by Kim Brooks
Early in my first trimester, I’d withdrawn from the second graduate program I’d just begun—the course work was intensive and inflexible, and I didn’t see how I could manage it with a newborn—and found a job as an assistant at a law firm in the West Loop that mainly conducted class action lawsuits involving overexposure to asbestos. The plan was simple. I’d work until a few weeks before my due date, and then I’d quit, have the baby, stay at home to take care of it, writing when I could. I aimed to write a novel while the baby napped, because babies, I’d been told, napped constantly. Babies loved to nap.
In this manner, without ever formally deciding, I became a stay-at-home mother, a demographic that rose from 23 percent in 1999 to 29 percent in 2012. As is the case with so many aspects of parenthood, a woman’s staying home is often talked about as a deliberate choice, an issue that’s black and white, either/or. The choice is assumed to tell the world something about who we are and what we value: A partnered, working mother might love her children, but not quite enough to prioritize them above her career. A stay-at-home mother might be intelligent and educated and capable, but not quite enough to go out and hack it in the world beyond the nursery. The reality for me was that my balance of work and parenthood was always more improvised than decided, always more a response to circumstance and lack of alternatives than dogma. If I’d been a citizen of one of the forty-one industrialized nations that offer parents paid maternity leave—to say nothing of subsidized childcare, quality early childhood education, or a host of other family supports—I might have made a different choice. But I lived in America, and so the calculation was simple.
At the time I became pregnant, I had a BA in English, an MFA in fiction writing, and three years’ worth of assorted freelance work, fellowship-facilitated writing projects, and various stints as an adjunct professor. My income from these pursuits added up to $15,000–$20,000 per year, enough to live on when combined with my husband’s income, but hardly enough to justify, in my mind, placing my soon-to-be baby in the care of strangers, a prospect that, in Chicago, would devour most, if not all, of the money I brought in. And yet, as simple as it seemed, the prospect of not working at all for three, four, or five years still worried me. I feared total financial dependence. I liked working, being surrounded by people with different ideas and talents, feeling a part of the goings-on of the world. I liked babies and kids as well. But I really liked adults. I liked thinking, solving problems, talking to people, accomplishing things, working toward tangible results. I began to worry that maybe spending my days in an apartment with a baby wasn’t the best plan after all. When I mentioned my concern to Tracy, she said that she understood my fears, and that though she thought it was awesome that I was going to have so much time with the baby (she was going to have only six weeks of leave before returning to work full-time), she also thought that if she had to do what I was doing she’d probably go insane.
* * *
A few days after talking to Tracy, I went to look at day cares that offered part-time enrollment. The first one fronted a busy, commercial street. Large rolls of brown paper had been secured with masking tape to the windows to shield the children from the view of those passing by. I walked inside and introduced myself to a woman sitting in a hard, plastic chair with two babies on her lap. The two babies were smiling and drooling, while all the others in the nursery screamed. They were screaming from their cots and crying from their cribs and whimpering from the play mats and mountains of plastic toys around the floor. The room itself seemed to howl, to vibrate with their collective baby misery. The lighting was fluorescent. The walls, cinder block. The construction paper drawings taped to the furniture to help brighten the space only made it seem drabber. The air was stale. Nearly every nose in the room was running. “Come in,” said the woman. “You’re here to look around?” I nodded, attempted to return her smile. Then I told her that I’d forgotten to pay the parking meter, hurried back to my car, and never returned.
The second day care I visited was clean, quiet, sunny, and peaceful. The staff seemed professional and engaged, the children well cared for and content. There was soft light. Music playing. Aesthetically pleasing wooden toys. Sanitary wipes everywhere and one caregiver for every three children. This isn’t so bad, I thought. After my tour, I asked the director how I might go about applying to enroll my baby in a day or two of care. She explained that I’d need to fill out an application and then pay a deposit to secure my spot on their wait list.
“How long is the wait list?” I asked.
“Three to four years,” she said.
“You mean three to four months?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Three to four years.”
All the way home, I told myself how wonderful and selfless it was that I had decided to stay home full-time with my baby, that I didn’t have to dump him in some soulless center or hire a stranger to raise him. Whenever friends or family members or people I met would ask me how I’d come to this decision, I didn’t say, “I’d never get a job that would pay me enough to afford decent childcare.” And I didn’t say, “I’m afraid that any job I’d find wouldn’t offer me the flexibility to give a baby the attention and care it needs to thrive.” And I didn’t say, “I have no family nearby who are willing to help with regular childcare.” And I didn’t say, “I live in a society whose policies reflect the fact that it is still deeply ambivalent about mothers working.” Instead, I’d say, “I just know that it’s the best thing for us.”
In a piece in Elle called “Having a Child Will Bankrupt You,” Bryce Covert writes about the many and varied challenges parents face in finding affordable, quality childcare in this country. She cites a 2016 poll from Harvard’s School of Public Health that shows that the most common challenge parents said they face when trying to get childcare is the cost. She also cites another report, which finds that in some states the average price of day care for an infant reaches as much as $17,000 a year in 2015; it’s nearly $13,000 for a four-year-old. Putting two kids in a center costs families more than what they typically spend on food and, in much of the country, on housing. “In 28 states and Washington, D.C., sending an infant to daycare costs more [per year] than sending an 18-year-old to public college. The price tag has been climbing at an extraordinary rate: The cost for families with a working mother rose 70 percent between 1985 and 2012.”
