rage, a red-faced shouting match ultimately lost—though dads lose their cool sometimes and I sympathize. But it is doggedness and intransigence combined with self-control and a maximal application of all skills, strengths and competencies at your disposal. In this case what the situation required was 100% soft skills, but that doesn’t make the victory any less masculine.

To me, this is the epitome of masculinity in fatherhood, and now that I write it it seems already obvious: he does whatever it takes.

The other, more feminist and progressive side needs to hear this, too. Masculinity is not changing half the diapers (sorry). It’s not doing half the housework, nor being more open with your feelings. It’s not measured in how many tea parties you have with your daughter (though feel free). It’s measured in the security of your protection and provision, and through this you are showing your family the highest love. Even when you fail or you fall on hard times—job loss, food stamps, charity shops—what keeps a father’s masculinity intact is his stubborn refusal to roll over and take it. He never stops trying, and as long as he does this, he will never lose the respect and admiration of his wife and kids (not if his wife has any sort of character, anyway).

I reflect on this now because I could go into true labor at any moment with our fourth child. There is no other person I want by my side if everything goes right, and doubly so if everything goes wrong. How much easier it is to mother well when your husband has your back! I couldn’t fight the upper management of Omaha Children’s on my own, fragile and sleep-deprived as I was seven days post partum with a NICU baby, smothered by a mask and surrounded by anonymized healthcare staff following covid protocols. He carried us from five hundred miles away. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he didn’t leave me alone.

Here’s to all the dads out there doing the same.

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You need the internet, with its little sheeple and its trolls and its noisemakers. There’s an algosphere for every niche, a hundred suckers for anyone shrewd enough to capture them. You need the dopamine hit of being appraised by strangers, lauded by fans, the steady ping-ping of the drama engagement mill. This is how you’re special on the internet: racking up the stats on social media platforms. Doing what everyone else is doing on the internet. But it’s not “normal,” because you have a brand.

It’s all fun and games until one day you start noticing the normies, and not with your usual disgust. Your brother just moved to the ‘burbs. He’s got two kids. His home interest rate is high, but manageable. His wife is taking the kids out to the public pool this weekend, where all the poor and disgustingly obese normies are. Gross.

You see pictures of the kids on the SMS group chat. The kids didn’t even care about the repulsive normies. No awareness of status, no goals but fun. They’re sunburned and sticky with popsicle juice and radiating pure happiness.

Oh.

No, wait. Normies are suckers. Day jobs are for the lazy. Raising a family is for the unambitious. You don’t want that. This white picket fence shit is all cope. Everything is cope.

Are there normies that are heavily online? It seems at first brush a few may have broken through the ranks…but this would violate every known tenant of how the internet operates. Whatever normalcy they claim is clearly performative. The internet is a stage. The self-identified normies are vying for status along their given hierarchy of performative normalcy. They are just as online as you, just as calculating and manipulative.

But it can’t hurt to muse over them from the comfort of your screen. You can observe the normies, as a sort of zoological curiosity. We can assign them into pre-determined content-maker archetypes. Normie Dad, Regular Working Joe, Trad Wife. These categories make the online population legible, digestible. Any amalgamation of characteristics outside the framework struggles to stay visible, much less coherent.

Curious: the normies seem to have other stuff going on. Life outside the algorithm. You hear about it obliquely as your algo is tailored for more profound or titillating matters, but you know these other “life” things are indeed just fodder for the algorithm—hobbies and habits that fit their chosen social media archetype. Everything is performative.

And yet you suspect that maybe, maybe these low-key paycheck grinders who take their kids to Great Wolf Lodge and have mortgages and labor-intensive lawns and church potlucks are happier than you. They’re more optimistic, sometimes more sensitive, and either annoyingly naive or playing 4D chess with the anons. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

How is their happiness even possible? An inscrutable mystery that keeps you hooked. Sometimes they write entire essays about how shitty their vacations are, and you’re still subscribed. They talk about how hard it is to deep clean a rug—you’re still subscribed. How arduous it is to incubate new life—still subscribed.

God, the normies are cringe. So average, so benign, so unaware. So why are you watching them? Why can’t you look away?

Is it because you do want to be normal? Well, maybe in another life, if things had worked out differently. If your dad hadn’t been a deadbeat, if you hadn’t screwed it up with your girlfriend. You could have been on a riding lawn mower this time of day, instead of hate-reading this essay on Substack.

If things had been different, then seeing vanilla selfies of pregnant wives wouldn’t short-circuit your terminally online brain. You’d probably have your own wife and children by now.

For now, you stay on this side of the white picket fences, watching the housewives wander barefoot across the freshly mowed grass. Normieland is for the suckers, and maybe the fortunate.

Everything is performative. Everything is cope.

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If you think this is even a question, you’ve been on the internet too long. Trying to mold someone with borderline personality disorder into the wife of your dreams is like trying to turn a passenger airline into a rocket ship. You will crash and burn.

However, this raises an interesting question pertinent to the many Gen Z (and some millennial) men earnestly looking for a wife. Are wives built, or are they born? Is wifehood analogous to masculinity, where it is often argued that manhood is earned, while girls simply enter womanhood by nature of becoming fertile? And more importantly, is it up to a man to form a wife to his needs and preferences, or does it happen naturally as pair-bonding solidifies?

One of my dad’s many sayings as a builder is, “You gotta know what you’re working with.” The axiom applies here. If you think you’re going to build a healthy loving wife out of a BPD girl, you don’t know what you’re working with. You are not a builder, you’re not a foreman—you’re just a guy who wandered onto the job site looking for a paycheck and picked up a nail-gun.

To build a wife—and this metaphor only stretches so far—you must be the type of man who would build a good wife. You must become a builder, who picks the right materials and knows what it takes to make them into something habitable. You must treat every element with care and respect. In other words, you pick a good woman you have chemistry with, one whose values are at least roughly in line with your own, who is fairly emotionally stable and earnestly wants to make you happy. You understand what it takes for you to form a strong marriage and household, and you build the relationship with leadership and patience.

To stretch the metaphor any further would put me in very patriarchal territory, however. Men and women both form into the contours of a long-term relationship. Where she curves, you bend, where you push, she yields.

A commenter offered a beautiful metaphor I think is more apt in describing how a man shapes his wife: tree husbandry. A sapling needs good soil, water and sun. It must also be pruned of low-utility watershoots, suckers, and anything that overcrowds and obstructs its airiness and beauty. Under proper care, a sapling develops an elegant structure that stands the tests of wind, draught, hail, and pests. Long after it has past its prime fruit production, the tree husband is loathe to cut it down, because he himself has witnessed and enhanced its natural beauty over many years. It bears the scars of his pruning miscalculations, or where he failed to cut out a blighted area in time. You may trace its branches all the way back to a moment in time where it nearly died, where he nearly killed it out of sheer ignorance. All trees bear the marks of their caretakers, for good or ill. A man with his wife is not much different.

This metaphor also reaches its limit. Women do prune their husbands, but in a much more passive way. We often refer to this pruning as a “civilizing” influence. The difference is that men cannot, as a general matter, be led by their wives. They take advice, support, guidance, encouragement. They may defer to her better judgement, or let her pinch hit when the occasion calls for it. But to cease leading would be to abrogate your duty as a man; it would be emasculating. If a wife’s general role is supportive, then drawing up a list of ways a man can improve how he receives that support, similar to an executive directing his assistant, is not a completely unreasonable line of thought. It’s just doesn’t translate quite this way in real life.

When men argue for “building a wife,” they are using clumsy language in lieu of the biblical framework of male headship. They intuit that women are to a great degree moldable and leadable, but perhaps take the flexibility of female temperament too far, and play up their mimetic behaviors too much. I understand the temptation—in a world full of young women that don’t act like they’d be good wives, this gives them hope. It seems to expand their options. Yet some materials are just unusable; some vices are surely ruinous. The book of Proverbs has potent things to say about quarrelsome wives, for instance, observing that restraining her is like “grasp[ing] oil with one’s right hand.”

To return again to the building metaphor, the raw materials matter. A woman who is dysfunctional at baseline is not going to become functional just because you put a ring on it and think you can muscle your way to an orderly and peaceful union. Your prospective wife’s disposition, her attractiveness, upbringing, convictions, habits, even her friends, all matter. So you may make a roof look sharp, but the shingles will blow off in the first windstorm. Or you may notice the drywall sheets look good, but there are no 2x4s to built out a frame.

On the other hand, she may have excellent framing materials, but it just doesn’t feel like a house worth building. The vision doesn’t leave you awestruck. Women can’t just become whatever—that is part of our inherent charm, why we can’t be demystified, and why heartbreak songs resonate. Each romantic interest who pulls you in will leave a unique imprint on your soul if you fall hard enough. You would not want a world in which women were interchangeable, customizable widgets. As the more romantic sex (something I’ve recently come to understand is true), you men would hate it.

There is often more danger on the other end of the spectrum, though, and that is where the woman overly shapes you into patterns of dysfunction. If you believe women are so malleable, you may underestimate how powerful pattern-setting may be for your own role in the pairing. If you let a strong-willed woman mold you into habits and paths of least resistance that don’t serve you well or are not optimal for a lifelong marriage, you’re going to regret it. For instance, if you begin the relationship by bringing her coffee and constantly fetching her things or being her chauffer, constantly attending to her shifting moods and whims, you risk importing these courtship behaviors you used to endear yourself to her into a marriage where you are now her permanent errand boy, and it is assumed there is nothing better you could or should be doing with your time, and that to ask her to take on more of her own little needs and wants would spurn her.

Man and woman mold into the contours of the other. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a strong-willed woman. She can be a tremendous asset. But if you do not set the contours right, if you do not demonstrate you are in this relationship to lead, protect, and provide, then you will end up, to put it crudely, with your testicles on the chopping block.

That said, a woman who wants to please you can modify her behaviors quite a lot in day to day life. So, be a husband she wants to please. A woman who appreciates her husband is less likely to nag him over little things. Be a husband a wife can appreciate. If you need a woman who is more self-sufficient, be the kind of husband who doesn’t feel distant when you do spend time together. If you need a wife who’s keen on intimacy, be sexually attractive. Does this always work? Are there some things you are doing very right, and she still doesn’t respond? Obviously. There are no guarantees, but working on yourself is always the best place to start.

