The mother of all battles

by Julia Molony ©Independent.ie
IF you are a woman thinking of starting a family, be warned. Motherhood, apparently, turns most women into bores. It makes them obsessive about the inane details of child-care, replaces carrot mash where they used to have brains, and renders them devoid of any curiosity that extends outside of the domestic sphere.
But women who don't have children, the mothers counter, are worse. They are emotional car crashes, bitter, mournful and full of regrets.
Those are your options, ladies. Or, at least, so the latest female culture debate waging on in the media and the cybersphere would have us believe. You can't win.
This Mother's Day, more than on any other day of the year, western women of a certain age will be segregated into the haves and have-nots. Those with young families might choose, out of sensitivity, to make light of it to their childless female friends. In turn, the childless might find something else to celebrate in defiance of the cult of maternity that dominates the news not just now, but pretty much at all times of the year. At a time in history when fertility is dropping, when women feel a direct and explicit conflict between the ambitions they have been raised to exercise and their biological urge to reproduce, motherhood has become a flashpoint issue. And one on which, both ideologically and personally, women are becoming more and more dramatically divided. Reproduction is the Gaza Strip of women's issues. Separated by the milestone of partum, more and more females have been taking to throwing rocks from either side.
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