Babies are normalisers. I can see that. They shrink a woman down to a common denominator. A woman is not "real" until she has experienced what women's magazines call "Baby Joy". Without it she may try expensive medical procedures, and even agree to bear a stranger's donated sperm child alone, which any responsible adult would advise against because raising a child involves superhuman amounts of affection, exasperation, disasters, challenges, shocks, sleep deprivation, anxiety and astonishment, all of which need to be shared if sanity is what you're after.
Mundanely, Charlotte has years ahead of play dates with vetted babies of similar social status, will since conception have been on waiting lists for the kindergartens of the elite, and the most expensive private schools, who'll clamour to enrol her. She'll have Mandarin lessons, tennis lessons, underwater swimming lessons from the age of 2, and the usual orthodontic treatments to give her dazzling American teeth. What will the Clintons do if she's not "gifted"? Absurd. Superbrains are taken for granted in the world of money.
Much rides on this infant especially, it seems, her ambitious grandmother's possible presidential nomination. Posing with a baby grandchild will make other women sigh and relate. And when the baby wets her knee and spews milky tucker on her shoulder, the white perpetual shoulder stain of maternity will get a standing ovation.
As for you, if you make it into the news in adult life you'll be stripped of your individuality, described simply as "mother of three/whatever," interesting, as in Chelsea's case, only if your parents are prominent in public life, or your child becomes a serial killer.
At 45 you'll become "elderly", a descriptor attached by youthful reporters to any middle-aged woman, and finally, your ovaries having done their unremarkable bit, you'll be a mere "grandmother".
Whether you're also a hot-shot lawyer, doctor, florist, beekeeper or physicist, the service your ovaries did for the future of the race will be the sum total of what you are.
In biological terms this may be the literal truth, but in every other way it's irritating.
It's what made Helen Clark unacceptable to some people. She kept her ovaries to herself, wasn't a mother, so what could she possibly know? (About what?)
And now Hillary could have a shot at being a world leader sending warplanes and soldiers to distant countries to kill people.
But the casualties of American militarism will be as dead with a grandmother in charge as they were with grandfathers described as "president". Your gender, your grandmother/father-ness, guarantees exactly squat. So why, for God's sake, all the fuss?
