Motherhood has always been a subject ripe for mythmaking, whether vilification or idealization. Although fictional accounts, from antiquity until today, have offered us terrible, even treacherous mothers, including Euripides’s Medea and Livia Soprano, depictions of unrealistically all-good mothers, such as Marmee from Little Women, are more common and provide a sense of comfort. Maternal characters on the dark end of the spectrum provoke our unease because their monstrous behavior so clearly threatens society’s standards for mothers. They show that mother love isn’t inevitable, and that veering off from the expected response to a cuddly new infant isn’t inconceivable.

If motherhood brings with it the burden of our projected hopes, new mothers are especially hemmed in by wishful imagery, presumed to be ecstatically bonding with their just-emerged infants as they suckle at milk-filled breasts, everything smelling sweetly of baby powder. The phenomenon of postpartum depression, for instance, a condition that affects 10 to 15 percent of women, has been given short shrift in literature and other genres when not ignored entirely. This is true as well when it comes to the evocation of maternal ambivalence, the less-than-wholehearted response to the birth of a child, which is mostly viewed as a momentary glitch in the smooth transition from pregnancy to childbirth to motherhood instead of being seen as a sign of internal conflict.

Now along comes Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery to bring us down from the clouds into the muck and mire of postpartum reality. The novel’s nameless narrator, a married book translator, finds herself overwhelmed by feelings of rage, regret, and loneliness after bringing her newborn—referred to, as if to keep her as neutral and objectlike as possible, as Button—home from the hospital. In the immediate aftermath of delivering Button, “a dissipating high” tricks the narrator into thinking that “giving birth made me feel invincible,” but almost at once she feels discarded, reduced to being “an item once of value”—a feeling that is only strengthened once she is alone with her infant daughter in her small two-bedroom apartment. “The night that she came out, I kept thinking that I wanted her to stay in,” she explains. “I wasn’t ready to mourn the life I was leaving behind.”

Mourning the loss of one’s former life to the implacable demands of motherhood has become fairly commonplace. But for Molnar, this anxiety rapidly expresses itself as the mother’s reaction to the infant herself, her feelings reaching another register entirely. The narrator’s responses to her daughter’s insatiable needs are extreme, flecked with murderous intent, but they remain fantasies or hallucinations—or so the reader hopes. (If postpartum depression has gotten little notice in the culture, there is a tabloid fascination with those very few mothers, such as Andrea Yates or, more recently, Lindsay Clancy, who appear to have experienced a form of psychotic postpartum depression, eventually killing their children.) One of the things Molnar seems to be suggesting is that the line between a wish and acting on a wish is not as inviolable as we like to think, especially when it comes to new mothers, floating between disparate emotions, pressured by the assumptions of others and confronting their own mixed reactions to having created new life.

[Read: The calamity of unwanted motherhood]

The narrator spends the first week of motherhood half-consumed and half-appalled by the unignorable, “steadily oblivious” presence of Button, “a passive, pink, little old creature.” When she’s not vigilantly observing her—“Her repetitive movements remind me of breaststrokes under water”—she is tirelessly taking care of her, all the while dreaming of a time before the baby’s arrival on the scene: “The bassinet next to me is empty, which allows my mind to entertain the thought that Button is forever gone and I can go back to my desk like before.” Her formerly full world has come down to a confined space in which she is always fatigued and hungry, forever undoing her bra so that Button can latch on to her nipples—“It’s time to open the milk bar”—or changing the baby’s diapers or hooking herself up to a breast pump, or, again, replacing the bloodied sanitary pad between her legs where she has been painfully stitched up after delivery.  

Having to deal with her own body leads the narrator into an orgy of self-loathing, in which she stares at her “bloated and neglected” postpartum belly with disgust: “I poke and push the excess flesh around. My fingers sink deep, disappearing in funny bulges of stretched skin.” At other times her loathing is beamed at the infant herself, much to her shame: “I think about how when we clean Button in the evenings, her naked body (barely a she) resembles store-bought poultry in my hands. So easy to slice, but I shouldn’t welcome the thought. Such vile imagination must be pushed out from my consciousness.” Meanwhile, her intrusive fantasies of killing Button—“I mean, sometimes I picture myself crushing her with my foot”—so that she can return to her work and take walks around the unnamed city she lives in lead her to Google How common is wanting to kill your baby? and wonder if she is losing her mind.