Covert goes on to highlight a recent paper showing that the increase in the price of day care between 1990 and 2010 resulted in a 5 percent decline in the overall employment of women. According to Covert, “Even families who can afford childcare might not be able to get it … Many centers are simply full; in other places, they don’t exist. In a study of eight states, the Center for American Progress found that more than 40 percent of children live in what it calls ‘child care deserts,’ or zip codes where there are either no day care centers or more than three times as many children under the age of five as there are available spots.”
It’s undeniable that I enjoyed a level of privilege when it came to work-life balance that is out of reach for many women. I did not live in a childcare desert, even if wait lists were long and affordable options few. I had a supportive partner who was able to provide us with enough income to live on and a source of health insurance. I enjoyed the luxury of having any choice at all about whether and how much to work outside the house. And yet, the choice I faced was not really a choice in the way I’d always assumed mothers chose to work or stay home. It was more of a settling, a resigned acceptance of the idea that for a mother, the ability to work is a privilege and not a right. That’s a hard thing to accept. Easier to tell yourself you must be doing what you’ve wanted all along, that you’re making a noble sacrifice for your family.
Years later, a friend with a successful career in law told me how all through her first pregnancy and maternity leave, her best friend ended every conversation by saying, “Oh, how can you leave the baby so soon? I can’t believe you’re going to leave him.” I don’t thin
k I ever said that to my working-mother friends. I hope I didn’t. But the fact remains, I certainly thought something similar, silently putting other mothers down to lift myself up, disparaging their “choices” to feel better about my own. And many of them would later tell me that at one point or another, they had done the same.
Rather than questioning the system and the culture and the lack of support that makes it so hard for all of us, we turn against one another, take pride in our differences, flaunting and justifying whatever path we’ve chosen, as though any new mother would “choose” to leave her child forty hours per week, fifty weeks per year, if there were more flexible options—as though any new mother would “choose” to give up her work entirely, her financial independence, her career, her education, a chance at a stimulating and productive life among other adults if there were better possibilities or compromises. In trying to promote a spirit of acceptance, it has become common to say things like, “Every mom makes the best choice for her family.” Maybe. Another way to look at it is that we each get to choose from a handful of lousy options, then we try to make the choice go down easier by telling ourselves that what we chose makes us unique and special, better than those who chose a different way.
* * *
For my first years as a parent, whether the issue was childbirth or childcare, parenting style or safety protocols, I remained fixated on making the right choice for my children. It was only much later that I began to see how profoundly the choosing itself—the false sense of control and entitlement that choosing entails—had affected my experience as a mother. It created an extra layer of anxiety to a parenting culture that even under the best of circumstances can erode a woman’s self-confidence, her very sense of self. Jennifer Senior describes the impact this parenting culture has on our sense of autonomy, our marriages, and our free time. Julie Lythcott-Haims describes the toll it takes on our children as they grow into young adults. And in Excellent Sheep, a powerful critique of elite institutions of higher education, the social critic William Deresiewicz describes the toll it takes on higher education itself, as students are increasingly unable to take risks and think independently. But far less attention, it seems to me, has been given to how these changes in parenting culture, the convergence of parenthood with a capitalist ethos, have produced a kind of conspicuous child-rearing—a style of child-rearing in which every parenting choice is not only a choice but a statement—and how that conspicuous child-rearing impacts adults’ relationships with one another.
I recently spoke with a woman named Marissa whose experience in a moms’ group illustrated for me how poisonous our culture of parenting can be when it comes to such relationships. When Marissa’s daughter, now two, was an infant, Marissa found herself feeling lonely and isolated. She was told, as I had been told by friends and family, that the best way to feel better was to find a good moms’ group. She did, and at first, it worked. There were about fifteen other mothers in the group, and she liked many of them, found them smart and engaging. She told me how her first impression was that “this mom-friend thing is a thing. I get it. You have to have mom friends.” And yet, she wasn’t in the group very long before she started to notice something else, a strain of competitiveness that seemed to emerge whenever the women were together.
“I had wanted to have a home birth,” she told me. “It was something I really wanted. And of course, there were plenty of people who thought I was crazy for that, but I decided to go for it anyway.” Marissa labored at home with a midwife for thirty-six hours, but the delivery didn’t progress as she’d hoped. The midwife spotted meconium, and there were signs that the baby might be in distress, so after nearly two days, they checked into a nearby hospital where Marissa eventually delivered by emergency C-section. The baby was healthy. Marissa recovered well from the surgery. But when she told her new mom friends, many of them strong proponents of natural childbirth, she noticed something unpleasant: “I didn’t expect it,” she told me. “Because, I mean, how can you compete at childbirth? But I noticed there were some people who just couldn’t help themselves … there were women who, it was like they didn’t know what to say when I told them I’d had a C-section, and so they’d say something like ‘Oh, did you try laboring in a tub? Did you try perineal massage? Did you try hypnosis, or this or that?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, thanks for your advice. Obviously, I should have had a tub.’”
