2011 阅读4
Parenthood Sucks—or Does It?
It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful, provocative New York magazine cover story, "I Love My Children, I Hate My Life," is inciting much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. (Remember the heat that novelist Ayelet Waldman took for merely implying that she loved her husband more than her children?) Rather than conclude that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment elation, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that "the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification, nostalgia, delight." Apparently that selective, evolutionarily advantageous amnesia that makes women forget the pain of childbirth lasts well beyond the first years of your children's lives. According to one long-term study in California, no participants regretted having children, but 10 people in the study reported regretting not having a family.
insightful 有深刻见解的
provocative 挑衅的，引起争议的
anything less than 绝不是
dampen 抑制
nostalgia 怀旧
amnesia 健忘
这种健忘在进化上是有利的
The New York cover showing an attractive blonde mother holding a cute, chubby, blue-eyed baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child combo on newsstands this week. There's also Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel above the People magazine headline "My Baby Saved Me," a possibly pregnant (but probably just bloated) Jessica Simpson (OK! magazine's "Baby for Jess"), and "Baby No. 2 on the Way!" (despite any evidence of conception whatsoever) for reality-TV personality Kourtney Kardashian on the cover of inTouch. There are also stories about newly adoptive—and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news (at least the third such rumor about Aniston this year, but this is a slow year). Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling beatifically on the newsstands.
chubby 胖乎乎的
Madonna 圣母玛利亚
combo 组合
beatific 幸福的
newsstand 报摊
In a society that so relentlessly celebrates procreation (especially when done by attractive celebrities), is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is tantamount to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn't seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the childless. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn't have had kids, but unhappy childless folks—those freakish nonbreeders—are bombarded with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping, baby-size holes in their lives.
relentless 无情的，不间断的 PERSISTENT
relent 发慈悲，变温和
procreation 生育
tantamount 同等的 EQUIVALENT
在一个不遗余力鼓励生育的社会里，将后悔生孩子和支持虐杀猫等同起来又有什么奇怪的呢？那么，将为人父母的遗憾和无后者的遗憾相比较，也似乎显得有失公允。
bombarded 轰炸
gape 张开，裂开
最后一句不知道是什么意思
Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly, People, inTouch, and OK! present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra, Britney, and Padma tell it, raising a kid on their "own" (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.
It's hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it's interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of blissful, stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren't in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting "the Rachel" might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.
glamorous 迷人的，富有魅力的
blissful 充满喜悦的
但思考一下这个问题也是很有趣的：我们每周看到的充满喜悦、毫无压力、和谐美满的父母形象是不是真的没有在潜移默化之中，在潜意识里，造成我们对我们切身经历的不满。就像我们当中有一部分人曾希望剪一个 Rachel 发型来让自己有那么一点像 Jennifer Aniston。
有人剪了 Rachel 发型之后发现跟卖家秀相去甚远而心生懊恼；同样，看看魅力四射的明星妈妈，再看看身心俱疲的自己，也可能会在潜意识中对现实感到不满。