The shifts in the narrator’s state of mind are adroitly handled, suggesting the fluid tangle of the real and the imaginary that she is experiencing. Many of her thoughts are deeply disturbing, leaving the reader unclear as to how seriously we are to take them—or, alternately, how seriously the narrator herself takes them. That she is nostalgic for the freedom of her pre-Button life is understandable, but is she nostalgic enough to try to actually restore that life? These are questions that the novel raises without necessarily providing conclusive answers; instead Molnar succeeds in giving complexity to feelings that are often written off didactically as “good” or “bad,” offering us a way of inhabiting the narrator’s tenuous consciousness without the immediate need to pass into the certitude of judgment.

Through brief, vivid flashbacks we learn of the narrator’s life before she became a mother: her memories of the mother she lost at a young age, of biting off the purple nail polish she wore to school, of sleeping on a beach in Croatia, boyfriends, the delight she took in searching for just the right word when she was translating, dinners with other couples, and the passionate sex she and her husband once enjoyed. The narrator’s daily existence is now largely unpeopled except for some friends, who dutifully visit and assure her that that they “will want to participate in the child’s life”; her husband, John; and an elderly, recently widowed upstairs neighbor, Peter, whose visits, together with his oxygen tank, she quickly begins to depend on. She seems to feel most comfortable with this mournful man, listening to his stories about his late wife and not having to cover up her strange and confusing thoughts or apologize for her bedraggled, half-undressed state. “Do you think there is something wrong with me?” she asks him over a cup of tea in the kitchen. “No more than any other person,” he replies in his laconic way.

John, meanwhile, seems well meaning—at one point, the narrator conflates him with their couch as “the sweet and boring epicenter of our home”—but somehow negligible: “I can’t stand that everything John says is a quote,” the narrator thinks after he tries to reassure her that her body will bounce back, “a handful of scripted words that are easy to say for the sake of saying something.” Despite John’s best efforts—cooking dinner, crooning at Button when he gives her a bath, taking her to the pediatrician for her first checkup while his wife catches up on her sleep—the reader is given the sense that he only vaguely comprehends his wife’s ricocheting feelings, in response to which he keeps suggesting that she venture outside their apartment instead of holing up with Button, tracking her every whimper. She, however, allows that “it was a puzzle to me why he loved me,” and states that the birth of the baby signaled John’s “death”; his sexual overtures leave her cold. All the same, it is through John’s thick-headed persistence and encouragement that the narrator finally leaves their building, Button strapped onto her father’s chest. Outside on the street is the promise of life waiting to be picked up again: “The golden hour reflects off our skin and I am reminded: it is my favorite time of the day.”

[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]

The Nursery is a powerful brew of a novel, emitting unpleasant sights, smells, and emotions that are rarely captured in print; it is frequently disquieting in its brutal, insistent candor. “Has there ever been a description in literature of what it entails to change an infant’s diaper?” the narrator asks. Like all books that contain unpretty truths, it is definitely not for the squeamish or for those who insist on always looking at the bright side of things. Although it cuts back and forth, sometimes a bit confusingly, between the narrator’s life pre-pregnancy, the days she spends in the hospital after delivering the baby, and the harrowing aftermath, the cumulative effect gives the novel a largeness of scope that it otherwise might not have had and saves it from potential claustrophobia. The prose occasionally falters, and a phrase will sound as if it were a mistranslation (the writer was born in Budapest and raised in Sweden, though she is writing here in English), but it is in the main charged with an immediacy and directness that pulls the reader in.  

Molnar has written a daring and much-needed novel that has some of the hothouse, unflinching quality of Sylvia Plath’s late poetry. It highlights the fact that, much as we would like to believe otherwise, the maternal instinct is not hardwired, and the unpredictability of the first encounters between mothers and newborns, despite all we are told they should be, bears further study rather than reductive and patronizing theories that don’t always correlate with reality. Consider The Nursery, then, as an alternative script to the one offered in such chestnuts as What to Expect When You’re Expecting, if only to give a fuller and more nuanced picture of the experience of new motherhood, which doesn’t always live up to the insistently rosy portrait we have of it.

Turkey becomes the final member to ratify Finland's application to join the bloc as Sweden's path remains unclear.

When mirrors show us how we look, we adjust what needs to be fixed. We don't break those mirrors simply because we won't accept our reflection.

