On Having Children, or the Apparently Unhappy Duty of Parenthood

I hope those of you who know me well know that I would never really complain about being a parent. Being a dad is about the best thing I can imagine. Owen has enriched my life in so many ways and completely shifted the way I see the world and my place within it. He is adorable, fun, surprising; every day is different. He is at an incredibly fun age and I spend most of my time around him trying to take meaningful mental snapshots of moments that I perceive all too well are only fleeting.

At the same time, I get the burden part of parenting. Especially when Clara was working nights and I was on baby duty. And I complained in the way people complain about a job they really like, but feel bound by the code of the American workplace to complain about from time to time, but I never really had a big beef with the parenting thing. It was unpleasant to get woken up at 2:30 in the morning by a screaming, hungry baby who would much rather partake in the nourishment his mother could provide rather than sit in my awkward arms and suck on a bottle. But there was this beautiful, little creature in your arms that you are completely responsible for. And he closes his eyes and rubs his fingers through his hair or strokes your hand as you hold the bottle and somehow it is all perfect. 

Clara and I watched the movie What to Expect When You're Expecting the other night and this issue was brought up. A father-to-be starts hanging out with a group of dads who use their time together to complain about the less desirable parts of parenthood. The father-to-be mistakes this venting session for the whole story and imagines parenting to be a nightmare. But then the dads tell him the truth: that they love their children incredibly but sometimes it is hard. One dad says, in a line I can relate to well, "I love my kid so much I am afraid I am going to eat him."

It was with this in mind that I read a recent article in the Atlantic about parenting called “Not Wanting Kids is Entirely Normal” byJessica Valenti. I feel like there is a lot to take issue with in her argument. One of the most obvious to me is the insane notion that the idea about parenting most prevalent in our culture is that it is a fun-filled thrill ride. I don’t know what pop-cultural presentation would tell someone that about raising kids. Almost every example I can think of seems to portray parenting at best as controlled madness and at worst as life-ending drudgery. There might be some mommy blogs out there talking about how fantastic it is to change little Christopher’s poopies, but the general message is that this whole thing kind of sucks. Therefore even basing an article on the idea that women in this culture are totally encouraged to be content little babymakers is ludicrous.

That point aside, on to some more substantive criticism. Valenti quotes approvingly a mother who claims that although she was opposed to abortion before having a child, now that she has lived through the waking nightmare of parenthood she would run to the abortion clinic if her body did its job again. This woman is used to make the claim that a lot of parents hate parenting and therefore the notion that one ought to be a parent is wrong because some people don’t like it. It really is as circular as that. Since when is people sucking at something evidence that the thing they suck at is not worthy? This is the argument of children, not of adults. I’m not good at the piano. Piano sucks. Running makes my cankles sore. Running sucks. Dostoevsky is hard to read. Dostoevsky sucks. And reading, too. I don’t mean to entirely conflate the notion that sucking at parenting and being unhappy with parenting are of a piece, but it seems to me to be the case. Attitude is largely a matter of choice. As an adventurous friend told me on my first backpacking trip, “The difference between ordeal and adventure is attitude.” Being unhappy and unfulfilled in parenting, then, is largely a choice as well. A difficult choice, no doubt. Certainly more difficult than doing whatever the hell you want all of the time (though the people I know who do this never seem quite as happy as the parents I know). But every parent knows that when that baby wakes up and you’re tired and don’t want to get up, it is your choice how to react. And every parent has reacted in that situation both positively and negatively and can tell you the difference between the two.

If only she knew how unhappy this was really making her

Valenti further charges parenting with committing that most egregious of modern sins (no, not opposing homosexual marriage): removing selfhood. You are now a mother, not an individual. In other words, and this really is quite appalling, you are seen in relation to other people instead of your own, unique-as-a-snowflake self. My goodness! Before having Owen, Clara was Clara Jean Coffman, R.N. Now, poor woman, she is Clara Jean Coffman, Owen’s mom (and R.N.). And let me tell you, this loss of self has been paralyzing. Where before she could get up at 5 a.m. a few days a week to put on scrubs and drive to a hospital to take care of other people’s kids, now she is caged within the four walls of our apartment (or at the park, the zoo, or elsewhere) hanging out with our child. It is really terrible to see the road she is going down. Now I will grant that we’re not really the people Valenti is targeting (though I am not too sure who those people might be; those who carry unexpected babies to term are, generally speaking, not readers of The Atlantic Monthly; she is writing, no doubt, for the noble cause of raising awareness). But whether you’re rich or poor, married or not, young or old, all parents have to make the same basic decisions. And your attitude toward your children is not dictated by socioeconomic standing.

