Ma and Pa
I’m not sure why someone bothered to write this column:
This Sunday, neighbors, husbands, and especially children should lift a glass to the mothers who have managed to get and stay married to the fathers of their children. For, despite the fact that single motherhood never seems to go out of style with the media, motherhood typically works best — for our nation’s neighborhoods, children, and even most moms — with a wedding ring.
Also, tacos works best with beer, if you’ve got any. Some things just aren’t really controversial.
The writer goes on to cite a whole bunch of stuff that’s widely recognized by pretty much everyone (e.g., “two parents bring more social and economic resources to the parenting enterprise than does one parent”), with the stage-whispered implication that liberals think marriage is unnecessary because, like, um, the editors of the New York Times Magazine thought their readers might be interested in reading an article about rich white women who choose to silence their biological clocks with sperm donors instead of husbands, while leaving possible moral judgments, if any, to the readers’ discretion, instead of spoiling my wife’s brunch conversation and supplying those for her.
So what course of action does the writer recommend: Outlaw divorce? Mandate abortion for unmarried women? He never says, but he points out in the spirit of full disclosure that his own mom did a “wonderful job” raising his sister and him on her own, thankyouverymuch. Beyond that, the logic of his arguments adds up to present a flawed, if compelling, case for polygamy (spouse = good; ∴ more spouses = more good).
Above: W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute.
I wonder if Dr. Sociologistguy will next reveal the shocking statistics regarding the ease with which children from rich white families are more likely to attend private schools, get better jobs, and have their companies sustained by dad’s Arab oil buddies at a higher rate than those from poor hispanic families. Let’s all raise a glass to Dr. Obvious!
Tellingly, Wilcox puts the onus of getting and staying married on women.
Look, I don’t care who he is, I don’t want him putting his — oh, wait. You said onus. Carry on.
So, who wants to get group married?
So, who wants to get group married?
Will the Reverend Moon be there?
Absolutely not. No crusty handkerchiefs for us.
But a drunken orgy would be okay.
No one is surprised to learn that divorced and never-married fathers typically have poor relationships with their fathers.
So it’s a genetic thing?
This is why mothers, who usually make great efforts to have good relationships with their children, should also make every effort to get and stay married.
Whereas fathers, as everyone knows, make no effort at all to even remember the names of their spawn?
Typically, two parents bring more social and economic resources to the parenting enterprise than does one parent. Two parents offer one another mutual support, encouragement, and relief when a child is difficult, disobedient, or depressed.
Which are two of the reasons why a society featuring extended families and a more cohesive social structure is far better for children than the nuclear capitalist model. Either that, or a society with plentiful childcare available to all.
For instance, a husband can step in and relieve a wife who has grown angry or exhausted with her children.
Translation: dad can shout at the kids when they interrupt his TV viewing while mum’s cooking dinner.
Marriage also binds children to their fathers, who usually find it very difficult to maintain consistent and positive relationships with their children without the support and encouragement of their children’s mother.
Because again, as we all know, men are so socially retarded that they can’t even talk to another human without ‘support and encouragement’ from their own legally wed walking womb.
Lordy sweet Jesus, does he think when he writes? Or is he typing with one hand?
Mind you, one of the things that this article said to me (“Hallelujah, Lord, I hear you!”) was that abortion and contraception should be ubiquitous. After all, we don’t want those icky single women being forced to breed, do we?
I note that he ignored the common law marriage, as well as the same sex marriage. Intriguing, given that both have exactly the same advantages as the ‘golden ring’ yoke he so admires.
Oh, unless he thinks it’s vital that children get to see their father in the shower.
Eeewwww, Jillian, that’s even more scary than a lot of very scary things all rolled together and covered in toe jam. Moon is a complete loony, there’s no denying, but how is it that he’s got such pull in Wah-shing-ton?
Oh, right. Money. How could I forget.