Good Woman: what is she?

We’ve established you need to be looking for raw qualities, the qualities of a good woman. What are these qualities?

Five main traits jump out:

Attraction/chemistry: She’s not just someone “who’ll make a good mother.” To you, she has to be a MILF, and one you can reasonably imagine aging well with you through motherhood and beyond. No compromises.

Nurturing instinct: She may or may not have sharp edges, but with you she softens into her feminine ways of caring for you.

Capability: She’s not a total dumb-dumb. She can figure things out, even if it takes her a little longer. Come at me for saying it, I don’t care: living with someone significantly less smart than you is a drag (most people marry within 10 IQ points of each other). Nobody wants to be chronically exasperated, or the subject of chronic exasperation. You, rightwing chud, want someone who can manage the day to day aspects of your household without being micromanaged.

Willingness to follow: (Come at me, feminists.) She leans into her husband’s leadership and defers to his judgement when push comes to shove. Don’t look for a woman who just says yes to everything, as if she doesn’t have any will of her own, but does she trust you? Can she surrender her position when it matters? A household cannot have two CEOs. I make no apologies.

Not contentious/peace-loving: She isn’t a pot-stirrer—at least not usually. She desires peace, not conflict, even if conflict is sometimes necessary to reach peace. Nothing is more exhausting than a contentious woman.

There may be other qualities you have in mind that aren’t negotiable. That is fine. You should be picky—you’re looking for a wife, a love to grow old with, not a joyride.

Attracting a Good Wife

You cannot pull a good wife through empty displays of dominance—being demanding or pushy for the sake of it, because that is what “alphas” do. Pulling a good wife is instead a mixture of competence, care, maturity and status. You do not have to be older to express these traits. I married my husband when we were just nineteen. Why? Besides the obvious part of falling in love and getting along quite well with him, I realized he had all the raw ingredients of an excellent husband.

Competence: He was successful at anything he applied himself to. I figured he could develop competence in any field, and he had the work ethic inherited from his parents to back it up. Spoiler, 15 years later: I was right.

Care: He was trustworthy and concerned with my well being. I knew he was going to look out for me and any future children. Spoiler: I was right.

Maturity: He always joked that he was ready to move out at 14. I believe he might’ve been successful in that. The way he handled planning and logistics, weighed pros and cons, and didn’t get caught up in childish drama assured me he was, in fact, an adult. Spoiler: this man adults so hard.

Status: It may be gouache to discuss, but most women marry laterally across the socioeconomy, and so did I. Son of middle class suburban family with upstart small business parents, meet daughter of middle class suburban family with upstart small business parents. If he had come from some highly dysfunctional trailer park situation, he would have had a lot more to prove to me, because he would’ve lacked the social proof that comes with having a good upbringing.

You may be in exactly that situation, but it is nothing you cannot overcome by building your social credit in other ways: Be the guy people call for advice, the guy who’s always ready to lend a helping hand, the guy on the leadership team at church, the guy who’s built sterling credit, the guy who eschews the vices associated with how his parents or broke siblings live. Status is somewhat about looks and money, but not as much as some genres of internet discourse would suggest, particularly while you are still young. You don’t have to have a 401k or a nice car at 23, you merely have to demonstrate you have the potential to provide a lifestyle similar to what her father provided for her.

(On the other hand, if my husband had been from a wealthier family or was further along his chosen path of success, I would’ve had more to prove to him—don’t pretend that isn’t true.)

So, Cody was able to pull a pretty good wife, all things considered. I have my weak spots, as we all do, but whenever I get a peek at the state of affairs with some other marriages, I think I’m not doing so bad. I have improved his life in measurable ways. He’s very busy being ultra-productive right now, but maybe I will come back with an addendum with his own words on what he saw in me, as that would only be fair. Maybe, if he feels so inclined.

All this to say, do not despair, young men. If you can demonstrate these core attributes, there’s hope for you to find a good woman who will grow into an even better wife. They are not all Cluster B bitches or foolish girls with delusions of marrying only a 6ft+ man with blue eyes who works in finance. The question of whether you can make one of subpar materials should really be very low on your list of concerns. Focus on finding a woman with good qualities, look after her well, and watch her flourish.

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You come to bed. Your wife is reclining on her side, facing away from you. She’s scrolling Tiktok on her phone. You lean over and see some hyper-attractive influencer is bouncing through a massive kitchen in skin-tight athleisure, ostensibly showing off the new organization system in her cabinets, but the camera is getting a great view of her shapely rear end.

You greet your wife with, “Hey, honey,” and brush her shoulder. It’s like petting a rock. Her mind is somewhere else, in that high-end marble kitchen, and simultaneously in her own, which has a sink full of sippy cups and dirty milk bottles. It’s also fixated on this influencer’s body, and with every passing second disassociating from her own body. She’s thinking she could probably have that butt, if she tried harder. Probably. She’s a failure. She wishes she was more attractive.

You try a few further initiation tactics. Your standard routine. She finally shrugs and grumbles, “I’m so tired. Not tonight.” You roll over and give up, irritated and resentful.

Women, particularly young mothers or those who work stressful jobs, have an endless number of ways to trap themselves in their own head. The phone is just the most potent way to do it, and of phone uses, scrolling social media is the worst, because it has a direct negative effect on her self-image. Your pursuit of intimacy now faces the extra obstacle of lowered self esteem an a preoccupation with the flaws of her own body. Any man who’s been in a relationship knows a woman in her own head cannot be aroused, and even if she submits to your advances, it’s not nearly so fun as it should be. You can tell she’s somewhere else. She might submit to you, but she can’t submit to the moment. The whole affair falls flat.

Even if she doesn’t bring a phone to bed (a small minority), and she has no such body image concerns in the moment, she can easily spin out on her mental task list. Did she remember to pack the medicine? Has she scheduled piano lessons for the year? Was that email to the COO taken the way she’d hoped? Why didn’t she work out today? That was a bad decision. Is her friend blowing her off on that invite? Maybe it was that one conversation that got too political. On and on it goes. Welcome to female neuroticism.

Your job as the husband is to lead your wife out of her own head. Particularly during stressful phases of life, she is unlikely to resurface on her own. (Yes, wives, you should have better phone habits. You shouldn’t scroll before bed. You should probably delete that app entirely. There are other things you can do to feel more present and embodied, but we will get to that in a separate essay.) You cannot lead your wife out of her head by reasoning with her, or pleading, or reminding her how long it’s been since the last time. You’re fighting fire with fire, and it will just lead to guilt or resentment on her side and certainly resentment on yours. Neither is great for your intimate life.

No. The only way to pull a woman back into her body and the present moment, to remind her that she is not just an operating system managing tasks or an discontented inhabitant of a flawed body, is physicality. Touch, breath, pressure. A few syllables, maybe, but words are cheap unless you really know what you’re doing. Not only should you be more persistent in your seduction,* but you shouldn’t wait until you want sex that very moment to do it.

_{[*Here we pause for the land acknowledgement that no means no, and you know when the no is no.]}

A time will likely come in your marriage where a certain set of cues prompts the generation of a list of expectations in your wife, and the expectations generate anxiety because she thinks she cannot meet them. She isn’t in the headspace to meet them—it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you are the prophetic loser.

Your mission is to break that paradigm and make sensuality seem fun again, to make your wife feel alive again. In short, eroticism for its own sake, not as a mere stepping stone to intercourse. There are many ideas in the Red Pill space I strongly disagree with, but this post from about decoupling foreplay from sex (as in, periodically engaging in foreplay only, and in unexpected circumstances) strikes me as a keen application of this principle: bring your wife back into her body again. Short-circuit the “mental load.” Take or leave the specifics, but apply the principle.

Some men just like to slap their wives’ butts while she’s cooking dinner. A classic, but maybe not enough. You can also sweep her up and kiss her passionately, and don’t let go until she melts. I’m not going to brainstorm for you, though—why should I do your job for you? You can figure this out. In any case, get creative—discreetly, because you probably have kids around.

A mutually satisfying intimate life is more than regular sex. It’s about keeping the passion alive. Sensuality is the only way to pull a wife out of her own head and back into her body.

Yet, some very nice, well-socialized men are going to read this and think, but Georgi, I respect my wife as a whole person. I love her mind. She’s not just a [insert crude term]. She’s not a toy. She’s my wife! Should I be so aggressive in my pursuit?

Dear friend, I know you mean well. But what do you think sex is? What is sensuality? Is it two computers connecting via a USB cable? Are you downloading data to each other’s RAMs? Whisper sweet nothings, but it will only get you so far. It is the physical, the physiological, that pulls two lovers into that feeling of intimacy. If you want your wife to be in her body, you need to focus on stimulating a response from the body. You might use words toward that end, but it’s not out of an appreciation for her beautiful mind, okay?

In your youth, you may have been sternly warned off objectifying women, because women are people. Sadly, what this warning has generally carried the implication that women are almost exclusively made of the mind, and their bodies are like strange alien flowers that only bloom under exactly the right conditions—a full moon, a temperature between 70-75 degrees and a soil PH of 7.1—and you must patiently wait for those conditions to arrive so as not to be boorish.

You aren’t a boor, you’re a husband, and she knows you love her. We females are not mere minds; our bodies are not fickle flowers. We were given these bodies to enjoy and be enjoyed, and if you aren’t trying to appreciate your wife’s body as much as possible, that’s a crime against love, and on the whole your marriage will suffer. She needs to be seduced, she needs to blush and be caught off guard by your charm and your desire for her. She must be reminded that sex is not an operating procedure that asks her to be more than she is, that it is fun and affirming and makes her feel close to you. She needs you to lead.

So, if you’ve done well with your reminders, if you think you’ve short-circuited her neuroses, come to bed and throw her phone away, playfully. Pluck it straight from her hands and toss it across the floor. She may not know it in the instant, but she wants you to.

