Many Americans are horrified by the news of the killing of the Clancy children in Massachusetts — as well they should be. But what’s worse is how tragedies like it are becoming all too common in America.
Mothers from California to Missouri to New Jersey are killing their own young children. The latest tragedy happened in a West Houston townhome. Texas police say Cibelle Kubala recently shot and killed her four-year-old daughter, Vivian, hours after losing primary custody.
Several of these cases involved psychosis or insanity. Mental illness is real. Women who lose contact with reality need immediate medical intervention and care. But what happens when psychology begins to replace justice?
If our society begins treating motherhood itself as an explanation for mental illness severe enough to lead to murder, we risk creating a dangerous inference: Motherhood naturally makes women mentally ill.
At the same time, women are too often warned about motherhood as if it were a dangerous relic of a time when women had little rights and no options.
It’s said being a mother will ruin your body. It will derail your career. It will make you anxious, exhausted, isolated, hormonal, and somehow less mentally stable.
Repeated often enough, these warnings teach young women to approach motherhood with fear, and to ask first what a child will take before even considering what a child might give.
This is a strange way for a civilization to speak about the very act that ensures its survival.
Motherhood is difficult, and romanticizing it does women no favors. Pregnancy changes your body. Babies interrupt your sleep. Children demand your time when you would rather spend it elsewhere. They expose your weaknesses and force you to confront parts of yourself you might otherwise avoid. Yes, motherhood requires sacrifice. Everything meaningful does.
But empathy must never replace justice. When a mother kills her child, the tragedy is not that motherhood might have become too difficult. The tragedy is this: A child is dead. All children desperately need to hear from their mothers: You are not an obstacle to my life. You are one of the main reasons my life has meaning.
The most meaningful things in life are difficult precisely because they require us to become more than we were. Motherhood does that with startling efficiency.
Before children, it is easy to organize life around yourself. Your schedule. Your ambitions. Your comfort. Your feelings.
Then another human life comes from you.
Suddenly, your feelings are no longer the most important things in the room. You discover you can wake when you are exhausted, remain calm when you are frightened, and give when you have nothing left. You learn you are capable of serving someone other than yourself.
That discovery isn’t oppression. It is liberation from the prison of perpetual self-absorption.
Our culture constantly instructs women to look inward: Find your truth. Prioritize yourself. Curate your surroundings until nothing interferes with your preferred emotional state.
Is there any wonder as to why so many are lonely, anxious, fragile, and without purpose?
Meaning requires responsibility. Motherhood gives women responsibility in its most intimate form.
But what about a woman’s career?
Motherhood certainly involves tradeoffs. There are times when children need more from us, when professional opportunities must be postponed or declined outright. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
But it is equally dishonest to pretend motherhood only diminishes a woman’s professional capacity.
Motherhood can make you more mature, because you no longer have the luxury of treating every emotion as an emergency; more discerning because your time becomes precious; stronger because someone is depending on you to be strong.
Motherhood develops qualities no expensive graduate program can instill: patience, judgment, endurance, perspective, and an instinct for what actually matters.
History gives us extraordinary examples.
Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields, physics and chemistry. She was also the mother of two daughters.
One daughter, Irène Joliot Curie, became a distinguished scientist and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. The other, Ève Curie, became a writer, journalist, and humanitarian.
Marie Curie contributed to the future through her work. She also contributed to the future through her children.
The Bible describes children using language too many today would barely know how to comprehend: “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.”
A reward. Not an inconvenience. Not a lifestyle penalty. Not a threat to self-actualization.
Other scripture verses compare children to “arrows in the hand of a warrior.” An arrow is sent beyond you. It travels farther than you can go, and into a future you may never see.
That is what a child does.
You give your children parts of yourself, your stories, your values, your sense of right and wrong. Eventually, they leave your hand and are on their own.
It will not always be easy. Your children may disappoint you. You will disappoint them. They may choose paths you never would have.
But the arrow still flies forward carrying a part of you.
Too many women are taught to fear what generations before them regarded as one of life’s greatest treasures. Sacrifice is too often rebranded as oppression; responsibility as confinement.
But our nature did not disappear because modern “experts” suddenly declared it socially constructed. Women still possess the extraordinary capacity to give life, to protect, to nurture, and to sacrifice. That is not subjugation.
Once you become a mother, there are things no one can take from you. You have brought a human being into the world. You have loved someone in a way you could not have understood before that person existed. You have been entrusted with an arrow pointed toward the future.
So to women who have been told that motherhood will ruin their lives: Be careful what you believe.
JUDGE IN LINDSAY CLANCY MURDER TRIAL REJECTS DEFENSE’S NOT-GUILTY BID
Put aside the wine you have been told you need to numb yourself. Put down the phone that invites you to compare your life with everyone else’s. Stop allowing strangers to decide whether your life is exciting, beautiful, successful, or free.
Instead, accept the gift and the responsibility of raising your child.
Marissa Streit is CEO of PragerU and host of Real Talk
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
