Princeton Mom Judges The Childfree, Just In Time For Mother’s Day

princeton-mom-gives-pregnancy-adviceSusan Patton, the “Princeton Mom” is back to give everyone some more fantastic advice. Last time it was to remind all of the college bound ladies to ease up on the studies and start trying to land a husband, already.

It’s been a while since we heard from Patton, so you’ll forgive me if I forget whether young college women were supposed to be doing that before or after they secured a dowry of five young, fat she-goats for themselves. No matter. Susan Patton has moved on and is turning now to address all of you barren, childless career women, whose wombs are slowly atrophying into nothing more than a dusty, cavernous void in which you will ultimately store your spoiled eggs until the day you inevitably die. Alone.

Patton wrote her piece on The New York Post, where she starts dealing out advice bombs in a manner so obliviously horrifying, so terribly passive aggressive, that you can only imagine what it must be like to be this woman’s daughter-in-law: a fucking nightmare.

“You’re happily married ”¦ so, why no babies of your own? Busy Miss Important can’t take time away from her glamorous career to have a child? You know that you have a limited window of opportunity within which to procreate before your eggs will have past their expiration date. Smarten up, ladies! You may live longer and look younger than your foremothers, but your fertility remains exactly as it’s always been. In terms of your reproductive system, forty is not the new thirty.”

I don’t even know where to start with this. Sometimes “Busy Miss Important” is “Busy Miss Paying The Bills” or “Busy Miss Childfree”. Patton is just assuming that the only reason you don’t have babies right out of college is because you are arrogant and want to actually use that Princeton education you paid for, conveniently forgetting that there are a lot of reasons not to have a child, including “I don’t feel like it”. I know that if my mother-in-law was like Patton, I would start putting off baby making as soon as possible, and remind her that every time she brought it up, I’d be waiting one more year.

Patton goes on to talk about all of the stuff we all mostly know: your fertility rate drops as you get older, at which point, she would like to remind you, you are super duper screwed if you want to have a baby. Especially if you want to have that baby using IVF, adoption, or a surrogate: “Trying to have children other than the old-fashioned way is wildly expensive and usually fraught with disappointment. If you’re going to attempt any of these extreme measures, you have to be very rich, very lucky, and very patient. Don’t count on it.”

Yeah, fuck orphans. So disappointing. Of course, she acknowledges that the women who face the reality of trying to conceive are exempt from her scathing take down, but uses those women more as an example of what you don’t want to turn into as opposed to offering any real kind of empathy. As a bonus, she throws down this additional piece of parenting advice:

“And when you have children, if you can stay home with them and share the wonders of their infancy, do so. Honestly, why did you have children to begin with? Embrace your kids’ babyhood and childhood for their sake, and for your own. They’ll be gone in 18 years, which will go by a lot faster than you can imagine, and those years are filled with irreplaceable memories that even you, Busy Miss Important won’t want to miss.”

Wow. There is so much wow packed into this entire op-ed that if you can pull your jaw off of the floor, you should take a moment to thank Mrs. Patton for her valuable insight that you otherwise would not have been able to glean, since we don’t use Home Economics textbooks from the 40’s anymore.

I recommend reading the entire article out loud. If you don’t read it in Rosalyn Rosenfeld’s voice, you haven’t really experienced it like you should, Busy Miss Important.

(Image: Susan Patton/Facebook)

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