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If you like thought-provoking scifi suspense that has pretty much nothing to do with this subject matter, Liminal Wake, Book One of the Loop Duology, is available free here on Substack and on Amazon in all formats.

So you don’t believe in marriage, because people don’t change. You don’t believe leaning toward your lover to fix what’s wrong can pay off; you think leaning away is how you get what you think you want. You don’t have faith through the winter, that spring will come. You don’t understand that love can wither and die back like a rosebush, only to be reborn out of challenge and adventure and thrill, again and again and again. You don’t believe your wife can be convicted, or your husband inspired to transformation. You don’t believe that love is motion, pulling both of you, that if you believe in it, it is impossible to stay the same.

So you don’t believe in marriage, because it’s uncertain. You have never reached out for your husband with a newborn baby on your chest, grasped his hand and felt your love for him expand to fill the known universe. You have never watched him teach your son to ride a bike, or your daughter to pitch a softball, and overflowed with admiration for how he loves his family. You have never seen your wife sing her a lullaby, or guide his little hand in cutting cookie dough. You haven’t felt like you could do anything, you would do anything, to keep this. Here, in marriage, family forms its sacred branches. Here is true risk, here is abandon. You have loved with neither.

So you don’t believe in marriage, because one person can never be your everything. You speak the truth, but in error. She is the wind in your sails, not your ship. He is not your fulfillment, but the one who helps you fulfill your potential. You’ve never thought of it as a covenant before God and man, two souls bonded into one flesh, drawing strength from each other and from the network that builds them up, and that they pour into in return. You have never felt the joy of seeing your husband laugh genuinely with his friends, or your wife come back from a social call revived and easy. You do not believe your relationship is one small tile in the mosaic of community.

So you don’t believe in marriage, because you must to protect yourself. You guard against the possibility that he leaves. You name it a contract, you list its obligations. You have never buried yourself so deep into love that the thought of him dying wrenches your heart, that you couldn’t imagine the sun shining or the earth spinning without him. You have never been cut down by the realization that if she dies, it could kill you. If he dies, you will never love again—there is no other his equal. You are vulnerable, exposed, cherishing each day you’re given because none are guaranteed. This is the love that survives, the root that refuses to perish with the winter. It is the love that moves, expands, and calls us into faith, that points us heavenward, to an ultimate love that never leaves, and never fails.

So you don’t believe in marriage. Grasp first at eternity, then at love. There you will find marriage, too.

*This essay was inspired by ’s touching piece on gender roles.

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To transpose my own experiences and thought patterns as a young woman onto them and say, “I turned out alright,” is not good enough. I lived in one cultural moment, and they will live in another. They inhabit their unique bodies, I am confined to my own. I can, however, pull from my own experience and try to correct some of the subtle errors in my own thinking and in the messages I received in adolescence, so I do not pass those on to my daughters, calibrated as best I can to their personalities and the time and place they’re living in.

1. You are not just loved, you are cared for and protected

It is not enough to remind a Christian girl that she is a daughter of the Most High King, that she is loved unconditionally by Him as a father. It is essential, but it is insufficient to arm them for finding a spouse and having a happy married life. Girls are desperate for practical advice and insight on romance that doesn’t lead them astray. I do not expect my two, going on three daughters to be any different.

To help them, we as parents have to lay a foundation for them to feel anchored and secure. If you have anxieties you’re wrestling with, you can share them with me. If you have doubts, let me know. If you’ve opened up some kind of flirtship with a boy, it’s safe to tell us who he is, and definitely where he lives. If you feel like you messed up, we’re not going to browbeat you. If someone hurts you, we want to know—and Lord have mercy on that boy.

Home is safe, Mom and Dad are safe, and their residence will still be a home long after they move out, no matter what happens in their love lives.

2. Gauging your desireableness is not shameful

I was raised on the tail end of purity culture, where it was considered gouache, if not shameful, to wonder if you were pretty and if boys liked you. I do not want my daughters to experience that. As I’ve written elsewhere, not knowing where you stand with men is a great way to prime girls to waste time with low quality men out of a search for validation—or worse, to be victimized.

I want my girls to be modest, but not shy. I want them to feel butterflies and flushed cheeks. I want them to feel free to giggle and flip their hair and not think worse of themselves for “acting like girls.” I want them to enjoy being girls—whatever kind of girl they are. All phases of it, all the way until they die of old age.

I can tell my daughters they are beautiful, sure. I’m damn sure they will be stunners. But I don’t think a girl can really internalize her own beauty and charm until she embodies being a young woman and perceives how young men treat her. She might be clueless anyway, but my hope is she has friends and other people in her life who will point out, with discretion, when she’s missed some cross-sex signaling.

3. Trust your intuition

My girls are more likely to believe all men are safe than to believe all men are potential predators. That is the small, sweet world in which they are blessed to be growing up. I want them to love that guys are different and wonderful and somewhat mysterious in their ways. But I also want them to not be so overly agreeable and pliable with guys that they override their own instincts about an individual’s character and motivations. Practical guides about what not to do are well and good, but even if something just doesn’t feel right, I want them to have a game plan to get out of an uncomfortable situation, and to assert themselves even at the risk of embarrassment and social castigation.

4. Value your female friends

It is far more difficult to move through young womanhood without friends. Yes, intrasexual competition exists. Yes, sometimes friends betray you. They’re still worth it. It’s worth it to have friends to confide in, to soundboard with, to swap clothes with, to let you know when you’re completely off the rails. It’s worth the gas money going to see them instead of messaging or videochatting. It’s worth the lost sleep to stay up all night talking. You need girlfriends—girls who will tell you if you’re being drawn toward the wrong guy, who will help fix your hair before a date, who will let you cry mascara stains into their blouse and encourage you with prayers and scripture. Real friends do exist, you should find them. They are more precious than silver.

5. Take a compliment

Because women instinctually try to equalize among each other so they can relate and find security more easily, we find it hard to take compliments.

My dear daughters, just take the compliments, from either sex. If it was given in earnest, it should be received in earnest. If she likes your shoes, smile and say thank you. If he likes your jeans (the modest Christian men are squirming), smile, and say thank you. If he thinks your lipstick is a pretty color, smile, and say thank you.

All the Baptists are sweating, I can sense it.

The caveat is, of course: if you think the compliment-giver is a creep, you don’t have to smile the same way, or smile at all.

As I wrote above, some people think it’s low-key shameful to receive validation from the world. Why can’t you just rest in the knowledge you are loved by the Father? Why can’t you just be demure and “modest” and just “wait for the right man to come along” before you start trying to pick up some kind of signal as to where you stand?

Because we live in physical bodies, that’s why, and most of us plan to use them someday to make another person really happy and to make babies. So when someone praises you, for your competence, or talent, or taste, or your even (the horror!) your beauty, you should accept that as a constructive thing. You are being built up, not be vain or prideful, but to know that you have some good things going on and you are not going to settle for a man who doesn’t appreciate them and offer comparable value.

Perhaps I ask too much of the world, but I would rather have my daughters built up by honest compliments given in person than for them to trot themselves out onto the internet for validation from strangers.

6. Indulging body insecurity isn’t worth it

I’ve tried to model healthy habits for my children. Exercise, a balanced diet, an appreciation for being out in nature. But I’ll just own it: if you’ve followed me for any length of time you’ve probably picked up that I am at best averagely secure in my physical attributes. Which, for a woman, isn’t saying much.

I mean, several of you said I looked like Daisy Ridley and I took that as an insult (she may be boring but she is a flipping movie star). I neurotically find myself straining for body image goals that just probably aren’t worth the preoccupation. I might be borderline dysphoric at times. Overcoming covetousness is me surrendering the idol of body image to God, every day.

I want my daughters to do better than I have, and to internalize that if they have their health, they have a whole lot. I want them to fully understand that age comes for everyone, that their bodies will eventually wither and die, and we value them through every season of life. I want them to embrace the physical challenge and permanent marks of motherhood with joy instead of frustration, which is far easier said than done. I want them to appreciate their first fine lines, their first gray hairs, as marks of having been blessed to live this long, and to have lived those years well.

But I don’t want them to fall into the trap of thinking it is more virtuous to celebrate their “flaws” than to celebrate their beauty. If they love their lips or their hips or their bust, I want them to own it. Those attributes are blessings, and nothing makes a girl more insecure than feeling like she’s not allowed to celebrate a single thing about her body. If that’s “modesty,” then I reject the definition.

This culture will drag a girl down in its relentless pursuit of perfection. I’m willing to bet my daughters are at far greater risk of being beaten into the pavement by iPhone dysphoria and unattainable beauty standards than of falling into the sin of pridefulness over their looks. Besides, the more they can appreciate the bodies God gave them, the less likely they are to give too much in a quest for validation.

—

My eldest is still in elementary school, but already I’m looking down the road and seeing the potential outcomes should this or that happen, should she fall in with a certain friend group, or get a phone too early. Yet instead of seeing this journey as a series of pitfalls where I might let her down, I’m choosing to see it as a series of opportunities to build up a woman who is confident, loving, and beautiful in a way that no app filter can possibly attain.

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Have you raised daughters? What did you tell them, and what would you tell them if you could do it over?

But no wife who lets a bedroom grow cold does it because she is chronically fatigued by the vicissitudes of life, or because her husband didn’t pick up his socks, or because she has a “sinecure” through her husband’s financial provision and no longer needs to “put out.” Not if she married for love, at least, which is the vast majority of wives. Long-term abstinence or very low frequency sex in marriage is an expression of dysfunction. If a wife has seemingly lost interest in sex, there are reasons. Lack of interest in sex is not normal, and treating it like just another expression of solipsism means consigning thousands of couples to misery or encouraging divorce when it needn’t be the solution.

If you clicked on this, you likely either are someone, or know someone, who is worried about the love lamp growing dim. This piece is directed at women, not because all dead bedrooms are caused by women, but we often find ourselves working through complicated attitudes and life situations that kick off trails of mistakes, interventions that didn’t pay off, and subtle slides into dysfunction. Because female sexuality is more complex than our counterparts’, the issue requires more thought and more troubleshooting to fix. Men, for all their good will, cannot fully compensate for this complexity simply by advising other men on how to get their wives hot under their hair. (And when they try to advise women, it’s…well, I don’t want to say stop trying, but they lack the understanding of the female brain I’m talking about.)

