4/5/2020 | Minister of Children

Justin Trudeau has our attention on the CBC
For the children’s question period.
Our boys lean in to hear what he’ll say.
I’m tense, waiting for the pauses and wavers.
I know that ministers and fathers can lie.

The seven year-old notes Justin is handsome.
The almost-four year-old is watchful on my lap.
My partner stands behind our chair.
A brother and sister in Montreal ask:
“What will happen to us if our parents get sick?”
I can feel my partner breathe with me,
But we keep our focus on the boys.
At bedtime she will rock the younger one as he cries
And repeats the question.
It takes more time for parents to comfort children
Than they have to comfort each other.

Justin presents a navy cardigan and meticulous grooming,
Neatly framed on the colonial steps.
I bet he’s pulling on old drama teacher tricks:
Pretend the camera lens is the face of his youngest.
Pretend the teleprompter scrolls a Christmas story.
Forget the actor’s terror of an empty theatre:
Pretend the children are all there.

He starts every answer in good form: with a sigh,
A smile, and “I know many of you are frightened.”
Then he finds the talking-point groove:
Canada, taking care, Canada, safe, Canada,
Brave nurses, Canada, working together, health,
Good place, good country, Canada.
The country’s name can become a mantra
For how its settlers want to see themselves.

If you let the sound be ancient again,
You can hear the word that meant “village”
In a time before boats and planes brought
Smallpox, economic plans, and cardigans.

A while back, the seven year-old asked me
“Is Justin Trudeau a good man?”
By instinct, my reply was more about myself:
“Like all of us, he’s trying to be a good person.”

(That feeling when teaching the benefit of the doubt
Perpetuates a spell about white intentions.)

The young interviewer, online from his bedroom,
Says they received 4000 questions.
The selections show that children ask
What many adults ask, stripped of number-crunching.
A snowsuited boy in Iqaluit asks
Whether the virus can survive the cold.
A six year-old girl in Toronto asks
How homeless people are supposed to stay at home.
There is no question from a First Nations child about how
To wash your hands without clean water.

I know the parent politics of cutting a deal
Between what I know, what I am ashamed of,
And what I can say to project a safe world.
I know the pivot between dread
And the reframe that mixes hope with fiction.
Does acting the part of the good parent scale up?
The Minister of Children also has to comfort oil barons.
He has to pretend he knows what millennials need,
Promise that we can do anything when we grow up,
That everything we want is sustainable,
That everything will turn out alright.
He shares tobacco with chiefs and then betrays them.
He has to smile as he zooms with sociopaths.
He has to count the money that pays for the stagecraft
That prompts a boy to ask: “Is he a good man?”
Instead of “Does he do good things?”

Justin is a month younger than me.
He and I might share night sweats,
Palpitations, a certain emptiness about who we are.
He and I might have bonded
In a high school drama class in the late 1980s,
When climate collapse and trickster stories
Were fantasies to star in
Rather than medicine to surrender to
When we manage to tell our children: “We don’t know.”

— mr

Maybe This is an Opportunity for Parents and Non-Parents To Empathize More with Each Other

At about ten days into social distancing — and improvised homeschooling — this tweet sailed across my feed:

I laughed, but it hurt.

We have an almost-4 year old and a 7 year-old at home. Last night the provincial government sealed up the parks and beaches. The boys haven’t been within six feet of their grandparents for weeks. Yesterday, everyone over 70 was asked to self-isolate.

Parents are on their own these days. It’s one thing to not have access to child-care. It’s totally another to not be allowed to have any, or to get any from extended family. Every family, in every configuration, is on its own island of togetherness and aloneness.

It’s challenging, and we’re meeting it — to the point of it being a transformative experience in some ways. Relational peace and resilience is an incredible privilege. And I know we’re a thousand times luckier than so many. Anyone who is parenting solo now, or exposed to substance abuse or domestic violence — my heart just dies. When the vulnerable are isolated, the veneer of nuclear family safety and its independence cracks.

Back to the tweet: I’ve never, to my recollection, said anything so intrusive and insensitive as what wittyidiot reports to any of my non-parent friends.

But I sure have felt it.

And when I recognized myself feeling it, and I realized it felt off, I took a look at where that feeling was coming from.