The vote seals a major change in the European security architecture after militarily nonaligned Finland and Sweden sought NATO membership following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

South Korea’s fertility rate in 2022 was just 0.78 children per woman. In much of America, rates aren’t significantly higher: 0.92 children per woman in Puerto Rico and 1.36 in Vermont; in the Bay Area, it’s about 1.3. Demographers give many explanations for declining birth rates, but one of the most popular revolves around work and family. In countries such as the social-welfare states of Northern Europe, where women are given flexibility to square the demands of work with family, fertility rates are relatively high. In others, where either work or family makes excessive and incompatible demands, family loses out, and fertility falls.

Improving work-life balance is probably worthwhile and good for plenty of reasons. But very little evidence shows that it would have much effect on fertility. For example, when men help more at home, fertility doesn’t rise, one 2018 study found. And although policies to support work and family do boost fertility, their cost is pretty high for fairly modest effects (though they may have other valuable benefits: Child allowances, for example, reduce child poverty).

The ideal way to test the connection would be to randomly give some people a much better set of work-life arrangements and then see whether their family behaviors change. This would be hard to do, but as it happens, something like this random improvement in work-life balance actually occurs—when people win the lottery.

What happens when you win the lottery? Obviously, you get a considerable amount of money. Maybe you buy a new car, or a house, or pay off some debts. But you can also use your new wealth to establish a better work-life-balance: hire a cleaning service or a nanny, or cut back on work hours. Large random transfers of wealth are a nice way to test the materialist account of fertility. If receiving a pile of cash makes people have more babies, then maybe work-life balance matters a lot: More income from less demanding work would boost births. But if lottery winnings don’t increase fertility, maybe the work-life-balance theory needs some adjustment.

A team of economists studying a large pool of lottery players in Sweden found that when men win the lottery, they become a lot likelier than demographically similar lottery losers to get married (if they were lower-income and unmarried before their win), and they have more children. On its face, that supports the work-life-balance idea. But when women win the lottery, the only big change in their behavior is divorce: Divorce rates for women almost double in the first couple of years after winning the lottery.

The authors offer some straightforward explanations. When the men became wealthier, they became more desirable partners; their marriage rate increased by a third. Their increased fertility (an increase of about 13 percent) was itself largely attributable to the effect of being married, because being married tends to cause higher fertility, especially for men. The extra wealth apparently had no major effect on women’s desirability as partners, but—because Swedish law allows lottery winners to hold on to most of the winnings—had perhaps a big effect on their expectations for a postdivorce standard of living, enabling them to feel more confident about exiting a marriage.

Helpfully, the study authors showed that their conclusions matched the findings of another study of lotteries in the United States. It found that winning made both men and women more likely to marry, but that the effect was stronger for men, and that while it decreased divorce rates for men, it increased them for women. Men seem to use their newfound resources to build families, while women use them to exit families.

This seems like an inversion of common stereotypes about men and women. But reality is never so simple.

Marriage is a strong predictor of fertility for many reasons. Not least is the relationship between marital status and mental health, because mental health has a large impact on childbearing. Lottery winnings boosted male marriage and fertility not because men had unique desires for marriage and family, but at least in part because Swedish women were likelier to marry and have children with men who had more money. The effect for men is as much about women’s preferences and behaviors as men’s.  

Women’s responses to winning the lottery were similarly complex. Divorce rates did not rise equally for all of them. That increase, the authors found, was concentrated among previously low-income women, those who had been married to older or wealthier men, and those who were married for three years or less. The conditions under which these women entered into marriages with these husbands could be more important than the lottery winnings. Crucially, 10 years after the lottery, winners were no more likely to divorce than other women. In other words, lottery money may have accelerated inevitable divorces rather than breaking apart couples that would otherwise have stayed together for the long term.

If people want to have more children than they can presently afford—and surveys have repeatedly suggested that they do—and societies as a whole thrive when parents of all kinds are able to raise their children in stable households, then declining birth rates are cause for alarm. And for governments seeking to reverse them by creating family policies, this research indicates that some kinds of spending may prove more effective than others.

First, it suggests that a core part of low fertility is how people (especially women) value potential partners. In surveys, women continue to report desiring much-higher-earning partners, and when men suddenly have more money, they do in fact get married more. Policy makers cannot (and should not) “solve” this by simply handing out “man bonuses.” However, understanding why men and boys are becoming more likely to fall behind women in terms of educational and professional attainment could be a core part of increasing fertility.

