All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (28 page)

Back at Samantha’s house, there came a moment when she wondered aloud whether she hadn’t focused enough on Wesley when he was small. “I just remember when Calliope was little,” she said. “Wesley was always being awakened from a nap and scooped up in a car seat and put someplace. His standards were so much lower, in terms of his demands. He was just happy to have
food.
And I thought,
I wonder if I’ve done this to him.
But I look at his dad, and
he’s
like that. I don’t know how you feel, Wesley. . . .”

She then looked directly at her son—so talented, so perceptive, and Lord, such a pain in the ass sometimes, causing her so much grief. Yet it wasn’t a look of desperation to validate her choices. It was a brave thing she did. She seemed genuinely to want to know. He looked back at her, then uncertainly into the middle distance, with his hands cupped over the neck of his guitar. Several seconds ticked by, then several more. It was the only time there was no guitar-playing running in the background of our interview. It was the only time there was no sound at all.

“Start speaking when you’re ready,” said Samantha. But it wasn’t Wesley who needed the extra time. It was she. “I just feel like having kids is the greatest thing I ever did, and I . . .” Her voice caught, and she started to cry. “I’m so proud of them. I love them so much. Last night, I was remembering when Calliope was a baby and being like,
Oh my God, that’s so
gone.” Her kids, startled by this frank display of emotion, looked at one another and themselves started to well up. “And then I thought,
Well, someday maybe she’ll have a baby too.
. . .
” Samantha wiped her nose.

Wesley still said nothing. Calliope, almost never at a loss for words, said nothing either. She put one hand over her mouth. With the other, she laced her mother’s fingers in her own.

chapter six

joy

But I am telling only half the truth. Maybe only a quarter of it. The rest of the truth is that I was unable to bear loving my children so much. Loving left me weak, skinless. Ideally I would have liked Katherine and Margaret sewn to my armpits, secured to me. Or, better yet, kicking and turning in my stomach, where I could keep them safe forever.

—Mary Cantwell,
Manhattan, When I Was Young
(1995)

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, I’VE
tried to look at how children affect their parents at each stage of their development. To do so, I’ve examined inflection points and sources of tension, hoping to identify which ones are universal and which are unique to this moment in time. In chapter 1, I tried to explain how children can compromise the autonomy we’ve grown accustomed to, making it harder to sleep, harder to find flow, harder to manage the boundaries between our work and home selves. In chapter 2, I talked about the still-stalled revolution at home, and how a lack of consensus about domestic divisions of labor puts added strains on a marriage once a child comes along—strains only made worse by declines in social support. In chapter 4, I talked about concerted cultivation and the pressures on parents, since World War II, to intensively parent, pressures abetted by the soaring cost of living; ambivalence about women in the workforce; the rapid churn of technology; increased fears about child safety; and most of all, the economic inutility of children in the modern age. And in chapter 5, I examined the effect of the prolonged, protected childhood—as well as the culture-wide pressure to produce “happy, well-adjusted children”— on the parents of adolescents.

But each chapter (save for chapter 3, about the joys of young children) has had a built-in bias. Each has focused on parenthood as we actively pursue it day to day, rather than on what parenthood actually
means
to us, or how the overall experience of being a parent is swept into our self-image.

There’s a reason I’ve tilted in this direction. To raise a child requires galactic effort, and since the advent of modern childhood—since the moment “parenting” became a popular verb, especially—there has been an even greater emphasis on child-rearing as a high-performance, perfectible pursuit. To repeat the words of William Doherty, raising children is “a high-cost/high-reward activity.” Chapter by chapter, I’ve tried to document those costs.

But those costs don’t mean that children can’t provide us with moment-to-moment pleasure. Robin Simon, a Wake Forest University sociologist whose findings on the relationship between parenting and happiness rank among the most negative in the social science canon, said this to me outright, over coffee: “There’s really
fun
stuff about raising kids.” That’s right.
Fun.
She sees no contradiction between what she’s found in her research and this idea. She mentioned her nineteen-year-old son. At that moment, he was going through a karate film phase. “It’s
fun
watching really bad films with him,” she said. “It’s
fun
to hear his ideas about things and to see him express his interests.” It’s just that the fun parts of raising a kid—whether it’s singing at the top of your lungs or buying your daughter a dress, coaching a soccer game or staying in and baking banana bread—can be overwhelmed by the strains and moment-to-moment chores of the job.

But mothering and fathering aren’t just things we do. Being a mother or being a father is
who we are.
“When I think of the word ‘parenting,’ ” writes Nancy Darling, “I think of asking my kids to set the table, getting them to do their homework, or getting my youngest to practice his violin.” She notes that this is hard work. More to the point, it is “probably the least pleasurable part of my interactions with them.”

So what gives Darling pleasure?

Hanging out watching videos, having tea, having them spontaneously come over and hug me, being amazed at how good they are at doing things and how little push they need to do what they’re supposed to, and the quiet wonder of just being with them watching them GROW. . . . Listening to my youngest practice a violin etude last night—one he had bored himself silly with all summer—I was just awestruck that this kid who has terrible handwriting, who likes fencing with sticks in the backyard and who will do anything to start a water fight—could make such truly beautiful music.