I think the reason this article so deeply offended me as I read it was that it denied there is a better alternative, apart from better family planning. There was no, “Hey parent, stop being a selfish dipshit.” The remedy is all external. Plan better. Know that it’s OK to resent your children. Pretend humans aren’t integrally linked to one another in community. Above all, be your own true self. In his classic work Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neal Postman (a nonobservant Jew) observed of our modern ethic that where once a drunkard (his example) was told to despise himself and find God, today he is told to find himself. In other words, change that once required an emptying of self, a release from the bondage and tyranny of self, now rather requires one to find one’s own true self (an interesting object lesson in the way the individual has taken the place of God). In Valenti’s case, this consists of coming to terms with not wanting to be a parent instead of asking if there might be some deeper aberration underlying this odd denial of both biology and human history and community.

Parenting is hard. So are most things worth doing. The woman who decides to forego motherhood to climb the corporate ladder is also going to run into difficulties along the way. The couple who decides to forego children so they can take all of the vacations they want in their 20s and 30s are going to be lonely at some point as they age. That, and they will probably also lump their affections on to the children of their own siblings, pretending that being the cool aunt (in their own eyes) is more important than being a parent. Valenti is wrong from the beginning, as I pointed out a few paragraphs back. Parenting is not valued in our culture, broadly speaking. The response to this that Valenti interprets as normal is nothing but a reaction to the broad message that parenting is tedious and unfulfilling compared to being a businessman or a lawyer. It is self-fulfilling prophecy. And it is wrecking a lot of families.

Commonplacing: Alan Jacobs on the Task of the Christian Cultural Critic

One of my favorite living Christian scholars is Alan Jacobs, whom I have mentioned in this space before. Nearly everything he says rings true to me, and even when I disagree with him I learn something from hearing him out. He just started blogging for The American Conservative, perhaps the only website out there that espouses consistently the type of conservatism I feel most drawn to (and one that has very little place in today's GOP). I recommend it as must read material. In his first post at TAC he links to an old essay of his, written for Books and Culture, another great magazine I wish I had the time to read more consistently. I had read it before, but after two years of graduate school its words seemed fresher than ever (of course he hooks me in with some good discussion of Milton at the beginning). Enjoy (read the whole thing):

It seems to me that the careful dance, the difficult balance, of Christian cultural criticism is to be endlessly attentive to the form and the details of the world around us, while simultaneously practicing the "politics of long joy"—and in this way avoiding an unhealthy obsession with "trophies," and avoiding also being conformed to the ways of this world. It's a tough walk to walk, because one of the peculiarities of fallen human nature is that we find it difficult, over the long haul anyway, to remember that there is a world of difference between "I have no control over this" and "this isn't very important." We tend, against all reason, to diminish the importance of everything we cannot shape or direct. But our joy will be short if it is grounded in circumstances and events, because circumstances and events always change: if they please us now, they will displease us later. And then what will we do?

Central to this discipline, for me anyway, is a constant striving to remember who human beings are and what we are made for. . . The truth of who we are, given the extremes of divine image and savage depravity, is hard to discern; perhaps we can only achieve it in brief moments; perhaps we only catch rumors of the glory that is, and is to be. But even those rumors can sustain us as we walk the pilgrim path.

Alan Jacobs,  "The Politics of Long Joy"

On Truth and Lying in a Nonmaterial Sense

One of the great lies of modernism was that people were primarily rational beings who could be taught, or programmed, into acting always in their own rational self-interest. Once the irrationality of faith was pried away, reason would reign triumphant and we would achieve Utopia, or so the general thinking went. In cultures where faith has largely been pried away, however, we find that this is hardly the case. 

