‘Beautiful Chaos Of A Mother’s Heart’: Jessie Buckley Uses Oscar Speech To Honor Husband, Daughter
In the midst of such a disorienting, selfish atmosphere, comments like Buckley's serve as a tether for women who do hope for more.In the midst of such a disorienting, selfish atmosphere, comments like Buckley's serve as a tether for women who do hope for more.‘String Cheese’: Why an ‘American Idol’ audition is making millions of moms cry
These days, it feels like war is everywhere I turn. Culture wars on social media. Actual war on the news. Spiritual war invisibly raging all around. War inside me. Even the piling dishes and the toys that never stay tidy can feel like a kind of war.
But every now and then, a sunbeam pierces the thundercloud and silences the cacophony for a brief moment, allowing me to breathe and recenter. Sometimes it’s a timely sermon, other times a gentle breeze and birdsong. Coffee with a dear friend can do the trick.
'String Cheese' ministers to my weary soul by reminding me that what I call trials are actually gifts.
But this week, it was “American Idol” contestant Hannah Harper’s song “String Cheese.”
The name is silly; the lyrics are anything but. Right from the start — “I warm my morning coffee up for the third time” — I was smiling, nodding along in quiet recognition. Then the line, “Babies crying, it's pure chaos, but I don't miss a beat,” hit, and my eyes filled. Tears streamed until the final note.
And I’m certainly not the only one reaching for the tissue box. Harper’s anthem about the realities of motherhood has touched the hearts of millions in the six weeks since it went viral.
On February 2, the 25-year-old Missouri mother of three — dressed in a homemade patchwork mid-length dress, her strawberry curls pinned atop her head — proved her talent for both singing and song-writing when she auditioned for the 24th “American Idol” contest by performing her original song.
It was an unsurprising unanimous yes from judges Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, and Lionel Richie — and seemingly from America herself. “String Cheese” has racked up millions of views (and tears), peaked at No. 14 on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart, and has already become one of the most viewed Idol audition moments in the show’s history.
Suffering through the storm
It’s not like there’s a shortage of music that tugs on our heartstrings, so what about Harper’s country-style ballad is resonating with so many Americans?
I think there are two main reasons.
The first is that there’s something for nearly every woman in this song.
For the new mom under the black cloud of postpartum depression, whose motherhood feels more like a curse than a blessing, “String Cheese” offers the kind of encouragement only empathy can provide. Harper vulnerably confessed in her audition that the song was inspired by her struggles with postpartum depression.
“My youngest is 1, and shortly after he was born, I had postpartum depression, and so I was sitting on my couch ... I was just having a pity party, praying that the Lord would calm my spirit. ... I got up off the couch, and I quit throwing a pity party ... so I wrote this song,” she told the judges.
“Some days I wanna cry, run away and hide / But I worry about their every need,” goes one verse.
Any mother who’s been in the throes of PPD knows this feeling in her bones. The sleep deprivation, the hormonal landslide that occurs after birth, the endless needs, ceaseless crying, and lack of time to meet your own basic needs start to amount to something truly terrifying.
Suddenly, the walls begin to close in, and your biological self-defense mechanisms start screaming at you to flee. But something even stronger — a deep, primitive force that almost scares you — compels you to stay even as you wither. The mere thought of your child’s needs being met by anyone other than you is enough to keep you rooted to his or her side.
So you stay, and you suffer until the storm eventually passes.
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When 'touched out' turns existential
The song also offers a beautiful perspective to the overwhelmed mother, just trying to make it through another day of nonstop demands, tantrums, obligations, and messes.
“When I'm overwhelmed and touched out
They come climbin' up on the couch
Sayin', 'Mama, can you open my string cheese?'"
Sometimes a simple snack request when you’re just trying to catch your breath is the drop in the bucket that tips the scale. For me, it’s seeing tiny, sticky fingerprints on a surface I just cleaned. Every mom has that thing that takes her from typical stress levels to existential crisis.
It’s tempting sometimes to fantasize about the days when life will be easier, quieter, and cleaner, but Harper sends mothers to their knees with this reminder:
“One day I’ll be alone with a hot fresh cup of joe,
Wishing that someone would just drop by.
And I’ll sit and reminisce on times that I sure miss
Scattered toys and a baby on my hip.
I thought finding peace in the quiet’s what I wanted,
But I’d do anything to go back to being needed.”
For the mom struggling to keep her head above the rising tide, “String Cheese” is not only the promise that she won’t drown but that the water isn’t as deep as she thinks. In fact, there will come a day, and soon, when she will long for the feeling of waves lapping at her chin.