I hope my perspective as a wife and mother married nearly fifteen years provides some starting points to understand how you got here and where you might be headed if things do not change.

1. Your birth control is stunting your libido

Because sex is biological, it makes sense to look at the interventions and events that impact our hormones first. We’ll begin with the most scientifically controversial.

Study results on sexual dysfunction and sexual desire as impacted by birth control are mixed, but there is some evidence to suggest it affects libido in some women. Are you one of those women? I don’t know. But I can tell you from personal experience that getting off the pill and cycling normally was one of the best choices I made in this regard. I will never get back on the pill.

You may have been on birth control so long you don’t even remember what it’s like not to be on it. You may have been on it for the entirety of your marriage. I’m just putting a bug in your ear that if you’re just not feeling it very often, and sex isn’t as rewarding as you suspect it should be…you might owe it to yourself and your husband to try going hormonally au naturale.

2. Your SSRI is tanking your desire and sucking the fun out of sex

This brings us to SSRIs. A meta-analysis indicates the rate of sexual dysfunction, including lack of sexual satisfaction, among users of antidepressants could be between 50% and 70%, with SSRIs (affecting serotonin production) taking most of the blame. Yes, depression in itself tanks libido, but such high rates shouldn’t be dismissed, especially in a set of drugs that is supposed to treat the depression. If you were casually prescribed an SSRI because you had, say, the postpartum “baby blues,” or you went through a loneliness slump because you moved or were otherwise isolated, and you’ve stayed on it, this might be part of the problem.

I know from experience that depression can be serious. Don’t make treatment decisions rashly. But your choice of life outcomes shouldn’t be between, “I don’t feel like I’m drowning anymore because I’m on the antidepressant,” and, “My marriage is crumbling because our sex life is on life support.” It takes effort to build the life you want. But sometimes all it takes are a few friends, touching grass, healthier routines, and a new hobby or two to pull you out of your slump. Heck, a better sex life is probably going to be a big part of that.

So don’t cheat yourself, or your husband, by accidentally blaming your dying bedroom on a big life change like a baby, a move, or a new career when it may have been the drug you were prescribed during those transitions.

3. You had a baby

I know what I just said, but there is cascade of negative consequences that come after having a baby that can lead to a dead or at least zombified bedroom if not managed in a healthy way.

As is obvious to any parent, the postpartum period is characterized by a decreased desire for sex. That makes biological sense, because your body doesn’t want to get pregnant right away again. Pregnancy and the newborn phase are very taxing. Add onto that the temporary reduction in sleep quality, and you have a recipe for lackluster marital relations. Temporarily.

I’ll just wade eyeballs deep into momosphere controversy here and say if you do not maintain your sex life during the newborn and baby phases (I’m not talking immediately—wait the six weeks, don’t be an idiot), regardless of how non-sexy you feel, you’re both going to pay for it.

It’s pretty widely known that women generally need to feel desirable to feel aroused, and the deflated balloon that was your baby belly is not hot. But do you know what makes you feel even less sexy than your postpartum body? Not having sex. I’ve had three, going on four kids. I’m dead serious. Do not mess around with putting off re-engagement in the bedroom. If your husband still wants you, let that count for something.

If you continue to find new excuses for putting off or going long stretches without sex, you may well find that he just stops asking. Naturally, he’s resentful, but you told him, “I’m so tired,” and “I need to co-sleep with the baby,” and “I can’t even relax because the baby is so fussy,” and on and on, and so eventually he gives up.

You tell yourself it’s better this way, right? Because the expectations of sex were added pressure and stress on you, and you already have this new obligation, and the whole world revolves around your baby! Nothing else matters! Right? You lean on attachment theory, and Erica Komisar, and tell yourself your marriage is strong enough to handle it, and on and on with the excuses.

Bull. Shit. You loved this man so much you made a new life with him. He doesn’t deserve this. Yeah, some expectations need to be lowered for a time. Hormones are hormones, so maybe you don’t get to have crazy passionate sex as soon as you’d both wish. Maybe sex is not quite as frequent for a time. Respect the biology, as Arthur Brooks says. But don’t let this critical part of your marriage suffocate under a load of cultural motherhood pressures and pop psychology that do not know or care about you or your husband and what you both need.

Your journey into raising children is made worse, not better, for neglecting your physical intimacy. Lack of sex makes weaker marriages, and weaker marriages make worse parents. Worse people generally, in fact.

A dying bedroom can self-perpetuate in ways you didn’t foresee when you rolled over that first time he tried to initiate postpartum and said, “not tonight.”

For example, you already feel disappointed and self-conscious about your body despite all the body positivity reels you watch on Tiktok. Yet nobody (your husband) is showing you, in the most tangible way possible, that you don’t have to feel bad about it, because you shut him down too many times. This is just added to the stress of caring for a needy infant, so instead of having sex, you eat, because eating hyperpalatable foods releases dopamine. It also makes you fatter.

Now you feel worse about yourself physically, but it’s okay because you’re a really good mom. You’re totally dialed in on your baby’s needs. You look over at your husband, who’s largely given up on pursuing you sexually, and he’s also gaining weight. Because hyperpalatable foods release dopamine. And he’s drinking more beer every night, because alcohol soothes him. And who’s he trying to please, anyway? Certainly not his wife.

You wonder if this isn’t so bad, though. Just Netflix slop and Mexican takeout between you on the bed, forever. Do you even need sex?

A couple years later, after the one thousandth sniping match you two have had in the front seat of the minivan, your four-year-old will ask you if you and daddy love each other. You’ll turn back to him, and open your mouth to say, “Yes, of course, baby,” but in the back of your mind the frigid sheets are pulling up into some kind of monstrous shape you never saw coming—the question, “Do we really? If we love each other, why don’t we have sex except for birthdays and anniversaries? If we love each other, why are we so frustrated all the time?”

And it all started because you couldn’t overcome your insecurities and your mom brain to care for the man who loves you and gave you that child. This is one way a bedroom goes dead.

4. You’ve lost attraction

Sorry, my Christian brothers, but women are not “primarily attracted emotionally”—a white myth perpetuated to help the less Chad-like among you pluck up the courage to ask a young lady out, and to help ensure young women are comfortable settling for men they aren’t physically attracted to.

It’s a shame. Hopefully you aren’t one of those women who got suckered in this way. I’m going to assume you’re not, and that at one time you had a lively conjugal life. But now it’s not lively at all, because his habit and routines have changed him for the worse. Maybe he drinks more, maybe he stopped working out, maybe he goes in for the third helping of lasagna, because why not? He already has the wife. Doesn’t she love him unconditionally?

His eyes are dull, his skin is dull, his teeth are yellowing, he’s grown a paunch. He’s lost most of his muscle tone. It’s “dad bod.” And it’s not hot.

Or, perhaps he’s largely maintained his physique, but his attitudes and habits have changed in really unappealing ways. Ways that give you “the ick.”

This is the trickiest issue so far to navigate, because it’s out of your control. You can be a good wife and keep the bedroom alive anyway, but only he can recognize you are not as into it anymore and make a change. You can model better lifestyles. You can try to cook healthier foods. You can communicate how certain “ick factors” make you feel, and reinforce the direct correlation between those factors and how sexually motivated you are. But at the end of the day, he’s got to care about your attraction to him and his overall health and magnetism in general.

I’m not going to endorse deliberately making him jealous out of a lack of appreciation (and yes, letting yourself go is blatantly unappreciative behavior). Not only do I think it’s immoral, but it’s unlikely to lead to sustainable long-term changes in his behavior.

Again, it’s okay to have an honest conversation about the loss of attraction, but it has to come from a warm heart, not a bitter one. Maybe remind him of the great times you had when he was healthier and fitter, or when didn’t fall into the ick factors so much. Tell him you miss that. Will it work? I can’t say for certain, but clarity usually precedes positive change, if that change is going to happen at all.

Importantly, when you see him do something good, no matter what it is, let him know you appreciate it. When the good thing isn’t directly related to you—especially when it isn’t directly related to you—celebrate his wins. Express gratitude for the fact that he’s a good father, provider, fixer of things, and so on. As to fitness, if he only worked out once this week, that’s one more than last week, and that’s something worth praising. Him passing up the extra beer is worth appreciating. Him going golfing or shooting hoops with his buddies is good. Him taking more time for his own social life he’s been neglecting is good.

Practicing gratitude for everything good he does is going to mitigate your own resentment. Building resentment over the issue is only going to drive reciprocal resentment on his part—it is not some explosive force that is going to finally propel him into lasting positive changes. It may trigger some behavior modification in the short run, out of desperation or shame, but it’s temporary. Besides, nothing kills the bedroom mood quite like resentment.

5. It’s not as rewarding as it should be

I’m sorry there isn’t a more delicate way to say it. But every woman reaches a point, usually fairly quickly, where in the midst of daily stresses, she cannot often work up enthusiasm for the…shall we say, puritanical style of sex we are both thinking of right now. The secular guys and gals seem to know this pretty well, because sex knowledge flows freely in sex positive spaces.

But some of you did not grow up in those spaces, or weren’t paying attention, or your husband wasn’t paying attention, and so here you are, thinking about sex and going, “Meh, why put in the effort?” The discrepancy between husband and wife satisfaction is way wider than it could be. (Aim for zero on average.)

I could tell you female arousal and orgasm have historically been poorly understood. I could point you to the data! There’s even survey data about what combinations of sexual acts are more likely to produce female arousal, if you want to get really nerdy about it. But if your husband is not keyed in, you can help…em, what’s the right word here? Enlighten him? I mean, don’t break out a PowerPoint. Be sexy about it. The point is, if you’re having more fun, he’s going to get more sex, and both of you are happier. It’s pretty simple. (And chances are he wants you to have more fun—that is more satisfying for him, too.)