On my generous and gregarious side, there is, without a doubt, some inexpressible joy that parenting has filled me up with, to the point that my prior life feels unrecognizable and haunted. And I wish I could just share that with everyone. But on my narcissistic side, there’s a part of me that wants non-parents to validate my choices with their bodies. I want them to share my stress — as if they didn’t have their own. If I were to speak wittyidiot’s quote aloud, I would be speaking from that voice.

wittyidiot’s burn is on point. Whoever said that to him, intentionally or not, was inflating a selfish and defensive need to the point of trumping basic manners towards the many reasons, chosen or not chosen, for not being a parent.

The tweet also points out that the sentiment of “the greatest joy” is, when spoken aloud, disingenuous. When the shit hits the fan, it goes silent. Shouldn’t being a parent be “the greatest joy in life”, for better or worse? Yes, it should. Unless what the parent is really saying, in a passive aggressive way, is: “When are you going to take on the same stress that I have?”

The inflated parent is forgetting, of course, the stress of loneliness, or of building a chosen family, of miscarriage, or moral and political conviction, or simply other work in the world.

They’re also failing to anticipate just how much worse the stress of parenting can get, to the point of that unforgivable thought: that they wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

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For me, the last time this issue popped out of the collective unconscious and into the memosphere was from the other side, when that “Lady No-Kids” cartoon by Will McPhail made the hetero-normie rounds:

 

I laughed then, too, but it didn’t feel clean.

I especially didn’t feel comfortable that the target was a non-parenting woman, contrasted with the mature mother pushing the stroller and herding the 4 year-old.  It deepened the misogynistic double-bind of “You’re either frivolous, or responsible for everything.”

Happily, it looks like McPhail evened out the scales with a follow-up:

Gender aside: McPhail illuminates the bald fact that through lack of experience or imagination, the non-parent can be blind to their privileges of time and relative autonomy. And if they flaunt this, knowingly or not, or make assumptions about what their friends who are parents can and can’t do, it can be frustrating.

Or worse: for some it might provoke a grief — shameful because it’s not easily admitted — for a former life, or for choices that could have been. There are now 15K in the “I Regret Having Children” Facebook group.

The first time I clued into this tension was when the priest who was the principal of the Catholic school where my mom worked asked the staff to take on a bunch of extra tasks as though they would be giving up happy hour. I remember my dad grumbling, “Father So-and-So needs to wash some diapers.” I was young, but I understood that this wasn’t just about the work itself. Dad was talking about the kind of work: we don’t float above anything when we’re up to our elbows in crap. We don’t sit in cathedrals in contemplation. We don’t do yoga vacays.

But McPhail’s exaggeration leaves a sour taste. The heteronormies are buttoned-up. Lady and Lord No-Kids are obviously silly.

The problem with the caricature — maybe part of its purpose, in fact —is that it conceals the more stark challenges to parenting as an existential identity.

I have anti-natalist friends who say outright that it’s immoral to have children, given the imminent timeline of ecological collapse. It’s hard to argue with them. I have feminist friends who say that we just don’t have enough justice to allow for parenting partnerships — especially if they are hetero — that are structurally equal. It’s hard to argue with them. I have anti-capitalist friends who pinpoint the heteronormative family as the heart of consumerism, masquerading as love. I have climate collapse friends who say: “There’s no problem in the world that can be solved by bringing more people into it.” I know birth-striking millennials, melancholic but resolute.

All of these folks have good points. None of them are following geese around while not wearing pants. If you were to feed them wittyidiot’s line, “When are you going to have children?”, they would hear: “When are you going to conform to your gender identity? When are you going to accept your fate? When are you going to just admit you’re a producer and a consumer, just like everyone else? When are you going to get down in the shit with us?”

But there’s a lot of ways to wash diapers, and everyone has a fate. Many of these same non-parents are masters of the “chosen family” structure, which binds together those thrown out of the nuclear shelter, or those who had to flee. It’s not all extra yoga and non-fiction. They’re the ones who often have more time to volunteer, reach out by phone, share their baking, or take on an extra therapy client, pro-bono. One anti-natalist I know is spearheading vegan food distribution for the homeless in Santa Barbara. He’s committed to never having children, but he works as hard as I do, or harder feeding people he’s not bio-responsible for.

Here’s something else I’ve noticed: many of the most influential eco-prophets of our time — the “doomers” who can say what others are afraid of saying about tipping points and mass extinction events, for example, and how close they are — are non-parents. Do they have less to lose in speaking the truth? Conversely, many of the most prominent boosters of green capitalism or Green New Deals, or the belief that there are political or technological fixes for collapse — are parents. I think there’s a connection between the biological hope of parenting and maintaining a politics of progress, even when the cold hard math is all wrong.

 

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So far the lockdowns are shining a blinding spotlight on certain differences between parenting and non-parenting life. But what if we looked for something else?

In previous lives I’ve lived on several sides of this divide, albeit in my white, male and hetero way. I’ve been single (obviously), and I’ve step-parented for seventeen years, and now I’m partnered with two young boys.

As a stepfather I was devoted and committed. But I was also resigned to always being on the bio-responsible periphery of more central relationships. The buck never stopped with me. There were years in there where I didn’t think I would be a parent in what I conceived of at the time as a more meaningful way. I’m not saying that step-parents can’t have or feel exactly what bio-parents do — if that can even be generalized — but I didn’t, not quite. Part of that may have been my own emotional avoidance, but a lot of it was circumstance

It did however give me a powerful experience of simultaneous inclusion in and exclusion from the most privileged unit in our culture: the nuclear. This, along with other life circumstances — like being recruited into two cults in which family life was present but ambivalent to the point of being devalued — meant that I also socialized on both sides of that divide.

Back then, I had friends with children and friends without. Childless friends who were happy that way, and those who weren’t. Friends who had taken vows of celibacy that suited their introversion. Friends indoctrinated into celibacy who were quietly raging. Friends who grieved miscarriages and not finding the right co-parent. Friends who felt the clock run out. Friends who knew that having a lot of sex partners wasn’t conducive to parenting, and they weren’t about to change. Friends with children who talked about it, too loudly and defensively, in the way that wittyidiot skewers in his tweet. And also friends with children who were overwhelmed, depressed, terrified that they were passing on their trauma to their kids.

Later, when the stars aligned and I did become part of the nuclear club, I was rudely awakened to the fact that I might not continue to have that same connection with friends without children. The first volley was fired by a good friend at the time. When I told him my partner was pregnant, he ghosted me.

It really hurt. But it made sense. We never got to talk about it at the time, but my guess is that he was betting I wasn’t going to be as available to him, and so he cut his losses.

He was right. No more two-hour lunches, spontaneous cafe chinwags, or hanging out after events. He’d probably seen it happen with other friends: that tunnel-vision-descent into worry and expectation and rearranged values in service to the imaginary baby, but on a functional level can feel pretty narcissistic to the person who can’t share it.

And what a paradox. Expectant-parent worry puts you in a place where you really don’t want to be disconnected from anybody important to you, and yet it is exactly this narrowing vision that can drive key people away as if you had a virus.

At the same time, I felt myself being recruited into a new club. Men who were already fathers smiled at me with a mixture of fatigue, recognition, pride, and schadenfreude: “You won’t regret it,” but also “You won’t know what hit you,” and “See you on the other side.”

And the weird thing about that club? Its impersonality. For me, it feels more symbolic than embodied. I’ve noticed that the men seem to nod at each other more than converse. We share that peculiar nuclear alienation: we belong to families that are largely hidden from each other, but we also share an abstract social power.

Much of the abstraction is a function of time. The demands of the nuclear arrangements that we have — artifacts of patriarchy and capitalism — simply don’t allow for the same levels of sharing time between equals that often characterizes non-parenting or pre-parenting life. Add to that the fact that parenting seems to shunt many families into social funnels determined less by shared interests than biological circumstance. In the meeting places — playgrounds, schoolyards, gyms, instead of parks and cafes — there’s less talk about life in general than about life with children.

And this must make us very narrow-minded at times to our non-parent friends. We don’t have time. Or we don’t share the same timeline. It might also make some of us angry, in that wittyidiot passive-aggressive way.

My gut says there’s some intrapersonal confusion as well: when the parent is trying to communicate with the non-parent, they might feel they are looking back into a life they remember. It’s not true. They’re looking at someone else. Some whose path, with a slight shift in perspective, can be an object of admiration, simply because it is so different.

