Adult fantasy, p.14
Adult Fantasy, page 14
If, in other words, this parallel-universe partner said, ‘It’s okay, you can be the Dad,’ then, and only then, would I reconsider my position.
Now that many millennials are leaving their narcissistic years behind and selflessly forming families of their own, profiles of my generation as parents are beginning to show up in the media. In December 2015, Time ran a cover emblazoned with a typically hyperbolic headline — ‘Help! My Parents are Millennials’ — above a picture of a baby in one of those fancy Swedish four-wheel strollers that look like robotic insects and self-destruct in the first year. The baby’s uncannily adult features (compared to millennials, babies are Renaissance-level mature again) are arranged into an expression that says ‘good grief’. From the magazine’s right margin, two anonymous, perhaps even genderless, but certainly parental arms aim smartphones at this little dear in the headlines like hunters at a zoo.
Smartphones, social media, and the internet feature heavily in Time’s characterisation of millennial parenthood, with good reason. Many of today’s parents start documenting their children online from age foetus, with sonograms posted on Instagram and Facebook, followed by birth shots and important milestones, from crawl to kinder — will these parents continue to document into adolescence, or will puberty signify the beginning of the next generation’s digital individuation? Time will tell. Time will no doubt tell us too. Meanwhile, here’s a statement for the times: my Facebook page is covered in babies. There are babies sucking, crawling, cuddling, clapping, and co-opting my social network.
For a while, Facebook was dominated by the ‘motherhood challenge’, in which women posted five photos that made them ‘happy to be mothers’ and then tagged five other great mothers in their network, inviting them to do the same. These photos became indistinguishable from one another in my feed and also, poignantly, from a news item that dominated Australian media outlets the very same morning. My city’s major daily ran with a front page featuring a similar photo collage: images of smiling and gurgling refugee babies, slated for deportation to offshore processing centres. The headline was ‘Babies Bound for Hell’. There was no mention of their mothers.
While I quietly judged the women of the Facebook motherhood challenge, noting their inelegant timing, there were others who took to trolling, and even posting a ‘childfree challenge’, featuring photos of themselves napping with bottles of plonk, stacks of cash, international air-travel tickets, and molecular degustations, all of which were far more gratuitous and distasteful than the onslaught of babies.
The internet impacts everything we do now, and arguably for millennials more than any generation before. It is a place to perform the self, to make connections and seek information. I cannot tell you how many times, while trying to write this book, I have slipped into a digital trance, snapping back into focus just as I hit search on terms as asinine as ‘how to write a book in less than three months’ or ‘should I eat carbohydrates before I write a book’. I can only imagine what you would find yourself searching when you haven’t slept in days and your baby hasn’t stopped screaming for just as long. One friend says she was sucked into a rabbit hole of forums and dubious articles after searching ‘how do I tell if my baby is a jerk?’
‘I got a bad case of mummy finger,’ she laughed, using the new hospital slang for repetitive strain injury of the thumb. ‘Sometimes I wonder what he thinks our phones are. To him, it’s just this box of light that all the adults are totally transfixed by, that has the power to make them go completely still and silent.’
While the internet also helps connect parents who might otherwise be isolated, social media jealousy and guilt reaches its apex when the lives being compared are not our own but our children’s. Millennial parents are anxious about their children’s development compared to the other sprogs in their feed. They are wracked with envy or derision over shots of homemade organic baby food, elaborate cakes, smiling children participating in craft activities. It’s a ‘mompetition’.
Intensive-parenting trends, such as attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding, and other conceptual approaches centring on children’s wellbeing have paved a moral terrain. ‘Parental determinism’, the concept that parenting is the key determinant in the future lives of their children, has made getting through the day like cutting across a minefield for many parents. (And this is despite the fact that where a child is born, to whom, and what school they go to are the single biggest predictors of adult prosperity. Today, statistics carve up school districts into prophetic zones for the future wealthy: the statistical line that divides Sydney almost exactly in half, predicting the future income, health, and even life expectancy of babies born to the east or west, and the colour-mottled map of London showing a deep purple ‘knowledge class’ at the centre of the city, fading out to the pinks and blues of ‘service’ and ‘working’ classes on the outskirts of the megalopolis. In some ways, a child’s personal adult taxonomy is designed before they are out of nappies, let alone able to tap dance for Instagram.)
Such grave responsibility also has a significant impact on adult identities. ‘As the “work” of parenting (emotional and physical) expands to engulf more and more of parents’ lives, clearly the time and energy available for everything else will be drained,’ argued Charlotte Faircloth, founding member of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent. ‘This fits into a wider conversation around risk consciousness and the demise of confidence about how to approach the future. Put simply, our paranoia about parenting is a symptom of a society that feels less and less certain about what matters in life, and why.’
