Fabulous essay by Maggie Gallagher in the NCR. It's in the form of a letter explaining love and marriage to her grown son Patrick.
Here’s the place to begin. Every time you make love, you could be making your first-born child...
The fate of your first child will lie in the hands of this woman to whom you give the perhaps unwelcome gift of your seed. Afterwards, our society gives you no say in what happens next: whether she kills your baby, or bears it away from you, or asks for your help raising it in a quasi-family, one where love, money, sexual attachments, and parenting are split up among multiple people and households.
If you are lucky perhaps she will secretly long for you to propose marriage. But you lose control. What happens next will be up to her, not you.
Your capacity to protect your own child will depend entirely on the woman to whom you have made love. You have placed your fatherhood in her hands.
(My son, here’s a secret: Fatherhood is always the gift of a woman).
Read it all. Hat tip: Sara Butler at familyscholars.org.
Comments