I am what JD Vance would have called a single cat lady.

Actually, I don’t have, nor do I particularly like cats. I am more along the lines of a single black Lab lady, or a single bearded dragon lady. But the label still matches my civil status.

I have neither spouse nor spawn, which puts me in the demographic targeted by the Republican VP candidate in his critical commentaries on the state of civilization.

And guess what? I agree with him.

I was not offended when I heard Vance make his offhanded comment about the current vice president. He wasn’t being cruel or misogynistic, despite the hue and cry from progressive women and the men they are not having children with.

He was making an astute observation about the drastic sea change in societal standards that has taken place over the last few decades, and why it’s so problematic.

Vance understands the value and importance of women, and if you read his own memoir, which reads like the most fantastic fiction, he owes his life and his success to his grandmother and his older sister.

At a personal level, some of the most important women in my own life were childless, namely, the nuns who raised me.

I can’t remember the names of every lay teacher who passed through my 13 years of elementary and secondary school, but I can describe in detail every single sister who stood before me in her habit, and filled my thirsty mind with the riches of literature, history and language.

One in particular, a 4-and-a-half-foot tall member of the religious Delta Force named Sister Mary David, changed my life.

Gratia tibi ago, soror.

So no, you do not need to have children to matter.

That’s not what Vance was saying, and all of the women pretending otherwise are not only silly, they are dishonest.

There is a shortsighted narcissism that sets in when you think that you are the alpha and omega of your own universe. Believing that “you are enough,” as we have been taught repeatedly in some cult-like mantra of self-care, is probably going to raise your own self-esteem but will simultaneously give you an inflated sense of your importance in the world.

It also hastens your extinction, for obvious biological reasons which this B student doesn’t need to explain here.

As children we are taught the nursery rhyme:

“Little drops of water / Little grains of sand / Make the mighty ocean / And the pleasant land

So the little moments / Humble though they be / Make the mighty ages / Of eternity.”

I always took that to mean that we need humility to place ourselves in the context of a greater society, that we alone aren’t much but that together we create the “mighty ages of eternity.”

And then we have John Donne who provided a more eloquent but no less compelling argument for community:

“No man is an island / Entire of itself / Each is a piece of the continent / A part of the main

Each man’s death diminishes me / Therefore, send not to know / For whom the bell tolls / It tolls for thee.”

And at the risk of enraging my conservative friends, this was the theme of Hillary Clinton’s oft-quoted truism, “It takes a village.”

But back to Vance.

I don’t feel that I was being lectured to by Trump’s VP pick.

I think that he was simply stating the obvious, that we are not put on this Earth to post on Instagram about how fabulous it is to be able to go on vacation without bratty kids or redecorate our amazing penthouse apartments with the money we would have used on daycare, or have bikini bods because we never suffered from stretch marks.

And we weren’t “only” put on this earth to have children.

But the refusal to see them as not only necessary to our survival but to our humanity as well, is something worthy of the greatest condemnation.

I say this as someone who can see how women who desperately want children but can’t have them would be hurt by Vance’s words.

But that’s only because they are being deliberately misrepresented by ill-intentioned people.

It is not the state of being childless, but the actual celebration of being without issue that is contemptible.

It’s no coincidence that most of the people doing the latter also celebrate abortion as a right.

So this single “not particularly attached to cats” lady has no problem with a guy who describes the immediate, long-term and essential joy in children.

The other cat ladies need to lighten up.

Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers