There Should Be Less, and There Should Be More.
And what if what you wanted to do was actually impossible?
At some point in late October, Luke saw a tweet that said something like, “Welcome to the illness your infant will have for the next five months.” (It was so not-exactly-that that I can’t seem to Google it.) Our then-10-month-old daughter, T, had just gotten sick, and had been sent home from daycare, and Luke and I were new to scrambling about what to do about childcare. He read me the tweet and we laughed too loudly, nervously, in perfect unison. “Wouldn’t that be horrible!” One or both of us said. Frankly, the details of this, and everything from the past five months, are blurry. Looking back at this attitude — one of naive hope that SURELY our daughter would not be sick every single day for five entire months — I am ashamed at my hubris. Of COURSE she would be sick for five entire months. The man on Twitter said it would be so, and so, it was so.
I’m slightly exaggerating. T’s sicknesses since October have looked sort of like this:
Nevertheless, the childcare scramble is a weekly assignment. If, somehow, T isn’t sick, then the daycare is closed one day for professional development; or she has an afternoon routine checkup doctor’s appointment; or there’s too much snow. The reason it’s a scramble is that Luke and I both work full time. Here is the way that a person’s work reacts when you tell them you can’t come in because your child can’t go to daycare:
1st and 2nd time: Totally understanding. They find you sort of heroic. You are a good family man.
3rd and 4th time: What are you feeding this kid that she keeps being sick?
5th and 6th time: Your direct superior, Leora, texts you, “Has your daughter ever NOT been sick?”
7th time: Everyone thinks surely you’re lying.
8th time: Sort of impressed that you have the audacity to keep up what is now clearly a lie.
9th time: Leora, privately: “Maybe I should just have a kid so I can stay home and eat tortilla chips on the couch all the time!”
I mention the tolerance decline because, for both and Luke and me, other people’s judgement is actually worse than the other obvious effect of having to take the day off to watch a sick baby: we don’t get paid. Neither of us gets paid for days we don’t work1, but we still have to pay the daycare for the days T can’t go in because she’s sick. And, for the record, this latter fact is absolutely the way it should be: childcare workers are already tremendously underpaid, and it’s essential for them to have a sturdy sense of the amount of money they’re going to be making all week. Plus, every child is sick for every day of every October through March, and there would be no living to be made at all if you didn’t have to pay for the days your kid couldn’t come to daycare.
Last year, we had a shared nanny, which meant that T almost never got sick (because she was not swimming around in everyone else’s germs), but we were totally dependent on a single human person to show up every day and watch our daughter, and if I had to work from home (which happens!), there was no doing that without also parenting on the side. It was also twice as expensive. But you already knew all of this, because we all know it. We know what parents sign up for when they become parents. We have been told that it’s impossible. Being told that it’s impossible is, sneakily, one of parenthoods’ selling points: you are supposed to privately believe that you will be the exception and it will NOT be impossible for YOU. And you have evidence that this is possible, because Instagram.
I imagine you’ve heard about performative motherhood. It’s having a moment in the media. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this article in The New York Times, and allow it to lead you to dozens of other articles that all declare the same thing: These Instagram moms are toxic, and they’re lying. This is a sentiment I sort of agree with, but it also strikes me as targeting individuals rather than systems.
Here’s an excerpt from Jessi Klein’s I’ll Show Myself Out (yep, still reading it) that made me slam the book down and scream into a pillow:
My very brilliant, very wise obstetrician was the one who finally settled it during a checkup. When I asked her for her thoughts on hiring a night nurse, she was unequivocal: “If you can afford it, you must,” she said. Her explanation was the humans don’t raise children the way we were naturally wired to anymore. We used to live surrounded by a village. We are not meant to raise newborns and infants without families around us. We were designed to have babies when we were fifteen, and be surrounded by our still very young parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and cousins, who would be constantly helping us. Upon reflection, I had to accept that she had a point. That did sound better. I was already really fucking old, which meant my parents were even older than that. They were nearby in Manhattan, and while they could be relied upon for lots of love and moral support, we could certainly not ask them to stay over and change a diaper in the middle of the night. Other than them, we didn’t really have available family help anywhere near us. While this is common, as my doctor explained, it definitely isn’t normal.
Klein names her privilege here, and I love this book completely, AND: most people don’t live close enough to their extended family to get the help that is biologically necessary for raising a child; and I have never met a person with enough money to hire a night nurse.
At least when you’re raising a child, you (and your wise obstetrician) know that you need help to do all the things you’re being asked to do. When you’re raising a career, or managing a household, or fighting for justice full-time, or building anything at all, there is NO expectation that anyone is supposed to help you. The myth of rugged, individual heroism is so pervasive, that a request for help continues to be seen as a sign of weakness. But if you accept that yes, actually, we all need help to manage what we’re asked to manage, a new question arises. Who are all these helpers? Why is one person’s project or baby or family or job more important and more worthy of assistance than someone else’s? Is it true that the people who can afford help are people who earned it? What does it mean to earn it? Is it true that the people whose job is to provide help fundamentally love helping? How can anyone know that they don’t want to be a helper if they have been raised by generations of helpers who only know about helping? None of this is fair.