Sex is something both man and wife should enjoy. If one of you always feels like it’s a chore, your bedroom is going to die. While a common narrative in the “trad” or religiously patriarchal spaces is that sex is a “wife’s duty,” the reality is that the debt of sexual intimacy is mutually held (really! Take it up with the Apostle Paul!). You have to work together to fulfill what is owed to each other, to cultivate both desire and satisfaction. In this way, sex does not feel like a debt being paid, but a gift being received. If it isn’t rewarding, it means you have some troubleshooting to do.

—

Part of wisdom is seeing down different paths opened up our behaviors and choosing whether or not we are going to walk down them. I haven’t covered every potential cause of a dead bedroom here, but the point is: if sex in your marriage is drying up, don’t despair. Look down the paths before you. Choose one that leads back to a fulfilling and healthy sex life, even if it’s harder. If you need help, get help. Don’t let the problems fester.

Your marriage is worth it. He’s worth it.

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But I may as well have draped myself in a security blanket.

Alexandra Klein recently wrote a piece called “Something is Keeping Christian Women Single: Alex Cooper’s Pregnancy Exposed It.” It’s an excellent essay on how evangelical purity culture can suppress women’s natural charm, desire, and “embodied femininity,” and then these women wonder why they’re still single into their late twenties despite being faithful and “waiting on God’s timing.”

I feel for these women because I narrowly escaped their fate. Sweatshirt Girl still met Good Christian Guy who didn’t carry the shame that purity culture can bestow on men, despite his similar upbringing. I say “escape,” but really purity culture impacted me negatively in at least three ways: an inability to assess my own attractiveness on the dating market, a demotivation to learn how to flirt, and a lasting reticence to allow myself to be desired.

Modesty culture

Purity culture has a lot of lofty spiritual rhetoric about how glorious it is to save oneself for marriage and to be modest and godly, but when you boil it down to praxis, it crystallizes into a set of rules. Almost all of them are for women, almost all of them pertain to modesty. You can’t wear shirts that show your midriff. You can’t wear spaghetti straps. Necklines should be high enough that nobody can see anything, even if you bend over. Bikinis? Literally the devil’s work.

There are even unspoken rules about how you can move your body. Evangelical and Baptist churches do not hold dances, because dancing can be seductive. We don’t talk about it, nobody says outright, “no dancing—too sexy.” We just don’t do those things. Nobody from the Christian and Missionary Alliance knows how to dance.

Church leadership might be forgiven for blanket rules that keep boys and girls from grinding up on each other, but it comes through in other restrictive attitudes. At one point—one of those rare times I was not wearing a sweatshirt—I stretched my arms up and then tucked them behind my chair during a youth activity. I was maybe 14 or 15. A middle-aged mom helping out gave me such a stern look I immediately went back to slouching. She literally imbued me with shame just by catching my gaze.

Purity culture is mostly modesty culture, and modesty is pretty much exclusively a female problem. Men don’t have to change anything, for obvious reasons. They dress modestly anyway, and nobody expects them to cover up their abs on lake day. Thus, the purity of the entire cohort of young adults in a church is hung like a ball and chain around the necks of girls. Do you know what happens when you give good Christian girls rules to follow and tell them it’s a great and godly responsibility to uphold them? They take it to heart. Girls who are good at school, which is most girls, are going to be good at purity culture, because it’s a framework for conformity. You can get so good at it, in fact, that you never even awaken to your God-given feminine charm, much less your sexuality.

“Do not open.”

Honestly, for a lot of us, it was weight off our necks—at least in the younger years. We didn’t have to worry about crushes, or if so-and-so thought we were cute. They weren’t likely to speak up anyway (which is an area where purity culture can do a number on young men). You became content in the unknowing, where your sexuality was a little black box that could remain sealed, tucked under the bed for “when the right guy comes along” (how will you know it’s the right guy? Lol just pray about it). Girls who were overweight or had other physical shortcomings liked purity culture, because it brought all the teen girls down to an even, sexless playing field. Girls love an even playing field, and so protecting the legalism of purity was self-reinforcing.

This culture masked a lot of insecurity and social shortcomings, especially for me. I didn’t have to learn how to flirt, because flirting was antithetical to purity culture and the great, godly Waiting. It didn’t stop me from subtly envying girls who were natural flirts, but it was nothing I couldn’t brush aside. There are no external pressures to learn how to use your charm in purity culture. No friend takes you aside and says, “Hey, do you like [that boy over there]? Why don’t you go talk to him?” No friend is there to advise you on how to subtly invade personal space or touch someone with an innocent but pleasing sort of spark. I didn’t have to learn any of this, and by not learning any of this, I was being a Very Good Christian.

I also didn’t have to worry about whether guys thought I was attractive, because it didn’t matter. Don’t Date in High School was another unspoken purity culture rule, so what was the point? Again, no helpful friend says, “Hey, you’d look really pretty if you curled your hair this way,” or “Have you tried blending eyeshadow above your crease so you can actually see it?” Because those things weren’t supposed to matter to us. I genuinely didn’t know how I measured up for guys, though in the absence of feedback, my natural inclination was to overestimate my flaws. As we will see shortly, this lack of knowledge did not pay dividends.

But in a real sense, this was a burden averted, at least for a while. I could focus on school, on my hobbies, on My Relationship with God (“dating Jesus” was very popular in my adolescence). Worrying about the male gaze was a problem for other girls. When my mother casually floated to me that my sister was having trouble fielding all the male attention, and that I was pretty, how did I handle it? I just shrugged.

Topline thought: not my area of expertise.

Underlying thought: I am not attractive.

Follow-up thought: I’ll figure this out later. I have time.

(Of course I didn’t stop to think that maybe my lack of male attention had more to do with my lack of openness and willingness to flirt, not my physical characteristics. But who in my Christian world would have possibly dropped that suggestion on me? No one.)

Satisfactory, until it’s not.

In any case, this brings us back to the sweatshirts. Sweatshirts were kosher. Sweatshirts let me hide my body. Sweatshirts kept nagging middle-aged women with outdated hairstyles from drilling me with their prudish gaze.

For a while, modesty and ultra-conservative, completely de-sexed social interactions worked. They worked until I was about seventeen, and then I suddenly went into crisis mode. I realized that parents tried to keep me around other teens to keep them accountable, like some kind of chaperone. Georgi is not a sexual being. Georgi will keep them on the straight and narrow. Her presence alone is enough to kill any kind of mood.

And I let it sink in that I hadn’t been flirted with, ever, at least not in ways overt enough for my purity brain to detect. A potential reality hit me like the wake of speedboat: I could be single forever. Nobody wants me. What is wrong with me? What is the standard for being desired and loved, and how far am I from meeting it? These suddenly became urgent questions, and I was anxious for answers.

That, in short, is an important preface to how I ended up dating an alcoholic eight years my senior with no life prospects. Yes, depression and loneliness played a huge role, but all the issues above primed me perfectly to reciprocate enthusiasm with virtually any man with a modicum of charm would finally give me attention. I regret to inform my most prudish and legalistic brothers and sisters in Christ that if you do not let young women flirt and get rejected, flirt and be accepted, be flirted with and told they are pretty or even (God forbid!) sexy, they will eat from the palm of whatever low-quality man comes along to validate them.

Unzipped.

This brings me to the third harm, which I will try to speak to as delicately as I can. It turns out that even when you find and marry an amazing guy who treasures you and thinks you’re hot, the sweatshirt is still embedded in your psyche. It wants to stick around. If, for years, you were stitched through with the idea that it is not good and proper to be sexually desired, wholly and nakedly, then covering up stays your default mode even when it is no longer appropriate. You tell yourself you are not hiding, that you are not ashamed, and that nobody told you that. Intellectually, you know you have no reason to be shy. But reality is unfortunately more complicated.

To be clear, it wasn’t anything truly serious. It was subtle, like a speedbump. Still, it took me years to fully unwind this mentality. Years. It is only looking back fourteen years later that I can see just how far I’ve come. And you know what? I’m a little mad about it. I’m frustrated that I had to rewire my brain out of something that didn’t need to be there in the first place. I’m ticked that I could have had better and freer intimacy had I not been helped into the Sweatshirt Mentality by the church blindly following legalism with no regard for its potential long-term consequences.

The telos of purity culture as I experienced it is not actually saving sex for marriage. It’s floating brains, cut off from any hint of carnal desire or erotic love until an appointed time, at which these brains are suddenly dropped into a God-given body with hormones and pheromones and nerve endings and told, “Godspeed.” It’s generations of women with their sexuality tucked into sealed black boxes marked “Someday.” It’s young men receiving the message that there is something wrong with them because they recognize the female form even in inanimate objects, and think about sex, and want to do that with a woman someday, preferably as soon as possible.

It’s sweatshirts that even in their shapelessness, cling to you like the all rules they represent.

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But that is not where our story begins. A narrow street-level townhouse with a chipped brick facade sits unassumingly in the multi-use, rent-heavy neighborhood of Summit-University. The stoop is dusty and worn. No signs or flower pots adorn it; both windows have bars, and the shades are tightly drawn. It’s invisible to passersby. Yet within the next four weeks, seven infants inside this nowhere address will breath air for the first time.

Louis Albertson, a baker from a few streets over on his mid-morning walk, was the first to hear the cries from inside.

“It wasn’t the baby cries,” Albertson insisted to me. “I mean, babies cry, don’t they? They were weak little cries. But I heard a man shouting. Some poor woman was whimpering—I didn’t understand the language, I thought it was maybe Arabic, but it sounded like she was being berated. Like really, really intense stuff. That’s exactly what I told the cops.”

The St. Paul police department did nothing with the report, until Albertson finally saw a woman exit the front door minutes later and run down the steps.

“She was sobbing. She said that she just wanted to see them, and get more of what she was owed. Said it wasn’t enough.”

The woman, Bebelyn Flores, was a Filipino migrant. She was lured to St. Paul under the pretenses that she would be a human surrogate for a wealthy white couple’s first child. Instead, her “sponsor,” named in court documents as Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Amir, had a second trafficking victim, a surgeon from Nepal named Bahadur Deepak, whose work visa was sponsored by Al-Amir’s medical staffing front company, harvest Bebelyn’s eggs and fertilize them with Al-Amir’s own sperm.

