Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  “You have got to be kidding me,” my friend Amelia said when I called her one evening to talk through my doubts. By this time, she’d become a mother herself; she was both working and raising a little girl on her own and had little patience for my laments about how Pete wouldn’t be able to hold down the fort in quite the way that I could.

  “I can’t even process what you’re saying,” she told me. “That’s how much rage I feel right now. The rage is literally breaking my brain. Are you living in like 1850? Are you wearing a crinoline right now and stirring porridge on the hearth? Fuck that. You go do your writing residency and you leave those kids in the care of their perfectly able-bodied, mentally competent biological father. This is your duty as a writer and a woman. Tell me you’re going to go or I’ll have to hate you. Okay, maybe I won’t hate you, but I definitely won’t respect you anymore.”

  This was not a threat I could take lightly. I told her I would do it. I promised her I would. But then, almost before I’d hung up the phone, I sat down in front of my computer, opened up Facebook, and went about seeing if anyone else, any of the other parents I knew without really knowing, might have a different opinion.

  Hey writer/artist/mom friends, I posted. I’m thinking of going to do a writing residency for 10 days, but I’ve never left the kids for this long. I’m scared! Guidance? Suggestions? Am I going to scar them?

  Within an hour, the thread showed twenty comments.

  Do it! one friend encouraged.

  Go, Kim, said another.

  When I went back full-time and had to start traveling, one woman posted, it was definitely an adjustment, but they’ll be fine.

  Other responses were more measured. Hmm, said one woman. How old are your kids again? 10 days IS a long time. It’s so hard when they’re young. But I’m sure it will be fine. Can they Skype with you?

  Wow, said another. You’re so brave. Claire is four and I haven’t even left her over night yet! She’s super attached though, and every kid is different!

  Oh man, I can’t imagine, wrote someone. I’d miss them too much.

  I’m not sure where these other folks are coming from, someone else responded. I run away from my kids whenever possible.:)

  I think this is really a personal choice, someone else added. I wouldn’t personally be comfortable with it but that’s just me. I’d miss them too much. I’m a wimp.

  I’m sure she’ll miss them too, said someone else. But that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t go.

  Just pretend you’re a man, suggested another friend. I mean, would we even be having this discussion if we were dads? Has any father in the history of the universe ever felt guilty about going on a work trip for a week?

  Maybe you could go for a shorter time, someone else posted. Or is there any way you can take your kids with you? 10 days is a long time to a four-year-old.

  Kim, another friend replied. I do a lot of travel for work. Message me privately. Too much judgment here.

  Who’s judging? She asked for advice and we’re all just offering it, another person wrote.

  I closed my computer, pushing it away from me. I took a deep breath, stood up from the table, walked to the other side of the room. It didn’t matter; it was too late. The internet oracle had unleashed the voices of discord, and now they were sparring inside my head, leaving me feeling more confused and conflicted than I’d been when I opened my browser.

  For five years, I’d indulged this kind of masochistic relationship with social media. When it came to questions about my pregnancy, my baby, my toddler, my preschooler, I wanted to know what other people were doing. I wanted their different perspectives, their advice. This desire made sense to me. If people used crowdsourcing to figure out how to lose weight or find a new apartment or build their own urban chicken coop, why not use it to get information about one of the most important things in life—raising children? And so I asked. I consulted. I browsed and lurked and got a good eyeful of everyone else’s sepia-tinted, beautiful, happy, well-adjusted families. And at the end of peering through the virtual living room windows of all these people I sort-of-but-didn’t-really know, I always, invariably, was left feeling … what’s the word I’m looking for? Unsettled? Uncertain? No, the word is shitty. Just generally, undeniably shitty.

  In the end, I made the decision the old-fashioned way. I put Violet in her stroller and took a long walk around our neighborhood and weighed the pros and cons, the complex negotiation of my children’s needs, my needs, Pete’s needs, and then I made a choice. I decided that guilt and anxiety or no, I would go to the writers’ colony for a week because this was my career, after all, and I was lucky enough to have a partner who really could man the ship perfectly well, and also no one ever dies from a week of mac and cheese.

  * * *

  I arrived at the writers’ colony in early June. The place was located on top of a hill at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was invisible from the main highway, so I drove past it, back and forth for fifteen minutes, before I finally spotted a turnoff, marked by a sign that read REAL WORLD ENDS HERE. Past the sign, the road narrowed, then angled steeply upward, asphalt loosening to gravel. There were cows grazing in a pasture, clusters of wildflowers, shallow ponds, a long stretch of weathered, white-wood fence. At the top of the hill sat a long, two-storied building, a structure all window and dark brick, not entirely unlike a 1970s motel or a college dormitory in need of renovation. This was where I’d live for the week. And beyond this structure, farther up the hill, a stone farmhouse with a grain elevator, sun-washed and surrounded by writers’ and artists’ studios where I would spend my days working. That was it. Bed. Desk. A dining hall for meals. A small pool and a few communal bikes for getting around or seeing the countryside. No cars. No car seats. No strollers. No high chairs. No toys. No diapers. No diaper bags. No sippy cups. For a week, I’d be equipment-less. I’d have that antigravity sensation known only to parents who are suddenly away, not just from their children but from all the modern contraptions of parenthood that are supposed to make children safer and happier, that are supposed to make parenting easier but that collectively inhibit our every movement through space. Getting out of the car, I felt eighty pounds lighter, almost buoyant. I also felt for the first time in a year like maybe everything was going to be okay, the awfulness of what had happened in Richmond falling away from me.

