'I really hope she doesn't have children'
“Chelsea is projecting out her cold psychotic nature and I hope she never has children.”
“I'm very concerned about this person's upbringing. I really hope she doesn't have children.”
“Must have been abandoned at birth”
“she has two children. Poor things”
“some mothers eat their own young. chelsea conaboy seems like one of those mothers.”
I was dragged on Twitter, again.
Nearly a year ago, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, adapted from my book, arguing that maternal instinct is a myth. It caused a stir.
Last week, I learned the op-ed was making the rounds on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Actually, it was a screengrab of the headline—no link—shared by an account with the handle “HarmfulOpinion” and soon viewed by half a million people.
In the next two days, the photo was shared again and again on the accounts of conservative commentators who together have millions of followers and who held it up as evidence that liberals are trying to “erase” womanhood, and motherhood right on with it. Elon Musk weighed in, twice.
Inspired by Ross Gay’s gorgeous Book of Delights, I started writing mini-essays this summer on the delights of parenthood, embracing Gay’s stream of consciousness and trying to see the beautiful bittersweet as he does. Here’s what I wrote after going through the many comments from people certain that a mother would know maternal instinct, a mother would know better:
At a picnic table at a family party this weekend, with a view of the ocean and the last dribs and drabs of a snack platter before us, Mark told me he’d seen some conservative politicians sharing a screengrab of the op-ed I wrote for the NYT last year about how maternal instinct is a myth. I hadn’t logged in to Twitter in days, maybe weeks. When I did, my mentions were a mess, full of misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and just plain dumb statements, so many of them about how I must be a bad mother, if I weren’t barren, especially given how ugly I am—my author photo shared and deliberated over—but certainly a bad mother, morally destitute, if I was one at all.
All the while, as they were retweeting, I was picking my kids up from summer camp and asking about their days, helping one to choose a birthday gift for a friend, remembering to pack the birthday card the other had made by taping his own Pokémon cards to the face of it—so thoughtful. I had listened to a friend worry over the state of her own parenting, offering reassurance for us both, and biked to the office with a promise that I would do this more often, the fate of my kids’ planet on my mind. Then, I biked home for pizza and cake—my birthday—and tucked in for family movie night, a Friday tradition three years running. The four of us on the couch, our limbs tangled or leaning against one another, like the pieces of a peanut fit together just so inside their shell, growing beneath the sun-warmed soil.
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