I thought all these goofballs were setting sail for France, now that it’s once again safely in “conservative” hands. Time to board the S.S. Wingnut, where they’re serving kool-aid on the Lido deck. They’ll be back in a few years, when the toxic cloud of their “moral clarity” has started to disperse from the red states, to fight the good fight on behalf of their beloved CSA. Oops, USA.
“…single motherhood never seems to go out of style with the media…”
There aren’t enough words in the English language to detail the intellectual dishonesty in this phrase.
Oh, who am I kidding. Yes there are.
I must say, this is a pretty good argument for gay marriage…
This Sunday, husbands should lift a glass to their wives. And another. And another.
Read his whole piece, and I must say, I’m down with the glass-lifting part.
For instance, a husband can step in and relieve a wife who has grown angry or exhausted with her children.
Translation: dad can shout at the kids when they interrupt his TV viewing while mum’s cooking dinner.
Shorter translation: “You hit ’em now, Earl, my arm’s tired.”
So, who wants to get group married?
No, thanks. I was married for about 15 minutes in 1990, and I didn’t really take to it.
Can I come to the orgy anyway?
To every fucking douchebag who says mothers and fathers should stay together for “the good of the children:”
My father came home from world war II with a raging case of PTSD. He was one of those MP’s going from town to town in western Europe after the D-Day invasion and during and after the battle of the bulge, taking prisoners, rounding up sympathizers. He was on a few firing squads. He was up to his hips in blood and gore and guts. Before that he was stationed in California and rounded up Japanese people in put them into camps.
He never did anything about his psychological problems, and my mother never forced the issue. She stood by, like June Cleaver, saying what a smart man he was, as he beat the shit out of me psychologically and physically with a frequency of about every other day from when I was 1 or 2 until I was in my teens. I had very few friends, I was painfully shy, and was full of anger and rage with my own PTSD. I had nobody, I had nothing.
One day when I was 10 or 11 my mother brought home a little dachsund puppy from a vet she sold a house to. I wanted more than anything to love that dog. My father screamed at us, “either the dog goes or I do.” My mother took that dog away after letting me love him overnight. One of the most cruel things those asswipes ever could have done, with me crying and begging to keep that dog.
It is truly a miracle that I did not wind up dead or in prison as a result of what I experienced with them staying together. I am so grateful and thankful for the therapists and mentors I have had over the years that have helped me get back to at least a semi-functioning level.
I only wish those members of the cult of the willfully obtuse who lecture the rest of us on how to live could experience just a taste of what I did, just a week. Then again, maybe that is why they are the way they are. Maybe they deserve our compassion.
But please, just shut the fuck up.
Sorry, I can’t try to be funny about this shit. Whatever you do, don’t stay together for the sake of the children. Moms, if he’s dangerous, get out now.
This is such deranged hogwash… I don’t even know where to begin.
Women should not stay in bad marriages. Infidelity, domestic abuse, substance abuse, and rank insanity are good reasons for anyone to get up and walk the hell away.
And it’s infintely better to remove children from those situations than to continue exposure.
Can we drop this maggot’s log back on him, now?
My parents got divorced when I was 15, but that doesn’t mean I was raised by a single mother. My father still stuck around and raised me. My parents have had model divorce. Sure, I was upset when they got divorced, but if that’s was the worse thing that happened to me in my life, I’ll have quite a charmed life.
I love how the kids are”hers”and dad is a fashion accessory for the yearly holiday card photo.
Ya know,I’ve about had it with idiot winguts who get an “idea”,imagine a certain stereotypical troublesome scenerio,come up with one(usually shitty)solution and that all there is,all she wrote,there ain’t no more. What that really says I think is that these great thinkers actually only know maybe one or two people just like them(enough to call them friends) and that they go to their thinky type jobs,home,and perhaps to the occasional cocktail party where other people with thinky type jobs pat them on the back for being such a genius. No wonder their ideas and writing sucks ass. Plus,I think I own blue jeans older than this little twit,seriously.