This statement resonated with me. It helped me to connect my feelings about performed parenting, babies as a central determinant of identity, and my sense of adult life as unformed and disconnected. Children are objectively important, and require care, attention, stimulation, education. In lives that lack centres, it makes sense that these concrete tasks could fill the void: if we cannot name the moral terrain of our lives, we can make parenting our crucial moral task. And if this results in giving too much space to our children, it is only because we do not know what that space might otherwise contain. It’s time, then, to have an adult conversation about it. Such a move is necessary if we are to create an engaged, connected, and intelligent adult culture.
I hit peak child-bearing age at a time in which adult culture was distinctly undervalued. The Australian government paid new parents five grand per baby, and the media maligned mothers for spending it selfishly, on big-screen plasmas and clothes. Meanwhile, our first female prime minister was attacked for her childlessness, for her too-clean kitchen and empty fruit bowl. In 2007, Liberal senator Bill Heffernan said, ‘I mean, anyone who chooses to remain deliberately barren … they’ve got no idea what life’s about.’
In the United States, female reproductive freedom was also under attack by conservative politicians. In 2012, US Representative for Missouri’s 2nd congressional district Todd Akin told a local news program that women who had been victims of ‘legitimate rape’ would not need abortions as they were unlikely to become pregnant. ‘The female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,’ he said. ‘But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.’ The punishment, in every case, seemed to come down sharply across the backs of women, and it’s a preference that is increasing in 2017, with President Donald Trump making a global gag rule — which prevents US-funded NGOs from providing, cancelling, or issuing referrals for abortions — one of his first actions in office.
Now, as then, the deadlocking of the female body to the sacred task of maternity sicks me out. As does the suggestion that a woman without a child can never understand the life of a woman with one, women’s intellects and imaginations being limited to the things they have experienced firsthand, naturally.
Unfortunately, these sentiments were echoed by well-meaning female friends, hopped up on post-birth hormones.
‘You’ve never experienced love like this,’ gushed one new mother when I visited her.
‘It’s amazing to think that I will never be alone again,’ said another.
I concentrated on controlling my facial expressions.
Meanwhile, in the tabloids, we were having a mommy moment. Celebrities by the dozen were taking to glossy magazines and lifestyle television shows to claim that they were just ‘regular moms’. I picked up a gossip magazine in a waiting room and became incensed by Gwyneth Paltrow’s claim that she was of this ilk, ‘just a regular mom wiping butts and warming bottles’. Sure, I thought, and stacking your millions. (Some years later, Paltrow would be vilified for allegedly not allowing her children to eat carbohydrates.) A few pages on, the actress Minnie Driver claimed her regular-mommy status too. Women’s magazines featured parent-and-toddler fashion spreads. Find out what Brooklyn Beckham or Pax Jolie-Pitt wore to the Yo Gabba Gabba! live show.
I read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and found it chillingly prophetic. In Egan’s future world, adults text one another in a vowel-stripped baby babble rather than talk because subtext has become exhausting, tone an unnecessary way to complicate meaning. Texting is, one character says, ‘pure — no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgments’. Meanwhile, toddlers, nicknamed ‘pointers’, monopolise culture through their natural aptitude with smartphones. Manhattan — the capital of grown-up culture, where the women of Sex and the City brunched, and so many of the art and music movements I adore emerged — has become, in Egan’s dystopia, the place ‘where the density of children is highest in the nation’. Babies fill Times Square, and the sepulchral streets surrounding Ground Zero — ‘An army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left.’
if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt? one adult texts another.
It would be two more years before I read Lee Edelman’s No Future, a polemic against the power of exactly this insistence, which he calls ‘reproductive futurism’.
‘What,’ writes Edelman, ‘would it signify not to be “fighting for the children”? How could one take the other “side”, when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends?’
While I was often called to defend my choice not to have children, I realised, as I waded through the swamps of pro-baby popular culture, that no one had ever articulated to me why they wanted a child. It was supposed to remain sacredly obvious, I gathered. Far from being a topic around which adult positions could comingle and mutate through impassioned debate, most of those I knew dodged accounting for their choice to procreate. Many, in fact, claimed that their baby was an accident. These accidents, I observed, usually occurred after the couple had quietly established that they wanted kids at some point and then promptly stopped using any form of birth control. This, I thought, pushed the boundaries of the term. It was the sort of accident I might have if I decided I did not want to go to work today and then turned off my alarm and went back to sleep.
Why did everyone want to tell me about their child’s nap schedule, or sweet temperament, or let me in on the intricacies of their bowel movements, yet no one could tell me how it felt to want a child? I decided I needed to talk to someone who had been open about their desire for a baby. I called Stacy, a friend of Annie’s with two children, whose existence she had spoken about long before it was manifest. Did she always know she wanted kids? I asked in an online chat thread after a few pleasantries.
‘Oh, I always knew! Yes.’
