In 2024, Democrats have changed motherhood from a cultural norm to a complicated “choice” fraught with societal implications about marriage, climate change, gender, and other leftist ideas. Ironically, leftists should be embracing motherhood as the single greatest creative act there is, given that the leftist cult revolves around empowering individual creativity. The forces of motherhood forced me to recreate myself as a better person.

Contrary to popular belief, Marxism is not an economic system. As James Lindsay and Logan Lancing’s powerful The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids explains, Marxism is a cultist religion about unleashing each individual’s ultimate creative potential, essentially supplanting the Biblical God and his morality. Lindsay expands upon that principle here:

If creativity is the name of the game, though, there is no more creative act than motherhood.

Many will dismiss this statement by saying that motherhood is a biological, not a creative act, no different from any other biological function. As to the mother...er, birthing person, it’s as meaningless as digesting food or building muscle.

That’s wrong. Pregnancy is a biological process (and an amazing one). Motherhood, however, is entirely different, so different that pregnancy is not a necessary predicate. Any woman who raises a child, regardless of a biological connection to the child, is a mother. (Men who raise children are not mothers because they bring a different intellectual and emotional energy to the process. They are fathers.)

So, what is motherhood? Motherhood at its apex is the creative process of raising a fully functional, morally decent and, if possible, happy adult. Motherhood is physical because the helpless infant, the unguided missile that is the toddler, the non-stop energetic child, and the endlessly needy teenager all need practical support (feeding, diapering, cleaning, driving, etc.). It’s also an emotional and intellectual process, as one guides the child into adulthood, helping that little person navigate the world while giving him or her the tools necessary to achieve optimal functioning in a complex, demanding society.

But for narcissistic progressives, caring for another is work, not creativity. Because of that child, the person may have had to say goodbye to a successful corporate career, climate activism, or the chance to try to beat Stormy Daniels’ record for the number of men (or women) bedded. With these goals, motherhood means thwarting, not achieving, the Marxist promise of ultimate self-fulfillment.

These women are defining self-fulfillment wrong. I know. I was there.

I had children to avoid becoming “Auntie Ruthie,” a deeply unpleasant childless family friend. I had just enough awareness to understand that my very self-directed good life—career, social activities, sleep—was making me rigid and self-centered. That understanding, though, didn’t make things easier when I had two extremely difficult pregnancies and deliveries, years of sleepless nights, very challenging children, and other issues that made parenting a thorny path. I had given up the good life for what seemed to be the promise of two decades of misery.

Desperate for a way out of this slough of despond, I turned to three pieces of wisdom. The first was a friend’s advice that, when it comes to children, I should “catch them being good” rather than constantly scolding them when they were bad. The second was hearing someone say of herself that she was “opinionated but not judgmental.” The third was Dennis Prager’s Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.

Within a short time of putting these philosophies in action—being determinedly happy, honestly praising my children when they were good, and offering my children the reasons behind my values, rather than slamming them with “final” judgments—I discovered, to my great surprise, that my children weren’t bad at all. I developed a wonderful relationship with them, who have grown to be loving, successful, and happy adults.

These mothering philosophies, though, went far beyond parenting because I eventually brought them to every aspect of my life. I was transformed from a negative, high-strung person into a happy person enjoying pleasant interactions everywhere, with everyone. (It helps that I can vent my spleen in the abstract through writing, but that’s another story.)

In other words, thanks to the work of being a mother, I achieved the ultimate creative act, something that went far beyond a career, sexual shenanigans, or activism: I remade myself into a better person.

If we commit to motherhood beyond simply fulfilling our children’s basic physical needs, that can be the most creative thing we’ll ever do, far exceeding Marxism’s cultic promises. So to all the mothers in the process of being the best people they can be so that they raise the best children they can: Happy Mother’s Day.

Image: North Pacific Railway Mother’s Day Card, 1916. Public domain.