Saved from waste
And finally, this tearful anthem is for the woman who is afraid of motherhood. Maybe she feels she doesn’t have the resources — financial, time, emotional, or otherwise — to be a good mom. Maybe she’s bought the feminist lie that motherhood is an unwelcome burden, a barrier to her personal ambitions and dreams, or simply more effort than it’s worth.
Two short lines are the timely message this startlingly large population of women need to hear:
“I never knew this is what my 20s would look like,
But they saved me before I had the chance to waste my life.”
The moment when a mother first looks in her baby’s face, something remarkable happens: All the things she once fretted over — time, money, preparedness, even happiness — lose their power, and a life without that child becomes unthinkable. The career, the travel bucket list, the free time, the clean house, the bank account, the mental stability all take their rightful place behind the tiny, wriggling creature in her arms. She knows that to have everything she ever dreamed of — but not the child — would be exactly as Harper says: a waste of life.
With the exception of the gospel, this is the most important message young women in America need to hear today.
Three women
I think “String Cheese” hits me so deeply because I am all three of these women. I’ve been the new adult in my early 20s, terrified of motherhood, barely capable of caring for myself, unsure that a swanky downtown loft and a cool-girl job that allowed me to travel wasn’t the better path. I’ve been the newly married woman in my mid-20s, wondering how on earth we’d afford a baby.
I’ve been the new mom, crushed by the reality of caring for a newborn who didn’t sleep, nurse, or stop crying for months and months and months (and then some more months).
Today, I am the mom who is just trying to make it through another day of work, meeting the emotional and physical needs of an almost 2-year-old who never stops moving (and still doesn’t sleep that great), housekeeping, and the ceaseless task of keeping tummies full.
“String Cheese” ministers to my weary soul by reminding me that what I call trials are actually gifts.
But it does something else for me too. It pulls my gaze in the right direction: down. Down to the blue eyes and the chocolate-smudged mouth that says “mama” 800 times a day.
And that’s the second reason this song is striking such a chord with so many Americans right now — women and men alike. Every day we watch the world grow more dystopian, as wars rage overseas, political divides deepen at home, and AI swallows entire industries whole. We fret over our children's futures, yet in that very worry, we often overlook one of their most basic needs: our full attunement. This song adjusts our posture in the most simple but profound of ways.
Win or lose, Hannah Harper is already an American idol. In one simple song, she has reminded us that the most profound victories aren't won on distant battlefields or in viral debates. They’re won right here in the ordinary, messy, sacred trenches of the home, where a child's small request for string cheese is really a divine invitation to love fiercely, stay present, and choose joy amid the storms.
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'My husband and I are living, breathing, walking testimonies that what the world gives is so much less compared to the fullness of what you can have in Christ.'The great replacement, American style
Earlier this month, the Cato Institute — perhaps the most effective think tank advocating open borders — published a study claiming that since 1994, immigration has generated a whopping $14.5 trillion surplus in tax revenues over expenditures.
Critics quickly noted that Cato’s study uses a strange standard for judging immigration policy. For example, the study admits that immigration drives up housing prices by increasing demand, yet it still treats the resulting rise in property-tax payments from homeowners — citizens and noncitizens alike — as a benefit.
Who the ‘American people’ were in 1776 or 1787, or are in 2026, is a much-disputed question, but that does not exempt us from trying to answer it.
But perhaps more fundamental is the study’s idea of what should count as an expenditure on immigrants. It treats the educational and medical expenses of immigrants’ American-born children — all of whom Cato claims are “birthright citizens” — as expenditures on citizens rather than on immigrants. This is the same kind of sleight of hand we saw during COVID, when the rise in illness experienced after the first of two shots was counted as cases among the unvaccinated rather than the half-vaccinated.
Statistical games aside, such studies raise a far deeper question: To whose well-being, security, and liberty is the government of the United States directed? That is answered for us in the preamble to our fundamental law, the Constitution of 1787:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
When I cited the preamble recently, the libertarian economist Glen Whitman replied that it is not binding law. Perhaps, but it is something more fundamental than law — it tells us what our laws should be trying to achieve.
Who the “American people” were in 1776 or 1787, or are in 2026, is a much-disputed question, but that does not exempt us from trying to answer it.
