Summertime Blues And Fertility Treatments
The one thing I’ve ever truly excelled at in my life is raising children
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss summertime blues with the girls and AOC’s fertility treatments.
Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with your friends and family! And if you’re one of those friends or family members, you can sign up to get your own copy every week right here.
Summer is about to be over for our family as the girls head back to school in a week. I was talking to a friend about how hard August is every year, but I couldn’t really put my finger on explaining why.
I spent the whole night going over it in my head. On the surface, it’s because summer is over. You have this weird in-between stage, especially in the South, where it’s still blazing hot as if summer is still in full swing, but you are forced into “fall” mode because the kids are preparing their backpacks and trying to get back into the school routine.
But for me it’s a little different.
I woke up this week realizing that I only have three more summers with all the girls under one roof. Sure, I’ll have some semblance of family summers after my oldest heads off to college. Hopefully she’ll return in May when classes end, but it won’t really be the same. Everything is going to change in two years. And I’m not quite ready for that.
I don’t know if you can ever prepare for the moment you realize that time is slipping away from you. Every day you go through the motions of motherhood, until one day you wake up and realize that it’s all going to change. What do you do with this information?
Last week I talked about male loneliness and how our society has treated them so terribly for decades. We’ve elevated women without doing anything to keep men feeling important. The same can be said for women who married and had children young, as I did. We were left behind in the conversation in a similar way. Of course, our families (our children and husband) made us feel like our lives were important, but society looked at us like we were failures or freaks for wanting this life. We were relegated to the bench, only to be called on once a year on Mother’s Day.
Before I started writing, when my life was consumed by diapers, kindergarten drop-offs, and preparing costumes for school plays, I could feel the condescending attitudes from my peers. The work I was doing was considered a copout. It was something women did when they didn’t have anything “better” to aspire to. Fast-forward a decade, and these same women are calling me or posting online about their fertility struggles.
I had to sit back and really think about this when I saw the video of AOC shooting herself up with chemicals to prepare her body to freeze her eggs. Apparently she is no longer with her longtime boyfriend/fiance. She clearly wants children, but there is no male prospect in her life. The reality of being 36, unmarried, and without children has hit her. It’s looking more and more every day like Democrats want her to run for president in 2028.
Something society won’t say out loud, but silently still acknowledges (hence the influencer-style video of her freezing her eggs), is that this ambition is only going to make having children harder for her.
We are practically the same age. I still have ambitions. There are things I want to accomplish in my professional life, but none of it came at the expense of having a family because I put that first. This is a conversation we should lovingly have with women, but instead we tell them to be career-focused when they are young and worry about family formation later. In reality, only one of those options has a biological expiration date.
It’s easy to tell women to get married young as if that is a simple thing to do. There were so many things that went into me and all of my sisters finding husbands in our early twenties that if even one thing went wrong it would have been impossible. My only sister who didn’t get married young ended up finding her husband in her thirties. They are married with a son on the way. But if she had married any of the men she dated in her twenties I know her life would not be as happy and filled with love and joy as it is now.
She had to wait. And maybe that’s where AOC found herself. She dated the same man for over a decade. Her biological clock said, if you don’t have children now, it’s going to be over for you. Staring down that reality meant either giving up her professional ambitions or settling with someone she knew wouldn’t make her happy.
Something I want my girls to know more than anything about motherhood is that you can actually have it all, just not at the same time.
There are seasons to your life. God designed our bodies to perfectly tell us what season we are in so that we can prepare ourselves accordingly. Ignore it at your own peril. One day you may find yourself on a livestream shooting yourself up with chemical hormones in order to extend that season.
I want my girls to know that there is nothing about their professional life that will ever validate or fulfill them in the same way that motherhood can. Your limits are tested. Your ability to multitask, handle sleep deprivation, and think critically expands in ways you never thought possible.
I was with my sisters the other night, having a couple of glasses of wine. We were gabbing about our lives and families when I said to them: “I think the one thing I’ve ever truly excelled at in my life is raising children.”
Of course, they objected, saying, ‘No, you are great at this and this and this too.’ But I had to stop them and clarify that I know I have other talents. I know there are things that I am good at, but when I look back at my life, the greatest accomplishment, the thing I am most proud of doing, is raising my girls. I put my heart and soul into teaching them how to be honorable women. They are good kids who will grow up to be great women. No amount of accolades or praise from my job could give me the same satisfaction as knowing that.
I wish more women were made to understand this reality when they are young enough to make this same choice. The professional world can be intoxicating, especially for modern women. And when they look at how their peers who settled down with a family and children young are made to feel about their lives, it’s no wonder they choose a career path over the alternative.
Maybe this is why I am feeling a bit sadder this August as the summer comes to an end. I don’t want this phase of my life to be over. I want to continue waking up every morning knowing that they are here with me. But I should be thankful that I even had these moments because not everyone gets to live a fulfilling life.
Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to goodlife@dailycaller.com
Heard It Through The Grapevine:
John Loftus reminds us how, despite everything being different, it all stays the same as America embarks on yet another battle with the establishment that is reshaping American politics in the same way we’ve seen before. Everyone’s Anti-Establishment Now
Speaking of AOC, Amber Duke explains the difference between Woke 1 and Woke 2. The left is trying to abandon their flagship ideology that failed to connect with voters. But in the process, isn’t the newest version the same as the last just with different packaging? Unfit to Print: WHAT THE HELL IS WOKE 2?
Like what you’re reading? If so, please consider subscribing to State of the Day or sharing this with a friend. You’d be supporting this newsletter and helping keep independent journalism alive.
If you are already a paid subscriber, make sure to join the conversation in our subscribers-only chat below.