Ultimately, there should be less, and there should be more. Less to do; more people to do it. There should be fewer projects, we should be moving more slowly, we should be focused on collaborating with each other rather than bossing each other around. But these are shoulds that you don’t have a lot of control around. And anyway, once again, T is sick.
T is sick, and I want to be good at community and polyamory, so I wanted to be able to ask for help. But my girlfriend has a full-time job, and so does her husband; and my boyfriend lives in Atlanta; and there’s no norm around asking for help with your baby outside of asking immediate family. Your baby is your baby, period. And it’s too bad, because actually, I think a lot of people would benefit from hanging out with a baby. I interviewed queer writer and educator S. Bear Bergman, who shared a “joke” that I actually thought was a kind of brilliant idea?
“I definitely remember at the beginning of lockdown making a joke and saying, ‘I think we need to match a single person who lives alone with every family with small children.’ So that like everybody can get some of what they need. You know, everybody that I knew who was parenting during the first couple of years of Covid was just exhausted all the time. And the people who were single and did not have children felt lonely and miserable a lot of the time.”
But anyway, I’m meandering. As I was wringing my hands about not being a good enough feminist, activist, mother, polyamorist, fill-in-the-blank, my girlfriend Kat texted me:
It isn’t your fault that the system is broken. When you’re living in actual or proverbial Sick Kid Land, and you’re thinking, “WHY CAN’T I DO THIS AS WELL AS OTHER PEOPLE SEEM TO BE DOING IT?” The answer is that no one can. The people who seem like they can have help. Whenever you’re feeling insufficient, it’s because you’ve been presented with a swimming pool, and you’ve been asked to fill it, but all you have is a single bottle of water. Not even one of those huge bottles you get at a gas station on a long car trip: just your typical, 12-ounce bottle of water. And what’s more: EVERYONE has only a single bottle of water. It’s not like you’re hiding more water somewhere, and because you’ve made poor choices, you can’t find it. When people appear to fill the pool, it’s because (1) They recruited a bunch of other people’s water; or (2) They have manipulated the picture so it LOOKS like the pool is full, but really, most of the pool is filled with bricks.
I believe that there’s another possible future for humanity, where there are more people doing fewer things; where the expectations we currently hold for individuals become expectations for whole groups, collectives, or organizations. It’s not even that radical an idea: I believe that shifts can happen while we’re all still alive, and that it will be as good for us as humans as it is for us, the world.
But that does nothing for you right now, and besides, whatever I have to prescribe would take a whole book, and not a set of paragraphs.
So I offer you the following exercise. Please picture an area in your life where you are currently falling short; where you wish you were doing better. Maybe you wish you went to the gym every day; you wish you were a more attentive partner; you have overreacted about a small thing; you have under-reacted about a big thing. Think about an area of shame, or of not-good-enough-ness, and wonder: What if the thing I am trying to do is actually impossible? You probably have a little guy to show up and say, “Oh, Erin2, of COURSE it’s not impossible. You COULD do it if you just TRIED HARDER!” Alright. Now say to that voice (FIRMLY this time), But WHAT IF it was not actually possible?
If it was not actually possible — like turning hot pink by sheer force of will, or building an earthquake-safe home out of only greasy diner pancakes — you would have to let it go.
“Possible” is a weird word, and a misleading concept. If it was possible for you to be better at the thing you wish you were better at, it would NOT be possible for you to be good at something else that you are probably currently doing well. You only have the resources you have. And if this is the situation, and you can understand that there is no future where you will do everything that you have yourself believing you have to do, well, then, could you just laugh at it a little bit? Just a little giggle at the incredible silliness of the idea that you, a single human, should be able to fill a whole swimming pool with a single bottle of water? And if you could laugh at it, might that disarm the whole notion altogether, even if only slightly?
With Love,
Sophie
We are in The New Yorker this week:
The fun story about this cartoon is that we actually wrote it and sold it more than two years ago. That’s how long it sometimes takes for a thing to show up in a magazine! Also worth knowing is that this was a “tack-on” cartoon — an extra that I wrote while on a walk that I threw in just for the heck of it.
This is not totally true for in my job as a Lecturer at a college, where I’m salaried and allowed two days of leave without consequence.
Or whatever your name is.
Sophie love the cartoon ❤️
THIS: "I believe that there’s another possible future for humanity, where there are more people doing fewer things; where the expectations we currently hold for individuals become expectations for whole groups, collectives, or organizations." Love it.
However, I do find that even at an individual level (let alone societal level), it's nearly impossible to imagine. Do *less*? A *lot* less? No, no...I wouldn't want to waste my life being unproductive.
It's crazy how hard people with a lot of resources work, and it seems that culturally we are unable or unwilling to pump the breaks. I'm curious how this shift might begin.