  At the colony that August, I became friends with a visual artist who had two kids in college. I became friends with an Israeli guitarist my own age, recently married but not yet a parent. I met single people, married people, gay people, and straight people. I met people who were parents, people who were grandparents, people who never wanted children of their own. I met a woman in her late forties, both a psychiatrist and a writer, who’d lost her husband to skin cancer two years before and was now raising two teenagers by herself. I met a novelist in his fifties going through a divorce, trying to persuade his twenty-year-old daughter not to hate him. I met an artist somewhere in middle age, raising two kids in a large city, and one evening when we went for our after-dinner constitutional, walking up the crest of the foothill on which the colony sat, she asked me about my writing. I told her that a lot of it was about my experience as a mother, and she said, very casually but a little out of breath, “So interesting. You know, I came close to killing myself twice after my children were born.”

  At first, I wasn’t sure if she was speaking figuratively—in my family, “I’m going to kill myself” is synonymous with “The day is not going well,” so I kept pace, kept a neutral face. “Oh, no. Really?” I said.

  “Yeah. I had terrible, terrible postpartum anxiety and depression. The first time I had to be hospitalized for a few months. The next time a little less, but still … it was awful. I don’t talk about it much. In fact, you might be the first person I’ve told in years.”

  She went on to say more about how dark that time had been for her, how unhinged and lost she’d felt, even after the acute, depressive period had passed
. She talked about how isolating it had been, because in addition to feeling terribly depressed, she’d also felt alone. “When you’re struggling with parenthood, no one really wants to hear it,” she said. “At least that was my experience. There’s this silently enforced code of contentment. Mild complaining is fine, but only to a point. It’s one thing to say, ‘I’m so tired because my kid’s still not sleeping through the night.’ It’s another to say, ‘Having children made me want to end my life. I feel like I don’t exist anymore.’ Or maybe there are people out there who are comfortable saying things like that, but I was never one of them. And it’s funny, because it sort of snuck up on me. It was like I didn’t expect to feel so anxious about it, about what kind of mother I was. It never occurred to me that becoming a mother would make it hard for me to keep being the other things I’d always been and wanted to be: an artist, an activist, a person with a lot of different kinds of friendships. I mean, look at me. I’ve considered myself a feminist since first grade. I make art for a living. I’m a leftist weirdo who has never had any desire to keep up with the Joneses. I’ve never even owned a car. I’m just, you know, not in the race. Except when it came to motherhood. Motherhood somehow dropped me right into the middle of the stampede. It was the one place where I felt this incredible pressure, this mania to get everything right, to be all in it. If I’d become anxious and depressed because I’d lost my job or gotten dumped or whatever, that would be one thing. I could have owned it. But to say that motherhood had triggered my depression, it felt like such a profound failure. I felt unsexed by it. You know, people are talking more and more about the pressures women face to have children, how hard it is to choose to not be a mother. And I have total sympathy for these people. But you know, it’s not as though that pressure stops the moment a woman gives birth. It’s not as though everyone says, ‘All right, job well done. Let’s all get back to work now.’ That pressure and judgment and scrutiny are still there. Maybe more than ever, because for the woman who chooses not to have a kid, people can say, well, so what? Let the selfish bitch do what she wants. Not hurting anyone. But when there’s an actual child … when how a woman mothers is impacting a human being, it’s suddenly a free-for-all. Even after you’ve decided to become a mother, there’s enormous pressure to be a mother, not just to take care of your kid but to totally embrace the role.”

  “Do you think people made you feel that way?” I asked her. “Or do you think it came from inside yourself?”

  We’d reached the top of the hill and slowed our pace. The humidity in the air lifted. The sun sank lower in the sky. The air tinged newly blue with shadows as the first stars pressed through. It felt good to be sweaty and out of breath, and to be talking to this woman I’d just met about parenthood without the usual posturing and insecurity and thinly veiled boasting. “I don’t know,” she said as she sat down to rest on the guardrail. “We think we’re doing things on our own even when we’re not. Did others make me feel like an inferior parent? Or did I feel inferior from the start and project that feeling onto others? I don’t know the answer. Maybe a little of both. I only know that in those early years, even after I made friends with other mothers, even after I went on medicine and got help for the depression, I felt constantly anxious and insecure. Now that my kids are in their twenties and doing fine and I have a strong relationship with them both, I look back and understand how bad it must have been, how hard.”

  “How did you get through it?” I asked her. I was hoping she was going to recommend a book, a pill, some quick fix to make this feeling of inadequacy go away.