From there, seven select embryos were placed in artificial wombs, or “fetal pods,” procured from the Chinese company, EazeGesta. It’s widely viewed as a knockoff of the American artificial womb manufacturer, GestoPod, and has been named in four lawsuits to date alleging false advertising claims and adverse outcomes, ranging from fetal starvation due to defective synthetic placenta, to severe autism caused by inappropriate hormone controls.

The seven pods come at just under one hundred thousand dollars a piece, not including shipping. If this was Al-Amir’s first venture with the pods, he would have netted about ninety grand for his troubles from the United States government’s baby bonuses alone, the only statutory requirement for which is a registered live birth and social security enrollment. Gestopod births are typically certified in person or via livestream by a licensed reprotech specialist, and such agents are legally prohibited from refusing to certify births on U.S. soil, to genetic mothers also present on U.S. soil.

But this wasn’t Al-Amir’s first gestopod venture. Prosecutors allege Al-Amir has artificially gestated at least three other cohorts of his own genetic offspring in three separate states: Washington, California, and Maine. He maintains no connection to the children, who were promptly laundered through a fake adoption agency and adopted out for fees ranging from $65,000 to up to $90,000 in one case—all by infertile, mostly upper-middle class couples who, a member of the prosecution told me, “didn’t ask questions they didn’t want answers to.”

Bank records show Al-Amir made a handsome cut off the adoption fees, too, making off with an additional 1.4 million dollars.

By law, baby bonuses are distributed directly to the mothers of new babies. But Bebelyn was forced to send nearly all of the funds to Al-Amir, under threat he would report her to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and send her home penniless. He let her keep thirty thousand dollars, just three percent of the total cash payouts and barely enough for her to live on for the next year. As for the Nepalese physician he coerced to harvest eggs and monitor the fetal development within the pods, Al-Amir paid him slightly more: $41,500. It barely covered the visa fees for he and his wife.

On this most recent cohort of births, Al-Amir made out with just under one million dollars in baby bonuses. Forensic accountants are still untangling how this money was laundered, though some of it has funneled into business accounts associated with daycare firms with incomplete paperwork, lack of recent site visits, and poorly spelled names.

Yet prosecutors have a legal mountain in front of them if they want to nail Al-Amir on defrauding the government. While the facts of the case are well established, the letter of law is not. The charge of extortion from Flores for the money that legally belongs to her is not the issue, but rather milling or “farming” babies for the sake of gleaning the bonus. Clearly, these babies were not brought into the world out of love for having a family, but pure avarice.

Yet the reproductive technology used is not illegal, and “birthing” seven babies at a time is not illegal. Neither are disqualifying for the baby bonus. If Flores had given her eggs to this process consensually, kept all the infants, and kept the money, would there be any legal case at all?

Still, headlines continue to identify the St. Paul case as “fraud,” when it is more accurately described as a case of human trafficking, extortion, and money laundering. If Al-Amir doesn’t lose on this count in court, he has certainly lost in the court of public opinion.

Albertson agrees. “It’s fraud for sure,” he tells me. “You can’t tell me that isn’t fraud. You can’t farm babies just to get a payout from taxpayers.”

As for the St. Paul babies, their names are legally protected, though they’ve since been changed from the names given by Al-Amir. Six of the seven were taken by Child Protective Services within hours of Albertson’s second call to the police. They were placed in one of the city’s newer android-assisted orphanages, given that no foster homes were available—victims of a foster care shortage that grows worse every year. As the genetic mother, Bebelyn Flores was offered placement with the infants, but she refused on the grounds she had neither the space nor the capacity to care for them all.

According to a social worker who did not want to be named, Bebelyn Flores told her in an interview, “What am I to do, huh? Pick only one? How can I do this? I must forget them. They go to better homes. God have mercy.”

One child died shortly after birth. The initial cause of death listed by the coroner was “failure to thrive,” though a second investigation is pending.

The U.S. Department Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration were both asked for comment, given that other baby bonus fraud schemes have been alleged by independent investigative reporters in Oregon, Vermont, and Massachusetts, states with some of the nation’s lowest birth rates. Notably, those involve alleged forged birth certificates or deep-faked live births, not real babies.

“We regret the human trafficking alleged in this case and desire justice for the wronged. We continue to support every person who chooses to have a baby, regardless of what technology is used to bring that baby into the world,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Health.

“Our office has not identified any instances of fraud thus far. Our baby bonuses have boosted fertility by an additional four hundred thousand births in the five years since the policy began. We continue to support all parents in their parenting journey.”

The baby bonus has been a boon to the surrogacy and artificial womb industries, boosting revenue by 91% in the last five years and accounting for an estimated 17% of the added births cited by the Department of Health. Pro-tech natalists like Elon Musk have been vocal supporters of these alternative fertility paths, while child rights advocates point to higher instances of attachment disorders, anxiety and depression in children born via these reproductive technologies.

Albertson has a wife and three kids of his own, all born naturally. He isn’t very ideological, but when I ask him about how he thinks the six surviving babies are doing, he grows somber. “Nobody should be born like that,” he says. “It just doesn’t seem fair.”

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Not only is it not special—as in, it isn’t novel, high status, or otherwise noteworthy—but this is a very good thing.

Let me back up, and then I’ll prove it to you. There is much ado on social media these days about how “hard” parenting is, and therefore how prestigious parenting is. It’s expensive, life-altering, the much-anticipated next step after finding that coveted husband or wife. But there’s more to it than that, because simply having kids isn’t enough of a status signal. Raising kids is the best, moms on the internet will assure you, but also, like, are your sippy cups organized? Is there red dye 40 in their fruit snacks? Did you read this stack of must-read parenting books? Did you give birth naturally? Are your kids in at least one billion sports this year? Have they gone to Disneyland? Doing these and other Good Parenting Things makes you superior.

I wrote a Note last week on how complaining about your duties as a mom or dad is essentially the least pronatal thing you can do. Not only are you advertising (inaccurately) that being a mother sucks, but you’re advertising yourself as part of the melodramatic, woe-is-me peer group that new mothers would be stepping into. Demographer Lyman Stone offered his two cents, saying a lot of “family influencing” is antinatal in its content—as in, it makes child-rearing look so high status as to be unachievable. It’s a form of intrasexual competition, he argued, an attempt to suppress others’ offspring in order to leave more resources for yourself. These influencers may not fully recognize the deep biological roots of their own motivations, but the effect is the same: tell potential parents that parenting, particularly “good” parenting, is very high status and therefore special…but at the same time, that you can’t do it.

If you step back and examine mommy-blogging and “family influencing” from the angle of status-seeking, instead of internalizing what these parents are doing as a constant anxiety about your parenting job performance, it looks rather sad. Desperate, even. These parents want the thing that they’re doing, that billions of other people have done for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, to now be seen as special and praiseworthy. So they constantly advertise their “journeys” to show you how hard they work and how much they sacrifice. They offer “tips” to other moms to gain cred as “experts.” They want you to know that when a report card comes in, they’re “proud mamas.” They did something special, you see, by rearing a kid that is functioning more or less at his potential.

Parenting is special, this kind of content seems to say. Therefore, I, the content creator, am special.

These parents will enthusiastically affirm that you, too, should have kids! Family life is great! But the subliminal message is really a question: Are you up to it? Can you get on this level? Because I’m on this level. My extra effort is what makes parenting special because…well. Otherwise I would just be raising kids, like my great great great grandparents did. And that’s not special.

It’s worth noting most of these parents are millennials. We were raised on participation trophies and told since kindergarten that we are special, and each of us are born to do something special with our lives. The late 80s to early aughts was a time of deepening individuality, and also atomization. As culture became more fractured and communities decayed, we drifted apart, and it stands to reason that the more apart you are, the more pressure you feel to be unique. And when you see former classmates who live a thousand miles away posting their highlights, it drives that urge even harder. What can you do that will stand out in the feed? What cute and quirky photo can you post as heart-worthy? The pressures reverse from homogenization in a close-knit community to heterogenization, to novelty and specialness. It runs all the way down from image to self-image to engrained behaviors, and even if you aren’t posting, you still get the message as a consumer: be special. Do more.

So how do people reconcile this Special Snowflake culture with something as completely ordinary yet massively life-re-orienting as having children?

Modern parents have tried many things. You could see yourself as the Boss Mom, somehow affording to put kids in full-time daycare and yet “making quality time” with them anyway. This way, you can have your cake and eat it, too. You don’t have to become just a mom. But most women realize this isn’t their path. They either don’t have the stamina or don’t have the will to be full-tilt on career and also embrace children.

If you stay home with your kids, though, now you’re in a pickle. You gave up the chance to do something special as a full-time member of the labor force, you gave up “using your degree” that you spent $80k on, so now you need to make your motherhood (or less commonely, fatherhood) really count.

How can you make it count? Accruing victimization points is an option—you changed two thousand diapers, you cleaned up vomit off the carpet again. Your kids don’t tell you thank you. You handle all this by yourself because hubby is away at a stressful job.

It can count in special achievement badges, like getting a kid into Harvard or on track to become an M.D., getting them into Varsity sports, gently encouraging the blossoming of a real artist, or being punctual, hyper-organized and polished despite the chaotic nature of family life.

It could be radical rules, like No Screens Ever or No Added Sugar. You could have a vegan family. You could live in a yert.

It could just count in having a lot of kids, as you become an expert in tending to a dozen minors on a shoestring budget.

It could be—and this is a rather common one—that you signal your high status by being the perfect DisneyPlus parent. You do all the things that celebrate children. They have all the loud toys, and the Happy Meals, and the trips to Disneyland, and the trampoline park birthday parties, and the prepackaged snacks. This is how you show your deep investment into your kids’ happiness. You are better than other parents because you can both afford it and tolerate it (perhaps even like it?)

But all these options are just suits to dress up something fundamentally ordinary. Let me again burst the bubble for you: raising kids isn’t special. Not even when you do it well. It never has been. Poor people do it, and rich people. You are one of billions of people on this planet who have ever thought of bringing a child into this world, and most of them have done it in much worse circumstances.

