On Friday, New York Times opinion writer Elizabeth Bruenig penned a piece about her experience with motherhood in honor of Mother’s Day. By Sunday, the Left had fully lost its minds.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing this woman it was a tremendous personal achievement to be repeatedly knocked up by an Internet troll she met in high school,” wrote nonbinary author Jude Ellison Doyle.
“I’m troubled by Noah Smith’s and Elizabeth Bruenig’s white extinction anxiety, which imo informs their shared fixations on immigrant/latina/mexican motherhood,” tweeted Reveal reporter Aura Bogado.
“I would like to thank this headline/byline combo for helping me set a record for the quickest ‘gross, pass’ I’ve ever uttered in my life,” Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote, describing the piece as “naked pandering to the fantasies of pathetic men.”
So what was the offending headline? “I Became a Mother at 25, and I’m Not Sorry I Didn’t Wait.”
At 24, Bruenig, a Catholic journalist who by then already had both a Marshall Scholarship and a master of philosophy from Cambridge University in Christian theology, became pregnant with her husband, Matt, an attorney who would also later become a high-profile commentator on the Left.
“Being young, or young enough still not to know yourself entirely, and then feeling the foundation of your nascent selfhood shift beneath you — perhaps that’s exactly the sort of momentous change that makes the whole enterprise so daunting,” Bruenig wrote. “Yet there I’ve given up the game: With the exception of — perhaps — a few immutable characteristics, you are not something you discover one day through trial and error and interior spelunking; you are something that is constantly in the process of becoming, the invention of endless revolutions. You never know who you are, because who you are is always changing.”
So where’s the controversy? Bruenig gave birth at 25, just one year younger than the national average. Her daughter was born into a two-parent and two-income household. Bruenig today is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer. She’s hardly barefoot and pregnant, and few would argue that she’s not a textbook career woman in the field of journalism.
Despite her lefty bonafides, Bruenig cannot help but trigger the Left. How is that?
Some would chalk it up to her simple ideological heterodoxy. Although Bruenig’s a few inches to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders on all things economics, she’s personally pro-life, a position she doesn’t opine much on publicly but has driven some on the Left to equate with her being somehow anti-LGBTQ+. And as evidenced by her piece and her career, she’s hardly using her positive experience with young motherhood to push some Handmaid’s Tale fantasy on readers.
No, the rationale is quite a bit simpler: The premise of the contemporary Left is that the neoliberalcapitalistcishetpatriarchy oppresses every nonstraight, white male in every way. Bruenig’s willingness to be publicly happy with her life undermines that premise.
The Left doesn’t loathe her merely because she happily posts photos of domestic bliss, raising fears that she’ll encourage women to give up their careers to become full-time homemakers. It loathes her precisely because she evidently has it all. And there’s certainly a level of internalized misogyny and basic jealousy going on here. Middle-aged female journalists would stab each other for her resume, let alone 30-somethings — but she’s also been a mother since age 25!
Some on the Right may chalk it up to a simple sense of insecurity among women who treated nurturing work and family as a binary decision. But at its core, it’s far less logical than that. Bruenig is happy, and in a culture that lionizes public declarations of trauma and despair from victimization, Bruenig disrupts the narrative.
