Tea at Trianon: Your Life Is Not Wrong Just Because It's Hard

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Your Life Is Not Wrong Just Because It's Hard

From Of Home and Womanhood:

People are overwhelmed and tired all the time. You would not simply say to someone in medical school that because it is hard, therefore it is wrong to do. Or someone running a marathon should just quit because it hurts. We constantly do hard, difficult, painful things, and that does not make these things bad, most of the time it means the opposite. And parenthood is the exact same way.
We should be able to say that motherhood can sometimes be exhausting without treating children as some sort of disease in which fewer children is the cure. We should be able to listen and offer help to mothers without just dismissing them for having what we deem “too many children”. So how many children exactly are we allowed to have before we lose the right to ever complain about anything? And why is it that motherhood seems to be the only difficult thing in life we treat as some sort of mistake, just because of how difficult it is? This and more is what we are covering in the podcast episode. We are talking about the double standards we have for mothers, why saying I am “overwhelmed” has somehow become a direct insult against how many children you have, and why most of all, I refuse to believe that the answer to the hard parts of life and loving others is to simply have less people to love. (Read more.)