I asked her why she thought these other mothers were so quick to question her in this way, and she told me she’d asked herself the same question. “I don’t think it’s intentional meanness,” she said. “I think many people don’t know how to respond to someone else’s disappointment, to someone else’s emotions. Like they don’t know how to just be empathic. To say, ‘Oh, wow, that sucks that it didn’t go the way you’d hoped. I’m so sorry. But you obviously did the best you could, and I’m glad you came through it. I hope you have a better experience next time.’ They can’t say that, because if your C-section happened because you did something wrong, then that means they can make sure it won’t happen to them. Or it means that their successful, natural birth happened because they did everything right. They can take credit for it.
“I felt like I just couldn’t win. I’m sure because where I live in San Francisco, there’s a lot of sancti-mommy stuff around natural everything. Some people judged me for wanting a home birth, but then there definitely was all this judgment about me having a C-section. They wouldn’t say it, but you could tell they were thinking it. Most people would look at me with pity. Like I had been too stupid or hadn’t been able to stand up for myself or had been a victim of excessive interventions. People close to me tried to focus on the positives. But people I met in these mom groups, there was judgment on both sides.”
I asked Marissa if she experienced this same tension with issues other than childbirth, and without taking a breath, she began listing them: sleep, feeding, screen time, every developmental milestone. “Our daughter,” she tells me, “was kind of a magical sleeper. At twelve weeks, she started sleeping a solid six-hour stretch. It was a blessing. I knew it was a huge blessing. But I would never talk about it, because I didn’t want anyone to feel competitive with me. And once we started getting past four months, we were in that phase where there’s all of these developmental milestones and these arbitrary windows. As a first-time parent, you want to know what’s normal. But I have friends whose kids didn’t walk until eighteen months and ones whose kids walked at one year. And you can tell everyone’s watching and sizing each other up. I just think it’s weird that that’s how we relate to each other. I mean, it makes it so hard to have an authentic conversation with someone, because you’re worried about saying something that sets them off and makes them feel bad. You don’t know what’s going on in their family. And so everything is tense and fraught. If there’s a preexisting friendship and it’s someone you trust, that’s one thing. But otherwise, the competitiveness can make it hard to connect.”
My friend Tiff describes a similar experience surrounding after-school activities. “The kids are so scheduled,” she says. “They’re in school longer than we were. And the parents talk to other parents in a passive, though very competitive way. It starts at pickup at the school when a mom will say, ‘Oh, hey, it’s great to see you.… So, what activities is Ella doing after school?’ And it feels like a loaded question. Like the parent wants to see if they’re measuring up to you in terms of what kinds of extracurricular activities they’re exposed to. My kids are in fewer activities than many of their peers. My kids like to go home and watch TV. That’s not a choice that’s widely celebrated or even talked about in my parenting circles. And if I say something like that, I feel embarrassed. But a part of me also feels happy that they can relax after school.”
Tiff’s allowing her kids the luxury of watching television brought to mind a dinner Pete, the kids, and I went to with a few other couples and their kids. We were at a restaurant where the service was friendly but slow, and after five minutes, al
l of our kids were growing restless. My husband and I reached for our iPhones, because years earlier we’d decided (or at least accepted) that we’d let our children play on screens while they waited for food in restaurants. Another couple, for reasons of civility or table manners or brain development, had a no-screens-at-the-table policy in effect, so instead they reached for the piles of toys they’d carried with them, in big tote bags brimming with markers and Play-Doh and Disney figurines. They poured these nondigital diversions onto the table, turning the place settings into an elevated rec room. Another couple at the table disapproved of both of these choices. They wanted their children to sit nicely and participate in the conversation. Mostly this meant their kids flopped around and played with the saltshakers and kicked each other’s knees. The one childless couple at the table grimaced at all of us. I could see them silently interrogating each other, trying to understand how it was possible that all six of their friends were such ineffectual parents. Everyone was tense and unhappy. Everyone felt watched and judged. Everyone was wondering who was doing it the right way. But worst of all, worse than the atmosphere of guardedness and anxiety, was the fact that no one was acknowledging any of it.
This, it turns out, is the most important rule of parenting as a competitive sport: Nobody ever, no matter what, admits to competing. We smile and nod and hold our judgments until we get home from the restaurant. We say things like, “There’s no single right way.” We say these things as we sip our drinks, and only when we get home do we say to our partner or the nearest person who will listen, “What the fuck are they doing with those kids?” Nothing is acknowledged. Nothing is discussed. And on and on the parenting game goes; it’s hard to win while pretending not to play.
* * *
That morning in Chicago, the day after we returned from Virginia, when my father told me to give my mother a couple of days to settle down, I understood his rationale. My mom was upset not because she had been caught doing anything wrong, but because I had been. Do we ever really know where we stand if not in relation to those around us?