I was listening to a campus preacher one time and his interlocutor was telling him how easy it is to be moral apart from religious commitment. You knew what was right, implicitly, the young man argued, the barometer being whether or not it was good for all parties involved, and morality was therefore simply a matter of following through with this inclination. The preacher replied, "So you always do what is good for you because you know it is right?" The young man said yes. I should mention at this point that in between his comments the young man was puffing on a cigarette. The preacher's reply was simple enough, and humorous: "Are you doing what is good for you now?" This is a small example, but indicative of that great fiction that if we know our self-interest (and it happens to line up nicely for all parties involved!) we will always act in line with it.

This, I think, has something to do with the famous postmodern rejection of truth. Once it became clear that truth was not always sufficient for human experience, was rather difficult to discern, and that humans have a hard time adhering to truth when they do apprehend it, many found it expedient to chuck the idea altogether. But this does not change the fact that truth does exist. You can close your eyes to it all you want, heap up fiction upon fiction, but truth remains true. 

But my point in this post is not explicitly about the reality of truth or postmodern error. What I want to emphasize here is that not acting in our rational self-interest all of the time is not a bad thing. The moderns were just as wrong as the postmoderns. Truth does exist, but depending upon how we talk about it, it is not transcendent or total. And by truth here I mean the truth of the moderns. Purely material truth, abstracted from anything metaphysical. I would argue that truth in this sense is often dehumanizing, reducing us to mere quantitative machines, coldly evaluating self-interest at the expense of other considerations. In other words, truth in this sense is extremely individualistic and denies community. 

Modern notions of truth can still be true, in a material and rational sense. But generally only in that sense. A few years ago Thomas Frank wrote a book with a title more famous than it's thesis, What's the Matter With Kansas?. In the book, Frank makes the classic elitist argument that if people in Kansas and other places in Middle America really knew what was best for them they would be Democrats. The reasoning, of course, is couched in almost purely material terms: the Democrats give more money to the poor and Middle Americans are poor, so their rational self-interest ought to lead them to support the party of the welfare state. But the dumb yokels are entrenched in social issues and other political concerns that don't touch their checkbooks. What this argument abnegates is the other very real motivations that humans act on, those apart from the almighty dollar. Perhaps more constitutive to the identity of the confused Kansas Republican is not his status as poor, or lower middle class, but his religious faith, his moral vision, his idea of community, his independence from the state. The cold rationalist cannot see these deeper meanings, these transcendent truths, because they cannot be quantified and bear with them the stench of faith, that discarded wrecker of the world.

But no one sees the world completely rationally, whatever that may mean and presuming we could agree on a meaning. And that is fine. Mandated rationality is another form of tyranny. We are more than material beings with more than material concerns. Any truth that denies that is of limited value and rightly rejected.

Commonplacing: Williams on Dostoevsky, 2

Not having much in the way of original thinking lately, I am allowing others to do it for me. Another gem from the Dostoevsky book I am working through (slowly): 

"What [Dostoevksy] does in Karamazov is not to demonstrate that it is possible to imagine a life so integrated and transparent that the credibility of faith becomes unassailable; it is simply to show that faith moves and adapts, matures and reshapes itself, not by adjusting its doctrinal content (the error of theological liberalism, with which Dostoevsky had no patience) but by the relentless stripping away from faith of egotistical or triumphalistic expectations. The credibility of faith is in its freedom to let itself be judged and to grow."

In our conversations about faith recently, Clara and I have joked about how much we had figured out about God and Christianity when we were 19. I had it down. I knew how God worked, knew how this world worked--there was an almost mathematical simplicity to the whole thing. Now, I feel as if I hardly know a thing. The faith is still there, but the proud assurance of my total grasp of it is gone. And I don't think this is a bad thing; I don't lament the loss. Over the years, I have found that I am far worse and Christ far greater than I ever could have imagined then. I have also found this glorious world to be far more complicated and the people who walk about on it far more confusing, interesting, beautiful, and fallen than I could have known then. And that, I think, is growth.