When John Rawls — the late political philosopher and the most influential liberal theorist of my generation — tried to explain how rational people should design society’s basic institutions, he did not treat civilization as nothing more than a collection of isolated individuals. In his famous “original position,” he argued that we should imagine ourselves not only as individuals but also as representatives of “continuing persons” — family heads, or stewards of enduring family lines.
This concept of continuing persons was Rawls’ clunky but effective mid-20th-century version of Gouverneur Morris’ more eloquent “ourselves and our posterity.” It does not seem crazy or racist — Rawls would have said it was reasonable — to think that immigration policy should be assessed from the perspective of current citizens and their descendants. In fact, that was how the historical Rawls claimed we should think about immigration, much to the surprise and dismay of his students and epigones.
On social media, we find the repeated cry that the so-called great replacement — the notion that elites are exchanging native populations for more tractable revenue producers — is a demagogic lie. After all, the open-borders pundits argue, more immigration doesn’t mean anybody is forced to leave.
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But we are all forced to leave. Someday, each of us will be reunited with his or her fathers and mothers. Our descendants — the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren we leave behind in the country we made for them — are our posterity.
Another problem is that mass immigration not only increases the demand for housing, but it also suppresses the wage expectations of the native-born, particularly native-born men who are low-income workers. By increasing housing prices and reducing lifetime wages, mass immigration erodes the economic foundation required for family life, making fewer native-born men marriageable.
This decreases the fertility of the native-born. While an increasing share of children are born to unwed mothers, unwed parenting is sufficiently difficult that few such mothers have more than one child, and very few have more than two. Governments then trumpet studies like Cato’s to justify bringing in immigrants to support the aging natives who do not have enough of their own posterity to meet the fiscal need.
To paraphrase Charles de Gaulle, the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men. But if we want our graves to be tended and our memories to be revered by our posterity, we need to work now to ensure that immigration policy serves the welfare, security, and liberty of that posterity.
Those who continue the work of George Washington and the other founders by maintaining and passing on the union they built — stronger, more united, and free — may not be their blood relatives, but they can justly claim to be their spiritual progeny.
A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.
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Police officers searching high and low for a missing toddler in Louisville, Kentucky, last month received an unlikely assist from a four-legged hero.
While a drone and police helicopter searched overhead for signs of the 3-year-old boy, officers with the Louisville Metro Police Department's Seventh Division canvased the neighborhood, keenly aware that time was of the essence.
'Lassie found him!'
Officer Josh Thompson indicated that a fellow officer heard tell of a report from a woman "that called in about a kid. It wasn't the same description, but it was a young kid — hit her Ring doorbell camera, ran off."
After following up with the woman, Thompson learned that the boy had ventured to the home across the street.
The front porch of that residence was flanked by packages, and there were no obvious signs of anyone being inside. So Thompson inspected the rear of the house, taking note that "there's some spots where a kid may be."
When returning to the front of the home, hoping that this time someone might answer the door, Thompson realized that he was being tailed.
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"There's a dog, starts walking with me," Thompson recalled. "At first, you don't know about dogs. You don't know where the dog's from, so I'm kind of being a little leery of the dog. He's barking, chirping at me a little bit, and then continues to follow me back to the front porch."
The dog was relentless, yapping at Thompson in an apparent effort to get his attention.
Bodycam footage shows Thompson gesture to the dog and say, "Let's go find him! Come on! Let's go!" Immediately, the dog spins, then begins leading the officer back toward the rear of the house.
"It led me all the way back to the back yard. At that point, I'm thinking, 'Okay, this kid's in this back yard,'" recalled Thompson.
Noticing that the back door was ajar, officers briefly checked inside the house for the child but found nothing. When the officers came out empty-handed, they were greeted again by the dog, which hurried over to a parked car.
Moments later, Thompson heard his fellow officer, who had accompanied the dog through the back yard, announce victory: "I got him!"
"The kid was in the front passenger seat, terrified," said Thompson.
With some coaching from the officers, the kid was able to unlock the door and was greeted with cheers.
"I don't think I've ever seen a happier kid in my life," said Thompson. "He jumped out of the car, bear-hugged my neck, and wouldn't let go."
In the footage, it's clear that the dog was similarly excited over the result, wagging its tail excitedly and darting its nose from officer to officer.
"Lassie found him!" says one of the officers.
Thompson suggested that in his two years patrolling the neighborhood, he had never seen the hero dog before or since.
"I don't know where the dog came from," he said. "But it was a blessing from God that day."
The LMPD stated, "Outstanding work by our officers, and a four-legged friend who reminded us that heroes come in all forms."
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