A mother of a pyschiatrist

'I really regret it. I really regret having children' says French Psychiatrist Corinne Maier. And, more so, she has decided that other women ought not to have them, if they know what is good for themselves and for the world. She wrote a presumably humorous book filled with the seething resentment of a life that hasn't delivered to her whatever she thinks will make her feel fulfilled.

I agree that not all people are cut out to be parents, and it used to be that society spent more time educating people on the role of parenthood. It started from the role of marriage. Such institutions have been continually eroded and redefined - the family has taken a back seat to a life being centred around a person's desires. You could see this coming through even in the short article about Corinne:

"We went to a family dinner in the suburbs of Paris. It took us a lot of time to go there with the children, and we went because the children wanted to go. We didn't want to go, my partner and I, and it was a bit boring, but we took them anyway. [Oh, the effort of pandering to children - and not an unsurprising outcome given the initial attitude]

And on the way back, the two of us thought that it would be nice to see an exhibition on Belgian surrealists. Once inside the museum, the children began to be awful." [Maybe it was a bit boring? Maybe they acted the same way Corinne did at the family dinner she obviously didn't want to go to? Perhaps her psychiatrist would be asking her at this point if she set the situation up to retaliate against her children - she could have arranged a baby sitter for another time, but it was important to torture her children with an equivalent boring experience so she could say "you see how hard it is being a parent? Happy now?]

...And at that point, I thought, 'I really regret it, I regret having children.' "

Just to side step for a moment - In 2004, she wrote another funny little book, this one called Hello Laziness: The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace. This was funny because she basically described the depths Socialism had brought France to, and she railed against it in the same way she rails against children. It's just that, as an ardent left winger, she fails to see that it is her own ideology that was causing the problem. The right picked up on this though, and the much hated right wing used phrases from her book to help gain power. The article brings both of these concepts to full circle:

If she feels so strongly that motherhood is a mistake, is she willing to tell her children that they themselves were mistakes?

It seems obvious that a psychiatrist, who seems to be a successful mother, would instantly deny that. Instead, she thinks about this question for a long time, as if it had never occurred to her before.

"Well, I don't know, in fact," she says. And then brightens: "I think maybe in the future, if at some point, my daughter tells me that she will vote for Sarkozy, I will think very deep inside me that yes, I made a big mistake with her."

There's a lesson there somewhere. In the meantime, here are my 40 reasons not to be a French Psychiatrist: Go to Link

Hat tip: Listening to the insane

Source: 40 reasons not to be a French Psychiatrist

Related Link: 40 reasons not to be a French Psychiatrist