(This articles appears in the print edition of Bournbrook Magazine)
Tick, tock – so goes the biological clock. It's a truth that the modern world seeks to bury as best it can.
Children are a hindrance. For the aspiring careerist, the brats detract from things actually fulfilling; you know, happy hours on conference calls, populating spreadsheets and the like. From a young age, girls are bombarded with negativity surrounding childbearing: it will ruin your body, pregnancy will be tortuous, you will have no autonomy left afterwards.
The positives are scarcely mentioned. As such, the young are encouraged to freeze their eggs and put off the hassle of kids for as long as possible. Avoiding reproduction altogether is what the engineers of society would like you to do most of all (in the name of the 'climate crisis' or some such guff), so that you can dedicate your lives entirely to the soul-sapping strictures of modernity: mindless consumption, the Current Thing, or devoted employment to a firm that will boot you out on to the street the second it feels the need.
Each wave of leftist social revolution does its utmost to stamp out innate reality and superimpose ideology. Yet it inevitably fails as such desires are elementary to our being human, and the maternal drive cannot be wholly suffocated.
Instead of fighting such urges in the manner adopted by Mao, Lenin et al – namely the destruction of the 'bourgeois' family due to its privacy and resistance to the totalising tendencies of the state – the postmodern method is far cuter. Although Khmer Rouge probably wouldn't have liked Instagram and Tiktok in their promised agrarian utopia, these apps constitute the greatest propaganda tools ever devised.
Of this there are many manifestations: behold the rise of the 'dog mum' and her 'fur kids'. I refer not to the old insult 'what a dog!' and the inevitably unattractive spawn such individuals create, but instead to an online phenomenon indicative of our sorry modern state, in which human desires are misconstrued to a morally lost and impressionable public.
A 'dog mum' (or 'mom' for full effect) refers to a breed of woman who lavish their slathering hounds with the love and affection which should be reserved for children of their own species. Go online and you will see videos of women of childbearing-age fawning over Labradors and pugs – hugely anthropomorphised canines dressed in clothes and wearing shoozy-woozies (just 'shoes', to you and I).
Speaking to one's dog as if it were a child is not unheard of. However these types take it to a new level. Along with the cutsie outfits, poochy pedicures and extravagantly expensive toys of each conceivable sort, the misplaced maternal energy is clear for all to see.
The inevitable response to such an observation is that having children is 'not for everyone' and that some are unable to conceive. Both are true but do not detract from the point: many of these women revel in their childlessness and publicise the love of their mutts in the way a doting mother would.
In a society more accepting of children and more positive about bringing life into the world – where babies in the womb are not cast as parasitical growths until decided otherwise – no doubt many of these dog mums would do what each woman in their family line did since the dawn of time: have a child.
Don't get me wrong, dogs are good companions, but they do not grow old with you and cannot take care of you, nor do they have the potentiality of a person. It is a relationship ultimately defined by dependency and that alone.
The Internet peddles endless messages that are ultimately harmful to the self: if you're fat, you should be proud; if you're unsuccessful it's because of society's power structures; if you're depressed, you probably just need some meds.
Telling women that children are bad and a dog will do just as well is no less harmful: odds are that it will be too late before they figure out they were sold a pup.
I endorse this article wholeheartedly, especially since I've been 'colliemum' online for about a dozen years, but that happened well after my 'childbearing years' were over. Now I'm a great-granny. My collies never were 'fur babies', never got dog clothing, never ever were treated like 'children'. To the contrary: thanks to them I learned how to 'think dog'. Otherwise, they'd have taken over, bullying me into doing what they wanted.
But I've met such 'dog mums' during walks. I know first-hand how pernicious - for their dogs - such treatment is. Their dogs are horrible examples for disobedience, interfering with other dogs and people just out for a walk. The sad thing is that they'd have been pernicious mums for their kids as well.
I think they'd be far better off with cats who'd let them know, in no uncertain terms, what they think about being a 'fur baby'.
How true and how sad. Women are born to 'motherhood', whether biological or spiritual. That is their fulfilment; the genius of their sex. To frustrate this wish intentionally is tragic. To divert it towards pets is bizarre and perverse. We only get one chance at life.