Embracing this fact is your ticket to freedom, your chance to step off the merry-go-round of child-centric consumerism and parenting content and keeping up with Mrs. Jones. You can just be the parent God designed you to be: loving, present, concerned for their future, and unquestionably still yourself, with your whole shining personality that hasn’t been smothered under a Disney-shaped pillow or lulled into submission by dino-shaped chicken nuggets and Kidz Bop (unless you love those things, in which case, more power to you). You can avoid the exhaustion of trying to achieve status by parenting overkill.

Your mother-child or father-child bond is already precious to the people that matter: your spouse and kids. You aren’t just any mom or dad, you’re this kid’s mom or dad, and they know you can’t be replaced by someone else. You are special to them. You don’t need to do any branding to earn their love, or to feel fulfilled.

So stop trying to make parenthood something it was never meant to be. One of the greatest things about raising kids is that a lot of people do it. Most people will become parents at some point. That gives you every reason to draw deeper into your community, your church, your city, and connect on this most basic level with other people who are doing the same very important but very unspecial thing. You think talking to strangers is hard as a childless person? It gets so much easier when you both have kids, because your roles aren’t special, and there is so much common ground in rearing children you could talk about it endlessly. You may have nothing else in common, and yet somehow this common behavior draws us all closer together.

Instead of thinking of how you can make your experience special or higher status, just focus on being present, and appreciating the beauty that comes with raising children. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s ordinary. But it is no less beautiful than a spring hike on a trail thousands have done before. It’s no less precious because someone else has already captured the view with better eyes, or a better camera. Notice when people smile at your little ones. Appreciate it when they offer wisdom. Accept the help and tools that are lent or freely given, take advantage of pooled resources. Ordinary people do all sorts of things for kids in their communities!

What we really need as parents is a network of support, anyway. We need more homogeneity, and tighter communities. We don’t need branding. When you cast around at church or the park for other parents with kids of similar age, what are you looking for—their IG handle? How nice their stroller is? Well, maybe you’re looking at their stroller, but only for indications that they might parent similarly to you be similarly situated in life, so that you might by God’s providence make some friends.

Admit it: deep down under all the angst to be better and different, you just don’t want to do this alone. The good news is, there’s probably at least a few sets of parents in your area who you jive with. You just have to talk to them. Dollars to diapers, they’re looking for friends, too. Kids and their particular challenges and joys are so common, they’re a solid bridge between you and other humans. Use the bridge.

Because parenting isn’t special. That is precisely what makes it remarkable.

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Surrender, and never surrender.

Something the pastor said on Easter Sunday got to me. He said when you believe, you have to surrender. You have to nail all your sins and suffering and grievances to the cross, and then you have to take up your own cross and follow Him.

Though I already walk with the Lord, the words still spoke to me in a narrower sense. I have struggled against surrender for too long. It’s only been this past week that I’ve really been undone—that I’ve really accepted that this is happening to me. My soul has been strangling itself through vain resistance, a Chinese finger trap of metaphysical proportions.

This essay is not an easy read, and it wasn’t easy to write. It’s here in case it helps someone.

Surrender

When I found out I was pregnant with an unexpected fourth child, I took it very poorly. I was done having kids, and the only reason we hadn’t taken any permanent measures to prevent pregnancy was the slim chance we might change our minds later.

And by we, I mean me. I’m the one who struggles through months of nausea and fatigue in pregnancy. I’m the one who had a years-long knot in her forehead from the stress of caring for babies and preschoolers (I’m not optimally wired for it).

Yet here I am, nineteen weeks pregnant. I’ve felt the baby kick since fifteen weeks. Even then, it was hard to accept.

In my mind, there’s a lot I’m giving up. If you’ve made it out of the toddler stage with all your kids, I don’t need to explain it to you: Sleeping in on the weekends, no diapers, actually being on time for things, more date nights, real vacations, less stress all around. We just removed the booster seat from one of the kitchen chairs because the five year old doesn’t need it anymore.

You probably think I sound very selfish, and that’s because I am. I liked my life. I am terribly selfish, so much so that my overwhelming dread at seeing a positive pregnancy test surprised even me. If it weren’t for my faith in Christ, I would be the perfect candidate for an unspeakable organization to help me convince myself to do the unspeakable thing. I am selfish, but not so proud to think that in any universe I’d be above it.

I must surrender all of it. My plans, my body, my comfort. There is no way to make it through this with my mental and spiritual health intact, without first letting go of the life I had before, and accepting the trial I am currently undergoing. I acknowledge that this is happening. I am pregnant. I am sick. I am having another baby.

I surrender the future I had sketched out. I surrender the control I thought I had over my own life. I surrender to the possibility that my child may not even be healthy (I really don’t know—my third almost died as a newborn) and that together my husband, our family, and our church will figure out how to deal with that. I surrender to the uncomfortable, miserable physicality of building an entirely new human inside me, as the woman with the worst pregnancy nausea and fatigue of any mother she’s ever personally known.

I surrender. I nail it all to the cross.

None of this is me fearing I won’t love my child. I’ve believed from the beginning that I will love my child. That love is dormant but real, like a tulip bulb waiting to emerge and burst into color. But this knowledge cannot paper over the struggle. It would sound nicer if I told you that it did, that it’s all that matters. You’d think better of me. I’d think better of myself. But underneath that verbal salve would still be all the dirty uncomfortable issues I have to work through, all the stuff I have to nail to that cross, every day.

Never Surrender

One of those issues is my struggle with embodiment during pregnancy. Not only am I ill, but my body changes rapidly from the very beginning. Not every mother experiences it this way, but I do. I look in the mirror and hardly recognize myself, and the foreignness builds and builds until my skin crawls with resentment.

And I have often wanted, over the past four months, to curl up under my blankets and fall into a coma, to not have to see or feel my body, inside or out. I want to sleep through the nausea. I want to give in to my fatigue, because trying to outlive it feels impossible.

The more I struggle against my reality, against the body I have, the body I am, the more I try to hide from the discomfort in the stillness and the dark, the worse I feel. In this dark still place, all the anxieties of impending new motherhood come in to smother me. Will I be good enough? Will I keep baby safe? Will I be tense all the time, exasperated, and ashamed of it? These thoughts ensare me in the quiet. At best they’re useless, at worst they’re deceptions.

I trap myself, and then wonder why I feel trapped. For this reason, I have to tell myself that I must never surrender.

I am surrendered to the experience, the things I cannot control, but I must never surrender my agency. I cannot consign myself to being a sedentary lump of flesh. I’d be failing not just my own wellness, but my family’s, too. So I move. I get off the couch when I don’t want to, I do chores when I don’t feel like it. I get out under the sun when the early spring wind isn’t too biting. I hoe compost into the garden when my back hurts. I tend to my seedlings, attuning myself to the changing seasons, reminding myself there is a time for everything, even this, and this too, like the winter, will pass.

To surrender to my baser impulses would be akin to believing that summer isn’t coming, and that I am inching, sliding, into the longest winter, into bleakness and numbness. And for what? If I push away feeling, I push away tenderness and hope. It’s easier for me to say this now that the nausea is abating, but I wish I’d believed it from the start.

Because when I stay in my body, when I am present through the discomfort, I can experience joy. I can smile genuinely at my kids. I can help my husband feel the baby kick. I can accept a sister’s hug with warmth. I can laugh. I can see past my own suffering and anxieties, and in so doing make it an ever smaller part of my life.

It has been a long, dark winter, I won’t lie. But how much of the bleakness and cold has been my own refusal to surrender what’s beyond my control, and simultaneously my willingness to let my suffering render me powerless? I will no longer cower in the darkness. I will seize the light.

Surrender, and never surrender.

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Find my sci-fi novels here. If you enjoy thoughtful, layered sci-fi/fantasy that’s still fast-paced, you’ll love them.

Naturally, they counted down the twenty some-odd days between when my husband purchased the movie tickets and the actual showing, which was this past Wednesday.

When I tell you that even my kids, aged 5, 6 and 9, were not very impressed, take it to heart. My kids love videogames, yes. But they love stories even more, a love I’ve tried to nurture by weeding out the “content” and “slop” and leaving the stories, in both film and books.

But “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” does not have a story.

I don’t mean that nothing happens in “Mario Galaxy.” Plenty happens. Indeed, its 96-minute runtime provided ample opportunity for the writers to fit not just IP from Mario Bros. Galaxy, but Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Odyssey (I know this because they informed me).

The plot is straightforward: Princess Rosalina is kidnapped by Bowser’s son, Junior, and Princess Peach is asked by Rosalina’s luma children (the adorable glowing stars, for the uninitiated) to save Rosalina. Peach doesn’t hesitate, because she is a source of pure goodness (and not much else). Mario and Luigi assist by holding down the Toad kingdom while Peach is gone, because Mario and Luigi need an “in” somehow into the plot. I mean, the movie is called The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, not The Super Princess Peach Galaxy Movie. They’re side characters…but you get it, right? I mean another set of white guys getting to be protagonists in an IP bearing their namesake? Misogynist much?

From this point, more things happen. The audience is introduced to Yoshi, who is cute but one-dimensional, adding basically nothing to a cast that runs about a power-up wide and a token deep. There’s a rather Jurassic-park looking T-rex on a world they crash land into, which feels really out of place. Very millennial meta humor. There’s also a svelte space fox that is obviously just there to introduce a new possible direction for the Mario Bros. film franchise.

Things happen, and yet there is no story. There’s no intention, no inner conflicts, no character arcs (save for Bowser’s, which is atrocious). The characters move through this film like…well, like video game avatars. Mario is no closer to getting Peach to fall in love with him, despite giving her a sweet umbrella. Luigi simply exists and doesn’t seem to have his own wants and desires. He is the most NPC of sidekicks. Peach is only motivated to save Rosalina out of virtue and selflessness, and only later conveniently finds out that Rosalina is her long lost elder sister. She wasn’t looking, she had no great longing in her heart for family, she just stumbles onto the truth, experiencing only transitory emotional distress when she has a flashback and can’t interpret the truth. It doesn’t alter her behavior at all.

