Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

A Google Search For 'Motherhood'

iStockphoto/Getty Images

Two years ago, when my children were 1 and 4, I "found" the following poem with the help of Google's autocomplete search function:

/ Courtesy of Tania Lombrozo
/
Courtesy of Tania Lombrozo

Today, with children now ages 3 and 6, I decided to repeat the experiment:

/ Courtesy of Tania Lombrozo
/
Courtesy of Tania Lombrozo

What I take away: First, motherhood is hard. That's just what the data suggest.

Second, the experience of motherhood isn't constant. An individual mother's experiences change as her children grow, as her circumstances are altered, and as her own life evolves. Alongside the changing trajectories of individual mothers are changing norms for parenting and women. If I repeat this experiment in another two years, I expect to find a new poem once again.

Third, amid the difficulty and flux of motherhood there's some element of enchantment. Call it magic or a muse, there are times of wonder and awe, rapture and joy, dazzling moments of inspiration amid the inevitable moments of perspiration.

Happy Mother's Day to all mothers and their children!


Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tania Lombrozo is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Lombrozo directs the Concepts and Cognition Lab, where she and her students study aspects of human cognition at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, including the drive to explain and its relationship to understanding, various aspects of causal and moral reasoning and all kinds of learning.