Second, policy makers should avoid thinking about family policy as an issue uniquely related to women. Arguments that fertility can be increased by pushing for a maximally gender-egalitarian society or by delivering family subsidies disproportionately to mothers should be reconsidered. You can’t get higher fertility without men on board. Only policies that make space for men and women to choose to prioritize parenting can support higher fertility in industrialized societies.

Third, marriage itself matters, and marriage responds to material incentives. Boosting fertility by directly targeting fertility is difficult and expensive. One reason is that marriage continues to be a gatekeeping institution for larger families. Only by removing obstacles to marriage and helping young people wed earlier and stick together can birth rates be sustainably increased. This is a challenging task, and “pro-nuptialism” has even less high-quality research on it than “pro-natalism.” However, policy makers could offer “marriage bonuses” or at least eliminate marriage penalties, like the fact that low-income people can lose their housing or SNAP benefits if they choose to combine their incomes. This much seems safe to say: Working-class people shouldn’t need to win the lottery to feel that they can afford to get married and have kids.

Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified invasion of Ukraine last year and, for that matter, its first invasion of its neighbor eight years before are impossible to justify. Putin is trying to convince his public that this war is existential, but with little success. Russia’s existence as a strong, sovereign state is not dependent on its control of Ukraine or even parts of the Donbas or Crimea. That’s why since Russian President Vladimir Putin implemented a partial mobilization last fall, hundreds of thousands of men have fled Russia rather than march to the sound of the guns, and it’s why he still refuses to declare war and order a full mobilization.

And yet a small band of critics has rallied beneath the banner of realism to argue against continued Western support for Ukraine’s effort to defend itself. “Russia may be waging a war of aggression as a matter of law,” Mario Loyola wrote in a recent essay in The Atlantic, “but as a matter of history and strategy it is moving to forestall a grave deterioration in its strategic position, with stakes that are almost as existential for it as they are for Ukraine.” But actual realism must be grounded in the details of the situations it assesses. And in the case of Ukraine, those facts lead to very different conclusions.

[Mario Loyola: Ron DeSantis is right about Ukraine]

The borders of Ukraine that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 were enshrined in international law and in numerous treaties and agreements that Russia signed, over and over. They were not a “formality,” as Loyola suggests, nor was Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, and illegal annexation of Crimea, justifiable because “Russia felt it had no choice … because it couldn’t risk losing Sevastopol.” Russia shared Sevastopol with Ukraine for more than a decade and had a lease that would have lasted until the middle of the century. Ukraine was living in peace with Russia until 2014. Putin didn’t like democratic revolutions in neighboring countries, especially in Ukraine, because he feared that Russians would want the same thing, threatening his corrupt, authoritarian system. That’s why he invaded in 2014, and one of the main reasons he launched round two last year.

Loyola is not alone in suggesting that Crimea’s status be treated as a special case for Russia, that it was transferred to Ukraine “only” in 1954 and “is home to few ethnic Ukrainians even now.” Crimea is part of Ukraine. For centuries—until Stalin forcibly moved them to Central Asia during World War II—Crimean Tatars were a major presence in the peninsula even after Russia took control at the end of the 18th century, making up about 20 percent of the population at the time of the deportation (during which up to 50 percent of them died). According to the last census Ukraine administered in Crimea, in 2001, they made up about 10 percent of the population, and Ukrainians 24 percent. Their leadership has been severely repressed by the Russian occupiers. They are as much Ukrainian citizens as any others living on Ukrainian soil.

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

It’s common to hear echoes of Russian propaganda that Ukraine’s pro-Russian government in Ukraine “was deposed” in 2014—but that does not make it true. Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv and wound up in Russia. Another line often heard in Moscow and repeated by some in the West is that pro-Russia presidential candidates won elections until 2014. After 2004’s Orange Revolution, the pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko beat Yanukovych in the rerun of the 2004 presidential election, despite the latter’s efforts to steal victory.

