NY Times book reviews... just WTF.

There may be a sense that motherhood is boring, normal and invisible. There is some truth to that. No, you don't get parades, medals, a raise, or an employee of the month gift certificate for doing it right. There are only intimate internal markers that you are doing it well.

And yes, the baby is a Little Stranger. An intruder from the planet Other. A blood relative, a stranger, someone you didn't know before, a new personality. You have to be all right with that and be able to find that fascinating instead of intrusive.

The need to make a freaky-deaky horror-drama out of motherhood may be a fear of how non-public, how private, it is, how ignored you can feel doing it. It is best done by those who aren't looking for public praise.

Yes it is isolating. Your posse won't be seeing you the same way, or as much. You have been Body-Snatched.

All of that can feel like Horror to someone whose mentality is other-oriented instead of internally nourished.

Mothering is closer to the Rom Com genre than the Horror genre however.

The grandeur of women is that they can deal well with motherhood and most of them can. They can deal with this intrusion, first into the body, them into the life schedule, then into their mental life which has taken on a permanent change. It is a wonder and a miracle of human nature that none of this rips the woman apart. It doesn't. The mind of a woman has a secret deep resilience. Can a man do this job? Some have. But the texture of the person is not the same.

If men were the only ones doing this job, which they never will be, there would be no articles in the Times about the "horror" because men would just get it done and go to bed and that's that. Only a woman feels the deep resonance of mothering, meaning enough to get all freaky-deaky about it. No man would. A man who felt that way would hire a nanny and think about something else.

Mothering is infinitely fascinating. So is fatherhood. Fatherhood is not the subject of this Times piece though.

Maybe somebody here will comment about fatherhood.

/r/Natalism Thread Link - nytimes.com