Commonplacing: Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky

Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury, basically the Anglican pope, and he is a man that I admire very much, a man attempting in his own delicate way to restrain the Anglican church from a headlong fall into irreligious liberalism. He is also a world-class scholar, reflecting the old adage of the Puritans that the ministers of a congregation be the "best and brightest" in the parish, an adage that has fallen into hard times recently. Dr. Williams wrote a book about Dostoevsky, perhaps my favorite writer of all time, a few years ago for a series sponsored by Baylor University Press, called The Making of the Christian Imagination. The other titles in the series also have me salivating and my wife slightly lamenting my near obsessive love of books. I started reading the Dostoevsky book last night and this is what I encountered on the first page:

"The world we inhabit as readers of his novels is one in which the question of what human beings owe to each other--the question standing behind all these critical contemporary issues--is left painfully and shockingly open, and there seems to be no obvious place to stand from where we can construct a clear moral landscape. Yet at the same time, the novels insistently and unashamedly press home the question of what else might be possible if we--characters and readers--saw the world in another light, the light provided by faith. The novels ask us, in effect, whether we can imagine a human community of language and feeling in which, even if we were incapable of fully realizing it, we knew what was due to each other; whether we could imagine living in the consciousness of a solidity or depth in each other which no amount of failure, suffering, or desolation could eradicate. But in order to put such a challenge, the novels have to invite us to imagine precisely those extremes of failure, suffering, and desolation."

This encapsulates the movement of Dostoevsky's novels, at least the four that I have read, so well. We tend to parcel Dostoevsky out, read him in chunks. The Grand Inquisitor scene from The Brothers Karamazov is routinely excerpted as if it was meant to stand on its own. As if it was not a small part of a larger trajectory. But Dostoevsky never showed us a simple truth, because truth is not simple. It is hidden, yet real, in the interactions and dialogue that shape the world he conjures. And at its heart, is the Christian faith.

Politics, My Lost Love

I used to be really into politics. Really, really into politics. I spent a good portion of every day reading blogs from every side of the political spectrum and got pretty incensed at what I viewed as political offenses. Now, to be frank, I just don’t give a shit anymore. I don’t know when exactly I stopped caring. Sometime around the nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President, of, like, our entire freaking country. A country about which she knew very little. Now that her family has descended into white trash spectacle, I can’t help but be thankful that the McCain ticket failed. You can say what you want about Joe Biden, but it is hard to imagine him posing for a national magazine in short shorts.

I watched a good chunk of the Republican convention last week and have been tuning in dutifully to the Democrats in North Carolina this week, not because of a resurgent interest in politics, but to watch our country’s further march to late Roman pomp and excess. It was all bread and circuses. Mitt Romney is for America. Marco Rubio is for Marco Rubio. Paul Ryan loves Ayn Rand, but insists that we must protect the weak in our society, begging one to ask if he has read Ayn Rand. Clint Eastwood had a ten minute conversation with a chair. It was crazy.

But the craziest thing about it is how little of the blame for America’s current dismal milieu has, for the Republicans, anything to do with anything systemic in America and is all directly attributable to the nefarious (probably Muslim!) brown-skinned fellow occupying the White House. I get not liking some of Obama’s policies. That is a fair political position to hold. But the problem is that for many conservatives he cannot simply be a genuine and decent man with whom they have policy disagreements, he must be the ANTICHRIST. I don’t get that. He seems like a great man to me—good husband, good father, OK basketball player. But that can’t be the narrative for the extremists; he must be the fount of all evil. And I think that is sad. The Democrats are doing their own part in pushing a similar message this week: if we lose this election, they seem to think, the poor will die in a fog of exhaust from the tailpipe of a rich man’s environmentally unfriendly truck as he chortles and drives off to shoot at some innocent animal. (In the Democrats' America it seems as if all the rich and powerful are Republicans and the weary, huddled masses Democrats, but nothing could be further from the truth, you know, in that annoying real world.) 

No one wants to be told that they are part of the problem and the solution might be to change something. They want to hear that is all the other guy’s fault. It reminds me of what the Apostle Paul wrote to his young protégé, Timothy: “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3). Both parties seem to have done precisely this. It is not you, it is them. You are great, you are what makes America great. You just keep on being you, and we’ll try and fix the mess that those other guys created.

That mutual antagonism and resentment, in a nutshell, is why I no longer care much about politics. And why I'll vote this year, but don't think it really matters much (not only due to the solid redness of my state, but due to the fact that nothing much has really changed these past four years), and will do so while holding my nose plugged.