  Instead, she looked at me kindly, quite earnestly, and said, “You know, I think after years and years, I learned to stop giving a fuck. If people I knew, friends or relatives or strangers or whoever, had an opinion about what kind of mother I was or wasn’t, if they thought I was making mistakes, or doing things the wrong way, being too this or too that, being selfish by not giving all of myself to my kids, I eventually decided, fuck ’em. I’m doing the best I can in a culture that offers parents little material or emotional support. If people have a problem with the way I’m doing it, fuck every last one of them. And it’s funny—that anger—that was what got me to a place where I could finally stop caring and enjoy the little monsters. That’s when I started feeling better.”

  8

  GUINEA PIGS

  I was having coffee with a friend and former teacher not long ago, when after a few minutes, the conversation turned to parenthood. He was about ten years ahead of me. His children were in high school and college—and he asked me how I was finding the whole parenthood gig, if it was everything I’d expected it to be.

  “It’s basically nothing I expected it to be,” I said. “It’s much better and much worse, wonderful and impossible at the same time. But,” I added, “I do think it’s a hard time to be a parent in this country at this particular moment.”

  He thought about it for a second, then said, “Maybe. It’s sure as hell a horrible time to be a kid.”

  I asked him what he meant by this, and he went on to say that it simply didn’t seem that kids got to be kids anymore. Something was different. Something felt wrong.

  “I grew up in the seventies in California. And one of my best memories of childhood was going out in the afternoons to play baseball with my friends. It sounds so simple. But, God, I loved it. I’d grab my glove. We’d meet at the park. We’d play until dinner. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore. Now they’ve got to call in a coach from the Dominican Republic to work on hitting technique even before the kids step foot on a field. Everything they do is organized, supervised, observed. Stop and think for a moment what that must be like, that total lack of freedom. Imagine how awful that must be.”

  I asked him if he had any theories about how this change had come about.

  “No,” he said, “it just seems that somewhere along the way, Americans gave up on the idea of childhood.”

  On the one hand, the traditional markers of adulthood now arrive later than ever before for middle- and upper-class people. Financial independence, home ownership, marriage, parenthood, full-time employment: milestones achieved most often in the early or midtwenties a generation or two ago are now commonly postponed by up to a decade. Attending college, once an entryway to early adulthood, now, for many children of privilege, seems to mark the beginning of a second phase of extended adolescence in which young people make a series of attempts at independence while often enjoying the financial and emotional support and intervention of parents. In this way, childhood has not vanished but expanded. And yet the quality and nature of this childhood has been permanently altered by the rise of intensive and fear-based parenting. It turns out that it isn’t possible to change what it means to be a parent without also changing what it means to be a child.

  In his history of American childhood, historian Steven Mintz describes this change, writing, “Young people spend an increasing number of years in the company of other people their same age, colonized in specialized ‘age-graded’ institutions. Young people’s interactions with adults are largely limited to parents, teachers, and service providers. Children spend more time alone than their predecessors. They grow up in smaller families, and nearly half have no siblings. They are more likely to have a room of their own and to spend more time in electronically mediated activities … because fewer children attend neighborhood schools within walking distance, most children live farther from their friends and play with them less frequently, experiencing a greater sense of isolation. Meanwhile unstructured, unsupervised free play outside the home has drastically declined for middle-class children … Unstructured play and outdoor activities for children three to eleven declined nearly 40 percent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. And from 1997 to 2003, unstructured time continued to decline for children aged six through twelve, with playtime dropping off more dramatically for girls than for boys. Because of parental fear of criminals and bad drivers, middle-class children rarely get th
e freedom to investigate and master their home turf in ways that once proved a rehearsal for the real world.”

  * * *

  I connected to one mother whose family was caught off guard by these changes after living abroad. Elizabeth had been living abroad with her husband and children for more than fifteen years when they returned to the wealthy suburb of New York where Elizabeth had grown up. She was shocked by the changes that had occurred in her absence. “Europeans,” she said, “are much more relaxed about parenting.… They love their children, but they don’t seem to live for their children in the same way [we do], to define themselves by them.” They also didn’t seem determined to manage their children’s lives in quite the same way. In Elizabeth’s experience, American parents manage every aspect of their children’s existence. In Europe, a family still seemed more like a family, less like a corporation. Despite living in a large city, all of her kids had enjoyed more freedom abroad. By the time they were eleven, they were walking to and from school by themselves, taking cabs, going to each other’s houses on their own or going to the park. At thirteen, her son was in charge of his own schedule in a lot of ways. And his social life was all around him.

  Elizabeth had imagined that upon returning to the States, the kids would enjoy the same unstructured, suburban lifestyle she’d had as a child. But it didn’t take long for her to realize how much things had changed in the intervening decades. “I felt a little like Rip Van Winkle,” she said. In wealthy American suburbs in 2016, “the mothers drive the kids everywhere. Every playdate is scheduled by a parent, or at least the parent is involved because of the driving. And in general, I find the parents are terrified—of what, I don’t know.” Her dominant impression upon returning was that “American parents were expected to wear their kids in a BabyBjörn until at least the age of eighteen.” It was an adjustment for all of them, but for her oldest son, Shep, it was something worse. He immediately became anxious, depressed, withdrawn, and developed a video game addiction for which they sought psychiatric help.