Motherhood Methadone
Sam Sykes ~ 12/18/2024
I attended community college in a shithole city riddled with crime, drugs, and bums. Sometimes when I would drive to school with a friend to carry on wasting time and money “educating” ourselves, we observe the long line outside of the Methadone clinic. We would yell “THE CITY IS WAKING UP!”, and (admittingly and cruelly) laugh at the junkies as they got their fix. After all, it's not like it kept them off drugs for more than a couple hours, it was just a free hit and they had to be there before the clinic closed at 11. It may be a weird analogy, but I see a similar phenomenon happening with motherhood. Western women fending off their natural motherly desires to instead trade down to a lesser form of maternal love. Cultural methadone, giving the women just enough to delay young women years.
Dogs
At this point I’m beating a dead horse. If you’ve read anything else I’ve published on Riot Club, you know that half of my articles involve shitting on pet owners. I’ll try to keep it short, but self-proclaimed “dog moms” are the first example of diet motherhood. These ladies are often hopelessly single, or worse, hopelessly dating a romantically unmotivated “man” eschewing marriage. The years drag on, and as all of their friends and peers are having babies, the maternal instincts bubble over into action. Once they buy a puppy and start to raise him up, they talk openly about his thoughts and emotions, interpret his actions as communications, and infantilize him by adorning him with embarrassing sweaters and costumes. If you want to break your girlfriend’s baby fever, buy her a dog.
Teachers
There is something nefarious and dark about spinster teachers. They wasted their youth getting hammered and doubling as cumbuckets night after night until their looks fade and the hoarding starts. If you’ve ever been to school, you can tell the difference between the middle-aged mom teaching you math that seems less invested in you personally, and more so academically. On the other hand, the spinsters use their power to pull in weak and stupid students into a weird, intimate, and almost familial relationship. Calling her by her first name and hanging around in her classroom after school prove the connection is not purely academic anymore, but increasingly personal. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing in theory, if these women had any wisdom to impart in the young, mostly fatherless girls hanging around them, but they have nothing but poor life lessons. Using clueless children to fill the lonely hole in their hearts, they should be cautionary tales, not mentors.
Aunts
Probably the least egregious of the bunch, Aunts are really just more of an annoyance than a serious issue. Nonetheless, they consistently feed their maternal desires with nieces and nephews. Spoiling the kids and occasional babysitting is enough to stymie the natural desire and action it requires to go and have kids of her own. The worst is when the big girl at work starts showing you pictures of her niece… Bitch, I wouldn’t care if it was a picture of YOUR kid, and this is someone else’s. Fuck off!
Daycare
What a weird world we live in. When women were forced into working in the late 20th century, something quite dystopian happened. Children who were previously raised at home under the watchful eye of their mothers have been shipped off to child raising centers. Like farm animals, the children are rounded up and sent to a cultureless building without morals or character. Like cattle or poultry held in a giant facility before the slaughter, just keep them alive, that’s it.
We have a flathead epidemic in this country at the moment, scores of babies with perfectly flat heads on the back of their skull. Daycare infants are put in a room with several other babies, laid in a bassinet, and essentially, not interacted with more than necessary. I don’t care who it is, 99% of people experience “bad days” at work, where they just don’t care. This is especially true for the $12 an hour workers taking care of your baby.
Nannies
Nannies were sort of the inspiration for this article. From a distance it seems normal and even kind of nice to be able to afford a nanny. Men that are seldom around and often travelling for work, married to women who are either, preoccupied with a pedantic career, or worse, mothers for the sake of hooking a high-powered husband, are the vast majority of nanny employers.
The more you try and understand this life, from the views of the mother, father, nanny, and child, the more you realize how evil an enterprise it truly is. For the father, he has even further removed himself from the burdens of parenting, marrying a woman with no intention of having her raise the baby. The nanny, young and usually the most innocent of the perpetrators, is paid to waste her child-rearing talents and vibrant youth on raising another family’s child when she could be raising her own. The mother is the most reprehensible character in our story, actively defying her maternal instincts and trading her time as a mother to chase a career and continue her selfish life.
But the worst part is what is done to the child. Raised by a series of young women who eventually leave the child to start their own families, distanced from the father, and unwanted by the mother is no way to live. Yes, these kids will probably grow up to be spoiled scum, but who can blame them? They are a nuisance. Something to be dealt with, not cared for. Like a car needs and oil change or accounts that need balancing, there is no love, just fucking maintenance.
Skinny
These examples of Diet Motherhood are a serious problem, distractions for half of the population. To choose sadness, loneliness, sluttyness, and dog-momming, over what really makes women happy. You’ll notice the only chicks that disagree with me never had kids anyway…