If I hadn’t already pretty much raised one kid,and wasn’t about half done raising another, I’d almost invite one of these buffoons to come visit me for a week or two. One,I could show them how actual pretty normal people live and solve problems,and two,they’d be so tired from doing actual physical labor(it’s growing season people! I grow my own…food) they wouldn’t have time to share every “profound thought”that popped into their little wingnut brains.
Staying married is best. Except when it isn’t. OK, National Review, send me mah moneh.
Also, tacos works best with beer, if you’ve got any
Hmm, that’s a pretty controversial position, m’man. I mean, sure, tacos and beer work damn good together. Whether beef, pork or fish tacos, which is the beginning of the problem. ‘Cause there’s also ham sammiches and beer, that might be even better than tacos. Chili and beer. Damn, that’s even better. Cocaine and beer is pretty good, too.
When you get down to it, I can’t come up with THE superlative compliment to beer. And while tacos are on the short list, I’m not sure they top it…
mikey
As the well off white male child of a stable, balanced, healthy marriage, I’d just like to say how tasteless it is for people to choose to be born to non well off white nuclear style families. I mean, really, if you can’t make the right decision what do expect out of the rest of your life?
Sad thing is, I’ve known people who more or less think that, not that they have the intelligence or honesty to recognize n admit it.
(Tho I have to speculate about the balance n health of their parents’ marriages, considering how they treated young wimmin.)
For instance, a husband can step in and relieve a wife who has grown angry or exhausted with her children.
Yeah, cause god forbid that the husband interact with her children unless his wife is having a nervous breakdown or something.
mikey-
cmon man. Pizza.
Pizza is the the number one thing to go with beer. All the other stuff is good, sure, verging on great, but line em all up and 9 times out of ten, a person will pick pizza.
I may have to suffer the howls of outrage for this radical position, but I stand by it.
Hysterica Woman- What made you hysterical then?
What’s with the raising of the glass, anyway? He describes all the ways in which a married couple are better off (nevermind the assumptions that go along with that) and then insists that the fortunate are to be congratulated on their fortune? Jebus, how about some glass-raising for those mothers who do it without all that extra support?
I mean, their status of being permanently in style with the media notwithstanding…
And it’s not like all of those single mothers went into it expecting to be single mothers. Weren’t pretty much all of them married mothers at one point? But of course, the burden was on them to maintain that marraige at all costs and they should be ashamed of themselves that it didn’t work out.
Congratulations for not being a victim of circumstance- isn’t that a bass-ackwards way of blaming victims of circumstance?
Ugh.
The perfect accompaniment to a beer is…
Another beer.
Cheers, I don’t mind if I do.
So, this Mother’s Day, lift a glass to dear old Mom, and lift it especially high if she honored the vows she made on her wedding day.
And if she didn’t, well, you should throw your drink right in her face. And then denounce her as a Whore of Babylon.
motherhood typically works best — for our nation’s neighborhoods, children, and even most moms — with a wedding ring.
Wedding ring? HA! Only a noob would be caught wearing that! Everyone knows you want the Wedding Ring +1 because it gives +5 to motherhood skill as well as an extra 3 agility.
On a more serious note, what are the odds that next month professor demeritous Wilcox will write an article praising fathers who make the effort to stick with their children? Maybe just a quick shout out to dads who pay their child support at least half the time would be more reasonable? Perhaps just a thank you to fathers who don’t savagely beat their spouse and children more than once a week? Nah, the idea that fathers are somehow responsible for a little of the work of raising children probably wouldn’t go over well at NRO.
mikeinseattle,
I really appreciate your story. Mine’s very similar, frighteningly so, and I’ve been trying for the past half-hour to figure out a way to tell it. I can’t do it. I admire your courage, sir, and if you ever find yourself in Georgia, give me a holler and we’ll get stoned.