And Bowser? Bowser is a hot mess. Bowser is an embarrassment. Seriously, how dare they hand this shitty character arc to Jack Black? He behaves only in ways that are convenient to the plot, first complacent and repentant for his world-destroying ways, which you’re led to think is a ruse. But then he behaves completely selfless, sacrificing his freedom so the Mario brothers can go free. But then, in what feels like a paltry handful of backslides to travel such a great distance in character…reverts back into his world-destroying ways as he fights alongside his son. Bowser makes no sense in this film, and I resent this bungle most of all.

At the end, Rosalina and Peach are reunited after so many years apart, and that is cute. That’s it. It’s just…alright. Like when your lukewarm “deluxe” fast food burger arrives in a premium cardboard box, and the tomatoes are underripe, and the patty is kind of dry but it’s not altogether unpalatable. That’s what this whole movie feels like.

Listen, I am four months pregnant. Hormones have primed me perfectly to be emotionally moved by a movie. I cried during a Superbowl ad this year. I wasn’t expecting “Up,” but I was expecting some kind of feeling out of this jaunt through the galaxy. A good kids movie should give you the feels. But the strongest feeling you’ll get is right at the beginning, when Rosalina is ripped away from the lumas after valiantly trying to fight off the villain and defend her star children. You don’t have to be a writer to know that’s not where a movie should peak emotionally.

Would I recommend you take the kids to see it? Not unless they already love the franchise. Will I let my kids watch it occasionally when it is out of the theaters? Probably, but I expect they’ll grow tired of it faster than they expect. With no story, you might as well just play the videogame.

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I breathe out. It’s all fine.

Then he stuck his out of the bathroom, tipped the pregnancy test so I could see: “Yeah…”

So, it was not fine. Nothing would be fine.

I collapsed on the floor, just like that other time. I burst into tears, just as I had then.

Only this was different. Last time, I’d told myself my newborn daughter, our third, would be fine, though she was already in the NICU on oxygen, cords trailing off her like the tinsel of an infant photography shoot. I had a brief respite of peace, where I really thought it’s all going to be okay. Then we got the news that a hormonal marker for her heart function was off the charts, and the Level 3 NICU team didn’t know what else they could do for her. She would have to be life-flighted to a Children’s Hospital.

I slid to the ground in the hallway outside the NICU, tears wetting my already stifling medical mask. I’d wished I could pray then, to at least ask why. But God was so inexplicably far away; there was no way my voice could carry that far.

This time was indeed different. Somehow worse, in that I was, conceivably, just being purely selfish. An even greater reason not to talk to God, right? Instead of fearing my child would leave this world too soon, I was afraid of bringing a new life into it.

“NO. I don’t want to have another sick baby,” I cried as my husband tried to pull me off the ground and hold me. “I don’t want to be sick again.” I choked those words out over and over, inconsolable. I really put him through it.

Our daughter had made a full recovery, true. But the three and a half weeks we spent in two different hospitals, the days and days she spent intubated, unable to even hear her cry, only able to hold her a couple times a day…it leaves a mark. Crumpled on the carpet beneath the twinkle of the Christmas tree, I wonder what’s next. What new suffering is waiting for me, waiting for my child?

Yes, the irony of falling into resentment and despair before a symbol of hope, joy and rebirth was lost on me at the time. Not now.

Four days before Christmas, I was only two days late. Some of my relatives found out that night, because I called my mom sobbing and they were in the room with her. I didn’t care; I just needed her, herself a mother of five and always there for me, to know that I was hurdling into hopelessness and depression.

My mother in law came over, too—another woman I look up to and lean on. I appreciate what these mothers didn’t tell me, which is: “You’re pregnant! Yay, what an extraordinary gift! Don’t be sad; go and celebrate!” No. They listened, they sympathized. They didn’t try to minimize my terror or tell me my feelings were invalid. My mother in law suggested I go drive somewhere empty and have a good scream, or draw a bath and cry it out as long as I needed.

Both of them knew my pregnancies were hard. They haven’t been complicated or risky, just physically and mentally punishing. Being on the spectrum of hyperemesis gravidarum (excessive nausea or vomiting in pregnancy) is like having the stomach flu for a 3-5 month stretch. Meds only take the edge off, and come with their own side effects. And this time, I have the added responsibility of three children to homeschool somehow in spite of it. The nausea is a major reason I didn’t want to have any more kids. HG is a daunting prospect, even when you want to have a baby.

I cried to God, too. God, why. God, please save me this time from the misery. God, how am I going to get through this? I knew that if I didn’t starting talking to him now, my own resentment would grow to block our communication.

But I had to feel what I was feeling. I had to be disappointed, and to recognize my fears and my struggles right off the bat. God knew, and both matriarchs certainly knew, that no waving of pom-poms or enthusiastic congratulations were going to override my emotions. Pregnancy doesn’t always feel like a gift—even when you’re happily married, even when you’re financially stable. For me, those nine months come with anxiety as much as expectation, moments of joy, and long days of misery.

My husband is a rock in these times, quietly pulling the extra weight I’m too sick to pull, looking after me in moments I sometimes don’t even expect. How I would do it with a less supportive spouse is beyond me.

At thirteen weeks, I don’t know what to expect with this baby. His heartbeat seems normal and he has four limbs, plus a small cyst on his umbilical cord the doctor thinks isn’t something to worry about right now. I think it’s a boy, but I don’t love him yet the way I love my born kids. I can say that without guilt; it was like that for all my babies at this stage. I don’t feel very attached—what energy do I have to try to form that attachment? Most days I’m barely making it through. I know that when he is born, when his skin touches mine, when I hear that cry, an unbreakable love effortlessly emerges.

A few times a day, I find myself trying to mentally prepare myself for the prospect of having a disabled child. I wonder if other mothers do this, too? I don’t want to place expectations on this baby. He’s already unexpected. It seems unfair to try to build him up into some kind of person that maybe God has no plan of matching. I want to let him be whoever he is without judgment or disappointment, but I’m fooling myself if I think a diagnosis isn’t going to knock me flat, anyway. You can’t mentally prepare for every eventuality. That’s what trusting God is for, and I know that now better than I did when my daughter was in critical care.

This new child is my “oops baby,” and I have no problem describing him that way. He will be unfathomably loved like all my other kids. I felt what I felt; I still feel what I’m feeling: mostly tired, weak, and mildly depressed. My children are excited, and I mooch off their enthusiasm for lack of my own. Today, my six year old son observed that I’m “starting to look pregnant.” I’m happy for them to have a sibling, just not quite happy for myself yet.

It’s a good thing I have six more months.

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People all over my feed have safely confessed they do not appreciate it when mothers say their job is “the hardest in the world.” Hard eye roll. Big cringe. Is it even that difficult at all? Why are you moms high-key projecting? Why are you online so much—don’t you have to get back to your super hard job?

And you know what? I’ll readily admit: parenting isn’t the hardest job in the world, even stay-at-home mothering. Not even close. I should think being a Navy Seal is a harder job, and fixing power lines, and working a deep sea oil rig, and being a hospice nurse are all harder jobs than feeding my kids sandwiches before bumming around in my sweatpants for a bit.

BUT. I have to say this for, apparently, the people who are glossing motherhood for their pronatalist agenda as well as the “childfree” types trying to tear down the value of parenting so they can feel better about whatever they’re doing with their lives.

While the childless people are complaining about sloppy mumsnet hyperbole, parents are doing life with kids, which is much harder than life without kids. It’s harder than being childless and working on a PhD. It’s harder than putting in your eight hour white collar shift and clocking out to few remaining responsibilities. It’s harder than having to answer a few inconvenient emails after hours. My husband and I sometimes joke that smart childless people could be millionaires, if only they had the improved efficiency and work ethic that comes from working around their own kids’ needs. They could be insanely productive, our paradox predicts. It’s only a joke, but it holds a grain of truth.

When parents say parenting is hard, we mean it not in the sense that you need special expertise or a high IQ to do it, but in the general sense that life is hard. In the sense that waking up at 3am for a early morning shift is hard, and caring for an elderly parent is hard, and unscrambling a billing snafu is hard, and cooking dinner when you’re really exhausted is hard. When you have kids, you add both complexity and responsibility, and those increase the difficulty of your life. You also add tremendous joy and fulfillment in a way that many other hard things can’t compare, but it doesn’t mean the hard parts aren’t hard.

For instance, I may be bumming out a Substack essay in my sweatpants, but I left out that I have been nauseous and fatigued for seven weeks straight because I’m pregnant. That’s a trial of being a mother. That’s hard. Just like changing a dirty diaper when you desperately want to sleep is hard. And teaching your kid to read when they just don’t get it is hard. Or being hypervigilant lest your two year old wander in the road during her sister’s baseball game is hard, and hearing a preschooler whine for the entirety of her timeout is hard, and having to discipline your kids for talking back is hard, and not comparing yourself to other parents is hard.

Becoming a parent is the easy part. You procreate, the baby grows (during which you may or may not have a deeply unpleasant time, YMMV), you birth the baby with some screaming and bodily fluids.

Then comes the hard part: being a good parent for the rest of your children’s life, even after the really labor-intensive, really “inconvenient” first three or four years. It’s the effort, not the blood relation, that makes parenting hard, obviously. To be sure, some parents put in too much effort, expecting to get an increasing return on the satisfaction and joy of parenting. More activities, more tutoring, more doting, better meal prep. It might make you think that “baseline” parenting is just “easy mode” (how much do you really remember about your preschool years— who’s to say?) but you’d be wrong. A lot effort and discomfort goes into ensuring your kid not only survives, but becomes a functional adult.

And here’s the kicker: you can’t quit. You can’t return a child. You can’t fail—and when they fail, trust me, it feels like you failed. Anything that requires this level of commitment, this profound level of physical and emotional connectedness, is going to be hard.

So yes, while you might see a few too many mothers pouring thousands of words and dozens of pictures into social media every day as if they have nothing better to do than panhandle for sympathy, parenting is hard. In my experience, it has breaks, it has easier stretches, especially once children become more independent. When your kid can pour her own milk, you can sleep in an extra fifteen minutes. It isn’t the hardest job in the world, but it’s still hard.

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