Then there is the argument that NATO enlargement was the reason behind Putin’s invasion in 2014. That, of course, overlooks the fact that Yanukovych legislatively ended Ukraine’s pursuit of closer ties with NATO—and yet Putin wasn’t satisfied with that. Had Putin not pressured Yanukovych into rejecting agreements with the European Union in 2013, the Euromaidan revolution never would have happened. And when current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky floated the idea of neutrality for Ukraine in the very early stages of Russia’s most recent invasion (before the discovery of the atrocities at Bucha and other sites), Putin wasn’t interested. Finally, Putin expressed no concerns about the Finns and Swedes applying for NATO membership.

Loyola and other realists often deny Ukraine and Ukrainians agency. Zelensky, who has performed heroically throughout the war, was democratically elected and has to take into account the views of the Ukrainian people. A recent poll by the International Republican Institute shows that 97 percent of Ukrainians think they can win the war and 74 percent believe Ukraine will maintain all territories from within its internationally recognized borders defined in 1991. Ukrainians strongly oppose any territorial concessions or compromises. They also don’t trust Russia, given how Moscow never lived up to its past commitments to Ukraine, not least the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements.

Moreover, Russia’s tactics—its war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide—have alienated Ukrainians for the foreseeable future. Putin has significantly bolstered Ukrainians’ desire to join NATO: 82 percent now say they would support joining the alliance. Invading neighbors and subjecting them to appalling abuses tends to alienate, not win over, the populations in these countries. When Loyola writes that peace “should be the overriding objective now, but it will require a willingness to compromise,” he omits that this would require forcing a deal on the Ukrainians that they vehemently oppose. It also ignores the fact that senior Russian officials, such as former President Dmitry Medvedev, and the Russian media have said that a key objective of the invasion is to destroy “Ukrainianness,” which is why some observers accuse Moscow of committing not just war crimes but genocide.

The presence of Russian occupiers in Ukrainian territory is unacceptable to Ukrainians. Not only would a peace deal ceding territory betray Ukraine and the concepts of sovereignty and territorial integrity, but it would also justify Putin’s view that the West is weak, and that he can accept its gift of part of Ukraine now—effectively a reward for aggression—and then come back for more, in Ukraine and farther West. China’s President Xi Jinping is also watching the West’s response, and drawing lessons about what the international community might do were he to attack Taiwan.

[Anne Applebaum: China’s war against Taiwan has already started]

Echoing other realists who tend to blame America first, Loyola implies that we pushed Ukraine into war. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Biden administration did everything it could to avert a Russian invasion, and Ukraine also tried to prevent one. Putin wanted to hear none of it, and instead made absurd demands in December 2021 that would have rolled NATO back to its pre-1997 borders and entrenched Russian control over the Eurasian region. What’s more, despite the dreadful performance of his military, Putin has yet to jettison his original, maximalist war aims.

The costs of letting Putin have his way in Ukraine, including the damage it would cause to the decades-old international order, are too grave to bear. If not stopped and defeated in Ukraine, Putin will try his luck in other countries in the region, including Moldova and possibly even the Baltic states. A Russian move against Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania would implicate NATO’s Article 5 security guarantees, potentially pulling the United States into a war with Russia. As it is, the Baltic states have been constant targets of Kremlin provocations, including the cyberattack on Estonia in 2007; the kidnapping of an Estonian official in September 2014, shortly after a visit by President Barack Obama; and the buildup of troops in Moscow’s western military district. If Putin is able to bluff his way to victory in Ukraine, on what basis can we assume that he will not attempt the same in the Baltics? This is clearly understood in Eastern and Northern Europe, and is why traditionally neutral Sweden and Finland want to join NATO.

In Ukraine, the Ukrainians are the ones doing the fighting, and tragically the dying; the United States has no soldiers on the ground. But we have every interest in providing the military support Ukraine needs to win this war and drive every Russian occupying and invading force off Ukrainian territory. No one wants the war to end sooner than the Ukrainians, but they also believe, and with good reason, that they can win, if they get the assistance they need soon. Now is not the time to snatch Russian defeat from the Ukraine’s jaws of victory.

Russia has reignited threats against Sweden and Finland after their historic decision to try and join the Western military alliance.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic becomes the oldest man to play in a European Championship qualifier as Romelu Lukaku scores a hat-trick to lead Belgium to victory against Sweden.

Finland and Sweden applied to NATO 10 months ago, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has yet to approve Sweden’s bid.

A Swedish investigator probing international adoption practices is in South Korea to investigate on the alleged falsified origins of adopted children.