After we all graduated, a shockingly large number of my classmates saw their parents split up. These were all pillars of the community, too.
A large number of those young people, who’s parents stayed in a loveless, unhappy marriage “for the sake of the children”, are working on their second marriage. Some, their third.
I’m 32 and have no desire whatsoever to get married. Ever, and I’ve studied hard on it, too, believe you me. My old man eventually straightened his shit out, and my folks are still married. Figure that out. I tell you what, though: my concept of what made a “good man” wasn’t because my parents stayed married when in a sane world they wouldn’t have stayed together six weeks (an alcoholic and a hardcore tee-totaller, for fuck’s sake). The old man did show me that any man can better himself if he puts his mind to it, though, I’ll give him that.
Hey, if this dipshit gets tenure, I want mine, too.
That can’t be right, Lesley. I’m sure Mother’s Day was either invented by Ronald Reagan or Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Wingnuts told me.
Since wingnuts believe it, it must be sooooooooo … ’cause they believe it real hard.
(And the only reason we don’t like Reagan or Forrest is because of the Liberal Heterodoxy.)
(Long live the Liberal Heterodoxy!)
(The Liberal Heterodoxy lives in Massachusetts and wears a big, funny hat. And gripes all the time because none of us ever visit or call.)
Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
oops, left out last line
“The great and general interests of peace.”
That gal would have kicked Bush ass.
Matt T.,
Thanks very much for your comment.
Regarding parents who split up after their kids leave the house, that raises a red flag for me right away that one or more of those kids was probably the black sheep and had to suffer the shit from one or both parents. The depth of the parent’s damage will often tell how deep the shitstorm will be for the kid.
Parents who go through empty nest syndrome can project the unconscious material they had been giving to one or more of the kids to each other and they discover each other’s true colors in a way they probably hadn’t seen since the kids were born. The value of therapy or having a mentor is that that the mentor can put a mirror in front of a person’s face and life that had to be buried can finally be experienced.
I’m in my 50’s and have doubts about ever getting married or having a partner, but who knows? I know a couple, he’s a screenwriter, now retired, who wrote movies we probably have all seen, got married when he was 60. And she was 32. And they’ve been married for 24 years and she keeps him young. So, there might be a honey out there for us, somebody who has the depth to see us for who we really are.
Best of luck to you, and I’ll take you up on your offer.
If this fuckin’ tool really wants to write ignorant shit about single mothers, he should have to first present his work in lecture form to a room full of people who were raised by them.
If he makes it out alive he gets to publish it.
Julia Ward Howe truly hated America by opposing slavery. Didn’t she realize it would be too hard economically and socially to get rid of it? Didn’t she realize freed slaves can’t take care of themselves and they freeze in the winter?
Liberals. Hmf.
I was trying to think of something to say, but I had to wait for my brain to stop spinning in circles. Thank you solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for what my now grown children tell me, the single mother who raised them, all the time.
And also kudos to The Dude Abides for saying what I cannot believe anyone beyond the fourth grade could fail to understand. Can I go get my honorary doctorate from University of Virginia now?
I still want to know Doc Wilcox’s well reasoned positions on baseball, hot dogs, apple pie & Chevrolet before I hire him here at NRO.
K-Lo
P. S. I personally favor hot dogs and apple pie.
If W. Bradford Wilcox is married with kids then I think his article can be shortened to:
Please, please, please don’t leave me baby but if you do you’re a slut and no way I’ll have anything to do with the kids without you there to “encourage” me to love them.
I don’t know what % of men are really so fucked up that they can’t form a bond with their children without their wives’ help but if they can’t bond with their kids they probably can’t form much of a bond with grown up women either. Yet women who can’t hold on to these prizes suck ass?
I’m a divorced dad with primary custody and I get a lot of stupid ass comments and questions about the arrangement my ex and I have from people who think like just like this sad sack. The nice surprise is there are women who find it hot that I’m such an involved dad. But then they figure out how little time I have for a love life and that’s that. Sigh, count me in for the drunken orgy.
