It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, “I Love My Children, I Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience.
译：詹妮弗·森尼尔那篇见解深刻、引人深思的杂志封面文章《我爱我的孩子们，我讨厌我的生活》引发热议并不奇怪——没有什么比“育儿绝非全然是件令人满足、充实人生的经历”这种提法更能让人们议论纷纷了。
Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition.
译：森尼尔并没有断言孩子到底会让父母快乐还是痛苦，而是建议我们需要重新定义幸福：不该将其视为一种可以用即时的快乐来衡量的东西，而应将其看作一种过去时的状态。
Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that “the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight.”
译：尽管日复一日抚养孩子的经历可能艰难到摧残灵魂，但森尼尔写道：“恰恰是那些当时令我们情绪低落的事情，日后会成为我们强烈满足感与愉悦感的源泉。”
The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week.
译：杂志封面上那位迷人的母亲抱着一个可爱的婴儿，这绝非本周报摊上唯一的“圣母圣婴”式画面。
There are also stories about newly adoptive—and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual “Jennifer Aniston is pregnant” news.
译：还有关于刚且刚恢复单身的母亲桑德拉·布洛克的报道，以及常见的“詹妮弗·安妮斯顿怀孕了”的新闻。
In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing?
译：在一个如此执着颂扬生育的社会里，承认自己后悔生了孩子就等于承认你支持虐杀小猫，这还有什么奇怪的吗？
It doesn’t seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the childless.
译：那么，将为人父母者的悔恨与无子女者的悔恨相提并论，似乎就不太公平了。
Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn’t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives.
译：不快乐的父母很少被诱导去思考自己是否本不该要孩子，但不快乐的无子女者却总被“孩子是世界上唯一最重要的东西”这样的信息所困扰：显然，他们的痛苦一定是生活中那孩子大小的空缺所直接导致的。
Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock.
译：像《美国周刊》和《人物》这样的名人杂志呈现的为人父母形象是极不现实的，尤其是当父母是像布洛克这样的单身母亲时。
According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all.
译：根据几项研究的结论，有孩子的父母比无子女的夫妇更不快乐，而单身父母是所有群体中最不快乐的。
No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their “own” (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.
译：这并不奇怪，考虑到没有伴侣可依靠，独自抚养一个孩子需要付出多少艰辛；听桑德拉和布兰妮的描述，她们“独自”（解读：有着全天候的帮助）抚养孩子简直是小菜一碟。
It’s hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous; most *s understand that a baby is not a haircut.
译：很难想象，很多人会蠢到仅仅因为瑞茜和安吉丽娜让生孩子看起来如此光鲜就要孩子；大多数成年人都明白，养孩子不是换个发型那么简单。
But it’s interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren’t in some *all, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a *all part of us hoped getting “the Rachel” haircut might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.
译：但有意思的是，我们每周看到的那些毫无压力、提升幸福感的为人父母的形象，是否在以某种微小的、潜意识的方式加剧我们对自己实际经历的不满呢？就像我们心底有一小部分曾希望剪个“瑞秋”发型能让我们看起来有点像詹妮弗·安妮斯顿一样。