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“My children ruined my career,” Lily Allen told the Radio Times podcast last week. The British pop/rock singer, songwriter and actress is the mother of three children. “I mean I love them and they complete me, but in terms of pop stardom, totally ruined it.”

Writing on the artist’s views, CNN opinion writer Holly Thomas expressed deep sympathy with Allen’s alleged plight:

I shared the communal wave of anger over the fact that male pop stars (and actors and footballers — insert any other profession here) never say these things. They’re never even asked about it, because men’s careers never seem to falter with the advent of parenthood. It was her willingness to express the frank truth, rather than parrot the accepted cookie-cutter lines about ‘learning to prioritize’ or how you can ‘have it all,’ if you put enough sweat in, that I found reassuring.

Thomas goes on to lament, “I was so impressed that, like most people, I almost missed what she said next. She added: ‘If we were actually more about community, and taking care of the community, then maybe you could have it all.’”

Any mother who declares that children have ruined her career is guilty of moral evasion, to put it mildly. What Lily Allen and careerist women like her have failed to realize is that motherhood, which constitutes child rearing, is a career unto itself – the single defining career of a woman’s life. Morally and biologically, this state of affairs is as invariable as the laws of nature. It is utter malarkey, therefore, for a woman to state that motherhood has ruined her career. It is more likely the case that her worldly ambitions have ruined or deeply compromised what ought to be, and biologically is, her primary career: motherhood.

But how have women come to this mistaken view that motherhood exists in some realm separate from one’s life and from worldly career pursuits? I submit it is only the sacrilegious ideology of feminism that has had the temerity to de-sacralize motherhood and pit it against competing roles a woman may choose to define her conception of the good life. Motherhood is the good, simpliciter, of the life of any conscientious woman. If it is not, if she chooses to put her role as a mother in competition with a secondary career, be it medicine, the law, banking—whatever—then she is a morally inverted female, and an unconscientious derelict.

It is not the so-called patriarchy (which does not exist in the United States of America, a country governed through and through by gynocentric, feminist, matriarchal sensibilities) that mandates motherhood as woman’s primary career. Rather, it is a woman’s own biological makeup which obligates her to devote herself to the care of offspring. As the mistress of birth, as the one who nurtures the development of the growing fetus and then the fully developed in utero baby and who births him or her, the mother is metaphysically committed to be the primary caregiver. For the survival of the child this must be the case. All the well intentions of a lactating progressive male feminist dad will not make up for the fact that it is the soft, pliant fleshy body of the mother that the child needs and gravitates towards. The infant instinctively gropes towards the mother for its primal satisfaction of his or her needs. This is a law of nature which two gay dads in their perverse and selfish desire to subvert the laws of nature can never justify.

And let it be noted that motherhood is not a job. It is not something one applies for, nor is it an appointment. So, when we speak of it as a career, we are speaking colloquially.

Whether motherhood is consciously undertaken, or is bestowed upon one “accidentally,” it is a gift from God. Gifts add superlative value to the quality of a life. They do not ruin lives unless one is beholden to a false narrative that beguiles one into thinking that one’s most exalted and noblest profession is really a curse on one’s life.

The aspersions against motherhood as the primary and unrivaled career in a woman’s life comes on the heels of another pernicious ideology that trivializes the sacred womb that is the repository of the infant: the so-called pro-choice movement that regards the womb as a piece of amalgamated cells codified into a sac that can be harpooned and invaded indiscriminately, and made into the site of a crime scene: the place where fetal murder takes place. If the sacred place where life begins can be rapaciously invaded and the life contained therein annihilated, then it should come as no surprise that children can be regarded as objects that can ruin a career. Children then become a mere afterthought. They are superseded by something much greater in the minds of career-driven women: an ephemeral role that by its nature cannot fill the regenerative domain that children occupy in one’s life.

Women who think children ruin their careers are in a for a rude awakening. Life for a woman at forty-five without children and a partner is empty, voided and deeply unfulfilling. No protestations to the contrary can prove otherwise. Metaphysically speaking, a career and material wealth can never satisfy the universal need for regeneration and self-reproduction that is part of the human condition. A wealthy, Harvard-educated woman with a PhD in economics, who owns her own hedge fund company, who is single and childless, will never know the happiness and fulfillment of a simple working-class mother of six who sits on New York’s Long Island beach making sandcastles with her grandchildren.

In trying to be like men, few of whom opt to be single and childless unless they are gay or suffering from some unresolved childhood trauma, many modern women who are childless – or worse, who have children and put them in competition with their professional careers – are engaged in a form of existential eugenics. It is neither normal nor natural to desire to be childless, nor to undermine the supremacy of motherhood. Happy, self-confident mothers who are deeply connected to their bodies, their emotions, and their children do not commit the categorical mistake of comparing motherhood to professional careers. They do not put the two roles in competition with each other.

To women like Lily Allen, the only moral rejoinder one can issue is: Yes, children did and ought to ruin your career. No conscientious mother should ever aspire to be a superstar or rockstar in this world. Terminate the fantasy. Motherhood, once you’ve undertaken to embrace it, is your highest calling. Those who are not completed by it, who can find no fulfilment in it, and who seek to have its reverent nature supplanted by an obsession with the social spheres of their lives will be ruined by the tyranny of an ambition that, by its nature, is limited in its capacity to deliver sustained joy and happiness and to commit one to a purpose and meaning higher than oneself.

There is a deep-seated neurosis at the epicenter of the mother’s psyche who feels an abysmal void, conflict, and frustration when caught between the demands of motherhood and a high-powered career, or any job for that matter, that limits her professional advancement. Her moral mandate is to advance her capabilities in as far a manner as is possible in her role as a mother. Such a frustrated woman has lost the essence of her femininity (which includes the desire to look up to a man and to be grounded and anchored in motherhood) and has taken on the ethos and sensibilities of a man, who fundamentally finds his identity in work and worldly achievement. Motherhood by its nature constrains worldly ambitions because care of the young requires a single-minded devotion to the young; a meditation on and intuition of their every need. It requires a life of chastity in the sense that theologian Erik Varden meant the term: in Biblical language, chastity is a function of simplicity of sight. We are no longer torn apart by our passions and our desires. Indeed, they may reach their fulfilment. Body and spirit, order and disorder, passion and death can move from creative tension to a new kind of wholeness.

No career outside of motherhood can provide this simplicity of sight and this maneuvering of chaos into order and wholeness. Let motherhood and the bearing of children destroy worldly careers. It is only in this destruction that a lucidity of purpose and meaning can be gleaned, and an unalterable and implacable wholeness can be found.

The struggle between motherhood and career ceases and, instead, a genuflection before the source of all life offers itself up as a sacred salute.