After my father died, my mother told me she stayed with him for the sake of us kids. Well, thanks, Mom, but your 45 year fight is the reason I never married. Did raise a great kid as a single mom, though. And, amazingly, he’s happily married.
My biological father left 6 weeks before I was born (and my older sister was 2) . My mom married a male friend cause she “felt like she owed him one” for helping her out in a tough situation. Obviously, that wasn’t going to last. She had one son with him and they ended up getting divorced. They were married from 1972-1979. She had anger problems, probably from feeling trapped (she’s much better now). I stayed in contact with my ex-stepfather, but my biological dad didn’t really make any effort to have a relationship with me or my sister.
It turns out that he had some serious problems of his own – mostly involving booze and cocaine. So, he wouldn’t have been a good father anyway. BTW him and my mom got married because she was pregnant with my sister.
My common-law wife (together 7 years, thankyouverymuch, we have two wonderful boys) had a bad mom, who kept the identity of her biological father a secret. Turns out that dude is a frickin’ long-term crankhead who terrorized his other kids (like holding a gun to their heads while spun out of his mind) .
The moral of this story – if you have an absent father, chances are that’s the best possible thing he could have done for you. Don’t lose any sleep over the relationship you never had, it was gonna suck.
mikeinseattle, that story broke my heart. I hope you find happiness somehow.
It’s people like W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, that made my childhood into years of hell by creating the social pressure for unhappily married couples to remain married even though divorce would have been a blessing for the entire family.
If glasses are going to be raised, I say we raise them to all of us survivors. All the people who said, “it’s hard to leave, but I have to do what’s best for myself and my kids,” or, “it’s hard to make a marriage work, but I’m going to do my part,” or, “it’s hard to go on living with this pain, but I’m going to keep on struggling in the hope that someday things will be better.”
Lots of survivors here, me included, and we all deserve respect, not judgments from assholes who’ve never had to make the hard choices we have.
That said, does anybody know if you’re supposed to bring a hostess gift to an orgy?
Let us therefore raise a glass:
To W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and the Witherspoon Institute–may his spoon wither.
My goodness. I guess I’m not terribly shy about sniveling about how fucked up my life has been. But, DAMN. Y’all have my deepest love and respect.
We may have embraced the darkness, but knowing it’s face gives us an edge…
mikey
The absence of my father – his abandonment of us early on – left deep scars, and for years I blamed my mom, who was a mess, no doubt about that. We all left home young because of her alcoholism and the violence. Like a lot of kids I thought Dad left because she was impossible to live with and that we were flawed. When he didn’t call on my birthday or see us at Christmas, I I chocked it up to some manipulation of hers.
For years she told me I’d been his favourite. Funny how rude the awakenings can be. The old bastard knew when his kids were on their own at the age of 15 and he did nothing to help any of us. We each were forced to live on welfare and the charity of friends. .The whole time he knew and did sweet fuck all.
Well, mom died of cancer a few years ago and we healed a lot between us and I realized that as sick as she was all those years and as impossible she was, she never really abandoned us. She didn’t want us to leave. She was sick and he was sober with a good job, a new wife, two stepkids, money, and a stone cold heart.
Now he’s 85 and wants his daughters and his son in his life. He says he’s sorry but he’s got these these rules that we can’t ask questions about the past or make him feel bad about what happened. In the few phone calls we’ve had he’s asked no questions about me, just talks about himself. One day I decided to let him have it. I told him I needed to talk about the past and that if he wouldn’t, it was over. He told me I should get over my anger and do something useful with my life. He told me this knowing absolutely nothing about me, two months after my mother had died and I’d nursed her singlehandedly through her cancer.