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I don’t have any big “Can’t we all just get along” ideas. The exchanges that wittyidiot lampoons and McPhail exaggerates should obviously just stop, or be kept private.

But there are a few public behaviour things I think we can agree on, especially on social media. That is if you care enough about this particular tension to help build a culture in which parents and non-parents empathize with each other. And especially if your social feeds contain a mixture of parents and non-parents.

IMHO, parents should really own that it’s tempting to use their children to self-object all over Facebook. To use them to show how busy or stressed or fun or woke they are. Or to hide behind. Beyond the massive consent issues involved in using your kids this way — something that non-parents may be more attuned to and put off by than we know — there’s a difference between recording and performing what happens in one’s life. The more one does the latter, the more abstract parenting becomes for everyone. Our relationships need less symbolism, not more. And if you’re a heteronormie, you may be contributing to conventional narratives that continue to bury other experiences.

If you know non-parents who are lonely, maybe text them? Explain your time is limited, but that you’re thinking of them?

And non-parents: pandemic lockdown might not be the best time to post pics of yourself in bubble baths or meandering diary entries about how bored you are. If you know parents who are struggling — reach out to them, maybe? You could read a book to a friend’s kid over Zoom. It sounds small, but it’s extraordinary what even a half-hour of relief can give.

Maybe it’s also for you. Imagine that book you read to that kid over zoom contributes to their ability to concentrate and focus, and that they take that skill and develop it to the point where they’re able to intubate you smoothly when you need ventilation during whatever pandemic hits us in 20 years.

As for me, I’ll continue owning my feelings and softening my judgements. I don’t know what life I would be living if I wasn’t parenting with my partner. But I trust there are men out there who are living non-parenting lives with integrity, supporting the world in amazing ways I cannot.

And maybe one or two out there will see that I’m trying to work on unknotting a primal jealousy of parenting: to fantasize that someone will take care of you unconditionally when you become a baby again. I’ll admit it: I regularly visualize my deathbed, and imagine my sons on either side, holding my hands. The stories starting to pour in from Italy and Spain of parents dying alone fill me with longing and terror.

But something tells me a fantasy that rides on a notion of the care to which parenting entitles me won’t soothe longing, nor overcome terror. I want to fantasize about fostering a future of care for everyone.

My Son Is 7. Here Are Some Questions I’ll Ask Him About the Corona Era When He’s 20

A starter list, mainly for me. Feel free to add your own questions in the comments.

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Did I let you learn about the pandemic at your own pace?
Did I tell you enough, so that you didn’t feel I was keeping secrets?
Did I tell you too much?
Did it ever feel like I was asking you to take care of me, or to soothe my worry?
I know I was scrambling to find money during that whole time. How did it feel when I couldn’t pay you enough attention?
Did it make sense to you at the time to ask you to do that homework-type stuff? Was it weird for your dad to be a teacher too?
Do you remember doing aerobics-dance-party-wrestling with mom in the living room when it rained?
Remember when the Croatian bakery had to close and my mom gave us that bread recipe and we started baking bread?
Remember when she needed more yeast and my dad drove my mom across the city to get some from me, and we met them at the curb but you weren’t allowed to hug them?
Did it bother you that I looked at my phone while we played chess?
We had a lot of new rules during that time. Did I explain them well enough? Did they make you feel more or less secure?
I remember walking with you and your brother in the ravine, and other kids were running around less supervised, and coming too close. Were you embarrassed when I scolded them?
But do you remember when the ravine was empty, and we walked there hand in hand in the dusk?
Do you remember me losing my temper? Did I come to you to repair?
Do you remember being angry at me? Did you ever feel shy about telling me about it?
How did it feel to have to keep that distance from Nana and Papa when we met at the park?
I remember saying “No, we can’t do that,” a lot, and it made me feel awful. Do you remember me saying: “But we can do this other thing?”
What did you imagine was happening for other kids around the world? Did it make you start thinking about justice?
Did you feel like your mom and I were working happily together? Did you feel our love?
Did you see me thank her enough for all the things she does?
When you heard the news over the radio, what was most interesting to you? Frightening? Inspiring?
Did it make you want to be a doctor, a nurse?
What did you learn about being bored?
Were you worried about your little brother?
Do you remember when your mom gave him his first haircut in the kitchen — with kitchen scissors because that’s all we had — because we couldn’t take him to Denise, who came to our house for your first haircut?
What made you most scared? What helped soothe you most?
What did you learn about reassuring children, without lying to them?
Did I ever say anything that, remembering it now, you feel: “That didn’t help me prepare for this”?
Did I live or buy things or relate to our neighbours in a way that now makes you feel, “That didn’t really model the skills I need now”?
How did this influence your thinking about the climate?
Did this make you want to have your own children more, or less, or about the same?

On Minimization as a Patriarchal Reflex

Minimization As a Patriarchal Reflex

Image: A chinstrap for children, designed by Moritz Schreber. Illustration from: D.G.M. Schreber: Calligraphy. Leipzig, 1858

 

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On Facebook, I posted a brief note about starting to learn what is painfully obvious to women: patriarchy inflicts the stress of constant bodily vigilance at best and acute terror at worse.

The post took off and the comments were stunning. So many stood out, like those that reported on strategies for increasing safety in taxis. One commenter wrote that she always video-chats with a friend while she’s alone in an Uber, dropping details that signal to the driver that someone knows where they are. If men don’t know about this kind of defensive labour, they’ve got to learn.

One genre of comments sent me down a real rabbit hole. The commenter would start with congratulations about my sensitivity to this kind of thing, because the commenter commonly interacts with men who simply think they’re irrational, neurotic, angry or bitter.

But I could feel instantly that such a compliment was undeserved, because I know in my bones what minimizing the other feels like. Continue reading “On Minimization as a Patriarchal Reflex”

Mindfulness for Fathers: Louis CK is Wrong About Boredom

In support of a new book I’m co-writing with Michael Stone about the spirituality of family life. Follow the link to support and pre-order.

I have an ambivalence crush on Louis CK. He plays the brave and humiliating role of exposing the swinging sweaty balls of the cultural id. But this doesn’t make him the spiritual teacher so many want him to be, especially if we forget that he’s playing a caricature.

Continue reading “Mindfulness for Fathers: Louis CK is Wrong About Boredom”

Mindfulness for Fathers: Five Difficult Feelings We Can Learn to Love

In support of a new book I’m co-writing with Michael Stone about the spirituality of family life. Follow the link to support and pre-order.   

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It’s a tall order for many men to even acknowledge difficult feelings. But love them? That’s just going too far. But of course, going farther and loving deeper than you knew you could is what fatherhood, and life, demands.

Parenting is painted through with great strokes of perfectly natural sorrow. You can only pretend to fight it. Much better to look at it carefully, to see its colours clearly, feel its textures. What else could be at the root of empathy and compassion? What else would give you the gravitas you’ll need to be a person of consequence in later life? What else would you even aspire to? Our strange luck is that there are at least five inevitable sorrows that soften us as fathers, even as they strengthen us. Their lessons extrapolate well to the rest of life. Continue reading “Mindfulness for Fathers: Five Difficult Feelings We Can Learn to Love”

Excerpt from Family Wakes Us Up: the first post-natal letter

A letter from  Family Wakes Us Up, my new book with Michael Stone.

There’s only one week left in our crowdfunding campaign to support its completion and publication.

You can support us by pre-ordering here!

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10/29/12

Dear Michael –

The clock says 4:37, my flesh says stay awake forever – you can’t miss any of this. My eyes are burning with bright exhaustion. He’s nursing and sleeping well, but it feels like I’m going through my own birth, and the labour has taken this whole nine days so far. Whenever I think I’m settling in for complete silence, I hear him breathe like another person within me, someone I have forgotten until now, someone coming in a dream, but no dream has ever pulsed so hot. Continue reading “Excerpt from Family Wakes Us Up: the first post-natal letter”

Mindfulness for Fathers: Giving Your Child Secret Space

A post in support of Family Wakes Us Up, a book I’m co-writing with Michael Stone. Please support the publication by donating here. Thank you!

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Our son Jacob is thirteen months. From dawn till dusk he treads the threshold between the togetherness we share with him and the secret space he is beginning to find in himself. At this age – all ages pass so quickly! – the contrast between the two is most visible in his relationship to books. Continue reading “Mindfulness for Fathers: Giving Your Child Secret Space”