Life is sacred... and unfair.
One reality that i got fooled into ignoring is that life IS inherently unfair.
I was part of that first generation that grew up as so-called "liberated women". We thought that we could "of course" have both a career and a family. Like the men did. But... no.
The men had a career and a wife who cared for the family. We ended up working just as hard as the men for the career, but we still have to shoulder most (if not all) of the caregiving.
And that's not "only" because of "prejudice" or "society"... no matter how brilliant or "deserving" we are, we women are, on average, physically shorter, lighter and less strong than men. We physically carry the kids for 9 months and need to live as a nurturing and feeding dyad with them for 2-3 years for EACH kid. That takes toll on the body, and it changes our spirit forever. When things go right, a woman is bound to her kids until the day she dies. They will forever come first. Picking up the grandkids from school and giving them snacks and TLC while waiting for mom who got stuck in traffic is no small investment of the limited energy older women have. But what mother of a parent in her right mind would refrain from such a blessed calling?
As women, our "social value" decreases after we lose a significant amount of our power of attraction through age, pregnancies and the fatigue of years of 24/7 caregiving. Even after the kids have grown, we are never again absolutely free to devote our whole self to a man or a cause. We are mothers, first and foremost.
THEN we need to add the "social" aspects of the game. Women lose social standing way faster than men, as our "value" comes from beauty, fertility, docility, housekeeping skills. Intelligence, critical thinking and earning power add very little. In fact, they seem to very often undermine our power of attraction.
Men are not affected in the same way. Age and paternity leaves men almost unscathed, as their "social value" is tied to money and power, which tend to stay stable or increase with greying hair and paternity.
When women get abandoned by a runaway husband, as they very often do now, they lose even more of whatever social standing they had left. I'm only describing reality. It is what it is.
Some young men talk about how women should "honour motherhood". That's nothing new. I liked the idea, that's partly why i got married and had kids. I believed that parenthood could truly could be a joint effort. But it requires the guarantee of LIFELONG protection and companionship with an honorable father, even after the kids have grown and launched.
Unfortunately, lots of middle-aged women like me still learn the hard way that they should have invested even more time and energy into building a personal, protected financial estate and a capacity to be their family's sole provider and parent. My story is banale, a very high number of middle-aged men tend to run away from their duties to their first wife and kids and leave them to fend for themselves financially and socially while they up and leave to go play house with some other, often younger, person. At forty or fifty, instead of contributing to the care of grand children, they burden their kids with half-siblings that are 20 years younger.
Clownesque.
Nobody sees anything wrong with that, nowadays. Especially not the people who inherit these "sugar daddies".
Basically, all i'm saying is that no amount of feminism or gender theories will change the fact that being born a female is NOT the same as being born a male. Life is, in essence, unfair. We cannot and should not try to engineer a "perfect society ". That's the birthplace of many genocides and dystopias.
Trust in the institution of marriage is irreparably lost. The current cynical generation was majoritarily raised by disloyal men and broken-hearted women (or vice-versa… but more vice than versa). I am quite imaginative, yet i do not see how today's mothers can rebuild the sacred nature of the family as a haven and a blessing. I have no clue how they could raise brave and honourable kids in the average unstable self-centred transactional "household" that most are into nowadays.
I fear for my own children and although i pray and hope for them, i am afraid that i will never know the blessing of becoming a grandmother.
May you be fruitful and multiply, my dear children. What a beautiful hope.