Now that’s what I call a dead beat.
especially children should lift a glass
Are you telling me that this assistant professor of sociology is calling upon us to encourage alcoholism in children? Dearie dear. If my daughter wants to lift a glass, she’ll have to buy her own freckin beer.
i wonder if w. bradford wilcox’s mom will be hurt by the fact that he is only raising a glass to her tomorrow, but not raising it extra high. since, you know, she might have done a wonderful job raising him and his sister all by herself, but since she failed to stay married to his dad.
I guess he won’t be raising his glass extra-high for my sister either, whose ex-husband married her, got her pregnant, and then divorced her when the baby was about 6 months old. He apparently hadn’t thought through the whole “being a father” thing very well, and thought it would be a breeze or something. I am told that his actions are somewhat common now among young men.
Another reason divorce is necessary, and one which the Brad Wilcoxes of the world are just too provincial, stupid, naive, or smug to understand, is to (as we used to say) “burn the karma” of your parents’ marriage.
My parents each came from families with zero understanding of themselves, their parents, who married whom and why, etc. It was a family tree consisting of branch after branch of obliviousness and ignorance. None of which is anyone’s fault, but all of which became the legacy of my sister and me.
When I finally woke up (and, via therapy, came to understand that everything I had assumed about myself was wrong), I left a marriage when my kids were 13 and 8. It took me year to give myself permission to do it, and was and remains the most frightening and difficult thing I’ve ever done. And, of course, the most necessary and positive.
I stayed in the town where we lived and have a good relationship with them (one is 21, the other 18).
Let’s see if Brad Wilcox (if that really IS his name–I mean, come on) is still married to the same woman (assuming he’s married to one now) in ten years.
…single motherhood never seems to go out of style with the media…
Guh. What a dickweed.
I guess there are a lot of stories on the TV about single mothers, but maybe that’s because they’re interesting characters, whether a) they do a good job and raise a family well despite their troubles or b) they do a terrible job and the wole situation is a trainwreck. It depends on what kind of story you’re trying to tell – heartwarming, cautionary, etc.
I get really annoyed with guys like Prof. Virgin Witherspoon here who cluck at the media for “endorsing” things when they’re really just mentioning them.
and atheist – it is common for young men to bail out on fatherhood when they find out what’s really involved. I suspect that’s been the case for a long time, like, since forever, though it may manifest itself in other ways like the resentful abusive dad who has been shamed into staying in the marriage “for the children”, or the fundie whackjob who screeches that the woman’s place is in the home. I think that Parenting Ed is as important as Sex Ed for preventing unwanted pregnancies. Lots of people don’t think it through before they become parents – some rise to the occasion, but enough don’t that it’s a real problem.
Mr. Wonderful,
Just curious…
How could your kids be 13 and 8 when you divorced, and 21 and 18 now?
This Sunday, neighbors, husbands, and especially children should lift a glass to the mothers who have managed to get and stay married to the fathers of their children.
Yes, let’s all toast Hillary Clinton!
freddy–
You’ve got me there. My son was 13 and my daughter was 9. Now, he’s 21 and she’ll be 18 in June. So she’s still 17, and it all works out.
Sorry for the confusion.
Speaking of ma and pa, I just thought I’d stop by to drop off my latest Mothers Day ditty. I don’t come by here much, as I’m a recovering troll, but every once in awhile I like to pay my old friends, and enemies (enemies Jesus teaches me to love) a visit:
Here’s a brand new Mother’s Day song for you from yours truly:
Happy Mothers
Dr BLT’s One Man “Banned”
words and music by Dr BLT (c) 2007
http://www.drblt.net/music/HappyMother.mp3
HAPPY MOTHERS DAY!
As if the New York Times were anything but a neocon rag anyway ….
I’m sorry, I forgot, this is a hip crowd. Here’s the post-Mother’s Day post-punk remix:
Happy Mothers
Dr BLT’s One Man Banned
words and music by Dr BLT (c) 2007
http://www.drblt.net/music/HappyMothersP.mp3