I am not surprised that you’ve gotten pushback on this — I expected there to be more, actually.
I did find one interesting thing about some of the responses. The (faux?) pity for you hating your kids, or calling them death machines, or being “angry” at them. At no point in your essay do I see any anger at your children. In fact, by the end of this essay, with the exception of the birth and gender, I know nothing about them. Here’s a wildly inappropriate personal example I find somewhat analogous — My husband and I have 2 cats. We call them “tubes of poo.” We do not hate them, get angry at them, fail to love them, because we acknowledge the reality of their perpetual states of eat and crap.
I don’t think acknowledging the devastation that babies do to mothers during birth is a sign of anger or hatred.
In fact, the realism of the acute danger to a pregnant woman almost can’t be overstated. Not just historically, not just in countries without good access to pre-natal care, but all the time, a woman is in most danger of harm when she’s pregnant. Obviously, there is they physical aspect (scary births, miscarriages, whatever), but the chance of kidnapping goes up, as does the chance of increased domestic violence.
I’m a medievalist. Childbirth is THE thing that killed women in the middle ages. Obviously other stuff killed women, too, but so many women died, even after several births that were “normal.” The Middle Ages also gives us women like Margery Kemp who decided that God wanted her to have a chaste marriage after she had 14 (fourteen!!) children. And, after her first child, I think — given how she describes it — she had postpartum depression that made her think she was possessed by demons. She also had a priest who was an asshole to her, so that didn’t help. She got over the demons when Christ appeared to her. The book is an AWESOME read, but it does gesture at women’s relationship(s) to their bodies etc. I think this whole “childbirth is empowering and beautiful!” is a really, really new thing. Like, not much more than 100 years old. Certainly an “easy” birth could have been taken as a sign of moral virtue, but empowering? I don’t know.
