Longtime readers of the Washington Post, among whom The Scrapbook numbers itself, will be familiar with the Post’s quaint custom of observing anniversaries and holidays with what might be called counterintuitive stories. For example, on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (2,403 American dead), the Post will run an article on the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans. Valentine’s Day will feature tales of wife-beating or romance gone horribly wrong. Christmas will feature an interview with a scholar who claims Jesus of Nazareth never existed. On Thanksgiving Day we’ll learn that the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony were racists and religious bigots. And so on.
Now, we understand what the Post is intending to do here. Since Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley once declared that the job of newspapers is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” the Post labors under an ethical obligation to afflict the comfortable.
To be fair, most American newspapers follow this curious, lemming-like instinct toward professional self-destruction. But not all. Which is why we were surprised, on this past Mother’s Day, to open the pages of the New York Times and find what amounted to a Post story in the Times. We say this because the Times, to its credit, tends to avoid such deliberately offensive features on holidays and, of course, seldom follows trends set by the Post.
Yet there it was, a lavishly illustrated layout on pages 22-23: “Stories of Motherhood, Told by Six Women.” It seems that “last year, the Times asked its audience to share stories about becoming a mother [and] received more than 1,300 responses.” Six essays were chosen to be excerpted, and their collective flavor may best be captured by their individual titles: “The World Was Hers. Then She Became a Mom,” “When Having a Child Doesn’t Make You Happy,” “They Saw Dad. She Was Mom,” “Her Mom Had Five Kids. She Wanted Freedom,” “One Sister Felt ‘Cheated,’ the Other ‘Terrified,’ ” and “A Mother’s Promise: You Can
Be Yourself.”
Our initial reaction was to wonder whether all 1,300 entries were as dolorous and hostile to the idea of motherhood. Then we began to suspect the editors carefully sifted through the stories to find six that perfectly matched their own presumptions. We tend to lean in that direction since the story entitled “A Mother’s Promise: You Can Be Yourself” was written by a woman whose late husband had been “an activist from El Salvador”; we remember all too well how the 1980s Communist insurgency in El Salvador was celebrated in the pages of the New York Times.
Whatever the reason, The Scrapbook concedes that if the purpose of the paper’s special Mother’s Day feature was to make motherhood sound calamitous and nightmarish and, ultimately, to discourage procreation, it succeeded. As a short-term marketing strategy, this might make sense. In the long run, however, it could prove fatal to the enterprise. Even future generations of Times subscribers are dependent on somebody, somewhere coming to terms with the hideous prospect of motherhood.
