For many years I was fond of pointing out something sort of awful: New mothers are the most selfish, egotistical beings in the entire world.

They see themselves as the pinnacle of altruism, selflessly sacrificing themselves to another person who is not themselves.

Obviously, that is a diaperload of crap. New mothers merely transfer their selfishness to their baby: their outrageous personal ambitions, fantasies, preoccupations. Every megalomaniacal, hyper-romantic conceit the woman wisely kept tucked within the concealment of her subjectivity explodes out of her in a massive fireball of unrestrained self-indulgence, onto this allegedly external, separate being in her arms… For all practical purposes, that baby is her. This is why new mothers are in so many cases universally reviled, even though nobody will admit it.

I always liked very much how horrible and obviously true this observation was. (I do pretty seeing; but I do ugly seeing, too. I just like truth; and when the truth is ugly I know I love truth for her mind, not for her pleasing features.)

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Here is an example of a perspectival shift I have had on this topic.

I now see unrestrained maternal self-indulgence as the ideal transegoic experience, of entry into authentic intersubjective relationship, what I call Logos.

Postpartum depression is the destruction of a girl’s ego under pressure of maternal responsibility, which any mother will tell you is absolutely crushing. The mother undergoes biological bootcamp. She is disoriented, sleep deprived, stripped of all familiar comforts and freedoms, ordered around by the insistent cries of an imperious officer. She is broken down and built back up into a mother. The mother is no longer the girl she was. That girl could not accomplish the things the mother has to. But the mother is not a stand-alone woman. She is a participant (probably a broken one) in a new transegoic being, the mother-baby, which comprises the mother and the baby, but is not reducible to the two individuals. I’ll call this “maternalization”.

But, in exchange for this period of depression, which is nothing less than a nonintellectual analogue of philosophical perplexity, the mother gets to experience the joy of the transegoic, which is the analogue of philosophical breakthrough. She gets to feel the nestedness of being, that we are in each in We as much as each of us are I.

Mothers worship their babies like little gods because the mother-baby relationship is the first religion many mothers have experienced. Worship is the natural response.

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That women put their children in daycare because they think they ought to want to pursue a career… it overwhelms me with misogynistic contempt. Women (on the whole) still lack independence of thought. Here is immediate, primordially intense reality revealing itself, and what does your average “liberated” woman do? She remains enslaved to general opinion, to all-too-common sense, to vanity. She’d rather appear free than to exercise authentic freedom and risk being seen as Not Independent. So, she tears her guts out, comes to work in despair, weeping… and accepts this as normal and necessary. Phuh.

(Note: Obviously, none of this vitriol applies to women who have no choice but to work, nor does it apply to women who sincerely love their careers more than their babies. I’m only talking about women who ignore what is closest in favor of what is furthest.)