Stacy promptly invited me over for lunch at her home, one hour west of Melbourne in a small, deindustrialised country town with a growing population of urbanites pushed out of the city by high rents and low prospects. Tree-changers, they have been dubbed in the media, though there were not so many trees around Stacy’s huge, rented home in the centre of the town.
As soon as I walked through the gate, I saw the trends outlined in descriptions of Millennial Mom. Though Stacy was born in the late 1970s, missing the cap for some definitions of Generation Y, she fit the profile from Time; she was the very woman whose habits Goldman Sachs evaluated for spending implications. Her three-year-old daughter was reading a library book on the lawn when I arrived, munching on a homemade sausage roll covered in what looked suspiciously like chia seeds. The little girl was a delight: soft-spoken, thoughtful, and cautious. Stacy ushered me into her bright kitchen and the girl asked politely if she could watch something before her nap. Stacy handed her an iPad, and the child shuffled off down a hallway lined with organised boxes of toys.
Stacy’s broad kitchen table was spread with an array of fermented vegetables in jars — her award-winning sauerkraut, as judged by the local agricultural show. A brightly coloured craft project was laid out in the adjacent room, felt and pegs and baskets of this and that. Useful boxes, as they called them on Play School when I was little. The whole thing was pastoral, neat, idyllic, and, in a way, enviable.
‘Millennial parents put self-expression first,’ said the marketing profiles. ‘Millennial parents are more idealistic.’
‘So what did you want to talk about?’ Stacy asked.
‘No one ever tells me why they want kids,’ I explained.
‘Right. Because it’s just something you do.’
‘Exactly.’
Stacy told me about her childhood. She was the eldest girl in a family of four and was often tasked with looking after the younger kids, feeding them and putting them to bed. It was not the first time I’d heard a story like this. Anecdotally, it seemed to me that people who played carer roles from an early age were more comfortable with assuming them later on, a fact that makes perfect sense and is probably obvious to people who grew up with siblings. One new dad I interviewed in my search to find someone to talk about their desire for children spent his teen years caring for his developmentally disabled brother, and attributed the comparative ease of transitioning into fatherhood and then single fatherhood to that experience. ‘It’s just what you do,’ he told me when I goaded him to complain or rant or protest.
I’m not sure it’s what I would do, I had thought then, and I thought it again now in Stacy’s kitchen, sampling her pickles and picking apart her life.
‘I was eight years old, making two-minute noodles for dinner and helping with homework,’ Stacy said. ‘I knew then that I would never feed my own kids shit food.’
I nodded, helping myself to another quinoa burger.
At age eleven, Stacy started planning for a family of her own. ‘I even have a list somewhere I wrote back then of exactly the man I wanted to marry.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Yeah!’ she said. ‘No beards!’
We both laughed. Chris, her husband, is thoroughly bearded.
Stacy had a glory box, too, still at her parents’, filled with ‘cheap crap’ that never made it to her married life, though in some sense her entire twenties were a glory box. Right up until the age-thirty deadline, which was very real for her, Stacy collected crockery, beautiful old toys and puzzles, and experiences.
‘I didn’t want to have kids until I was thirty,’ she said. ‘Now we can show them pictures of us in Paris. They can see we had a life before them.’
The phrase ‘a life before them’ resonates with loss on paper, but listening to Stacy, I got the sense that it was waiting to have children that was more difficult. She did it not because she wanted that life she had without children, but because she wanted to present it to them, like a human glory box, filled with experience rather than with napkins. She probably also did it because of the contempt that our culture reserves for mothers who are too young. There is a window, between too young and too old, and it is about the same amount of time as a graduate degree.
I looked at Stacy’s fridge, tacked with drawings and photographs. ‘So you basically got everything you dreamed of.’
‘We don’t own the house.’
‘No, but it’s a very nice rental.’
‘That’s truuuuue,’ she said, cracking her appealing, fox-like smile. ‘Then why are we so fucking unhappy?’
I smiled. Because happiness is not indexed to achievements, I thought. Instead of saying this out loud, I paraphrased Tom Waits: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you a hundred thousand dollars wouldn’t fix.’
Stacy broke into laughter. ‘That’s true, too. Then we could take a holiday and put a deposit on a house. Then we could afford some daycare.’
Stacy insisted that she does not feel pressured by her peers on Facebook. Her ethical parenting style and DIY aesthetic (not dissimilar from my own mother’s early Whole Earth Catalogue aspirations) was all her, and she stuck to her guns even if it meant explaining what a sweatshop was to her kids when they demanded some cheap imported toy at the supermarket (I never have to do that, I thought). Her insistence and her reasoning simultaneously problematise the kind of research that takes place in order to identify trends. Millennial Mom might have a strong profile that is open to exploitation, but the millions of women who make her up have come to these conclusions for many different reasons. One thing we know for sure about millennials is that they are more abundantly and carefully marketed to than any previous generation. Are good intentions cheapened when they are used in marketing strategies? Probably. But cynicism isn’t an antidote.
