There are so many subtitles to this article it is making my head spin. Worst mother in the world winning essay. Me, me, me, how children fit into my life. How to guarantee an ackward Christmas. Narcissus, “I stared into a pond and turned into Helen Kirwan-Taylor.” I bet you think I am being harsh? If so then I bet you haven’t read the article yet.
To be honest, I spent much of the early years of my children’s lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment I could imagine.
Kids are supposed to be fulfilling, life-changing, life-enhancing fun: why was my attitude towards them so different?
She begins many of her revelatory sentences with phrases promising honesty and I take her at her word. Afterall, it would be psychopathic to write a long essay about how painful it is to spend time with your children. Unless she is setting up the Yates defense. The only advice I can give to those children is to start taking showers. To answer Ms. Kirwan-Taylor’s question, because you are self-absorbed and you should not have had children. For people like you children are an accessory. A totem of a successful life. “My name is Helen Kirwan-Taylor, Look at my husband, children, house ye other overeducated narcissists and despair!”
Psychotherapist Kati St Clair has listened to the frustrations of scores of mothers. ‘Women now feel great pressure to enjoy their children at all times,’ she says. ‘The truth is, a lot of it is plain tedium. It’s very unlikely that a mother doesn’t love her child, but it can be very dull. Still, it takes a brave woman to admit that.’
All us bored mothers can take comfort from the fact that our children may yet turn out to be more balanced than those who are love-bombed from the day they are born. [Emphasis added.]
Because that is the problem with the world today- over loved children. WOW! I mean really wow. It does not take a lot of guts to admit that children can be exasperating but it does take gigantic chutzpah to say that withholding your attention is the path to a well adjusted child. Helen, girlfriend, its not about you any more. I don’t know what you expected when you had children. Was the first one exciting and the second one just dull as dishwater? Or maybe you just got tired of the daily routine that you did not see coming because this has never happened to anyone else in world history. So you were blindsided. Well TOUGH. Suck it up and play a damn board game with your kids.
Frankly, as long as you’ve fed them, sheltered them and told them they are loved, children will be fine. Mine are — at the risk of sounding smug — well-adjusted, creative children who respect the concept of work. They also accept my limitations.
They stopped asking me to take them to the park (how tedious) years ago. But now when I try to entertain them and say: ‘Why don’t we get out the Monopoly board?’ they simply look at me woefully and sigh: ‘Don’t bother, Mum, you’ll just get bored.’
How right they are.
Seriously, what is the English equivalent of CPS?
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PolishKnight said,
Anyways, feminism and the family courts created the myth of the madonna primary caregiver who bakes cookies that are so special that it requires the non-custodial parent to pay for her to stay at home all day and bake them from scratch. This helped to set incredibly high expectations for parents to prove their worthiness with crazy things such as parents going to jail because they left their 10 year old alone in the house for 10 minutes while they went to the store to get a gallon of milk or left the child alone in a car on a cool day. Many parents don’t want their children to walk to school alone for fear of being abducted, etc. It’s all hyper-protection compared to the standards I and my wife grew up in. Or do you think I’m being too loose?
July 29, 2006 at 6:43 pm
Gus said,
I experienced both of these incidents personally by the way.
Growing up today is a tremendously hazardous experience even if your mother isn’t as crazy as the Yates woman.
I am waiting for the first books to appear written by the children who managed to survive this insane ordeal we have put them through since the 60’s. They will make “Catcher In The Rye” look like a walk in the park.
“Child-obsessed”? Not when we drop them off at a day-care center at 6:30 in the morning and pick them up at 6 at night. Twelve hour days are rough on 2 and 3 year olds. I know. I volunteer in one.
As for Helen Kirwin-Taylor-Smythe-Bancroft-Wilson, or whatever her name is, she’s an idiot.
Children know whether they are loved or not but it’s nice to put it into words sometimes.
This is a foolish, pathetic woman who is missing some of the most beautiful and profound experiences of life.
When I did goup therapy with geriatric patients and asked them what the happiest days of their lives, the usuual response was, “When the kids were little”.
Sadly a whole generation of women has been brain-washed by the feminists into losing all that.
July 29, 2006 at 10:05 pm