And what those pleasures have in common, she realizes, is that they’re passive. “They involve just sitting back,” she writes, “and enjoying my kids being themselves.” They don’t show up as readily on surveys and questionnaires. “If you asked me about how I felt about parenting,” she concludes, “none of those pleasures would be assessed.” How it feels to
be
a parent and how it feels to
do
the quotidian and often arduous task of parenting are two very separate things. “Being a parent” is much more difficult for social science to anatomize.

joy

We live in an age when we’re told that striving for happiness is paramount. Our right to pursue it is enshrined in our nation’s founding document; it’s the subject of innumerable self-help books and television shows. Happiness is the focus of a burgeoning field in academia called positive psychology, which studies what makes the good life and all-around flourishing possible. (For a while, positive psychology was the most popular course among undergraduates at Harvard.) Happiness, we are told, is achievable. When we’re surrounded by so much material prosperity, as we are today, it is our prerogative—our due, even our
destiny
—to attain it.

But “happiness,” as so many parents have said to me, is a big and hopelessly imprecise word. One of the women at an ECFE class, a grandmother named Marilyn who happened to be visiting that day, put it as bluntly as I’ve ever heard it when she asked: “Shouldn’t we make a distinction between happiness and joy?” To which all the people in the class agreed that, yes, we probably should. “It seems to me,” she said, “that happiness is more superficial. I don’t really know how others feel, but for me, having my kids brought me this deep sense that I’ve done something worthwhile in my life. . . .” And then she started to cry. “Because when all is said and done, and I ask,
What was my life about?
—now I know.”

Meaning, joy, and purpose come from a great variety of sources, not just children. But what’s important here is Marilyn’s more basic observation: a single word, “happiness,” often cannot fully capture these feelings—or countless other emotions that make us feel transcendently human. The awed, otherworldly feeling you get when your infant looks directly into your eyes for the first time is different from the sense of pride you experience when that same kid, years later, lands a perfect double axel, which in turn is different from the sensation of warmth and belonging that consumes you when your widely dispersed family gathers for Thanksgiving. You can try to quantify each of these feelings with a number, certainly, and I don’t underestimate the value of such attempts, for the sake of figuring out ways to get more of them. But in the end, a number is just that—a digit, plotted on a graph. It may reflect the degree to which we feel something, but it entirely lacks dimensionality. These feelings do not strike me as the same
in
kind.
Some, like joy, can hurt almost as much as they elate; others, like duty, run silently in the background, perhaps making our day-to-day lives more difficult, but making our overall lives more worthwhile and more consonant with our values.

“Few of the experiences of happiness that are conveyed in autobiographical writings and literature,” writes Sissela Bok, the Harvard philosopher, in
Exploring Happiness,
“can be fully measured by psychological or neuroscientific research.” Nor, she writes, can “contemporary measures of happiness convey most of the philosophical and religious claims about the nature of happiness or about the role it plays in human lives.”

Indeed, one could argue that the whole experience of being a parent exposes the superficiality of our preoccupation with happiness, which usually takes the form of pursuing pleasure or finding our bliss. Raising children makes us reassess this obsession and perhaps redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness
is.
The very things Americans are told almost daily to aspire to may in fact be misguided. (There’s that line in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
that Sallah and Indiana Jones utter in unison: “They’re digging in the wrong place.”) As we muddle our way through the parenting years—trying to make sense of our new role in the age of the priceless child, trying to execute that role in a culture that provides so little support for working and nonworking parents alike—it is very worth asking: what
are
we digging for, and what have we found?

LET’S START WITH JOY.
It wasn’t just Marilyn who used this word to describe her experience. Practically all parents do. And perhaps no person alive has thought through the idea of joy with more thoroughness and more care than George Vaillant.

Vaillant is a psychiatrist by training, a poet-philosopher by temperament, and, from the point of view of the history books, the decades-long steward of the Grant Study, one of the most ambitious longitudinal surveys in the social sciences. Since 1939, the Grant Study has followed the same group of Harvard sophomores, collecting data about every aspect of their lives (and also, by now, their deaths). Not surprisingly, then, Vaillant tends to take the long view of things rather than focus on moment-to-moment happiness. “Their lives were too human for science,” he once wrote of the Grant Study men, “too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.”

When I first meet Vaillant in Boston, he’s dressed in a cheerful blue sweater with holes in it, which seem of a piece with his cheerful, slightly abstracted demeanor. He has dense eyebrows, lively eyes, and an unusually erect bearing for a fellow of seventy-seven. “Your generation can’t imagine a world without attachment,” he tells me as we settle down to chat. “But fancy: before, when behavioral scientists wrote about love, it was all
sex.
” He’s primarily talking about Freud and Skinner, who couldn’t begin to examine the love between parent and child without seeing eroticism. “They couldn’t
conceptualize
attachment.”

Yet that’s exactly where joy comes from, according to Vaillant: attachment. In his book
Spiritual Evolution,
he writes, “Joy is connection,” simple as that. Joy is very different from the kind of pleasure one gets from pursuing excitement or satisfying a drive. Those pleasures tend to be intense and ephemeral. “It’s how Freud saw sex,” says Vaillant. “A full prostate, and releasing it is glorious.”

Vaillant doesn’t want to shortchange such pleasures. He recognizes that we’re wired for them. They’re
fun.
But also solitary. They’re very different from joy, which is almost impossible to experience alone. “It’s the difference between watching
Emmanuelle
”—a famous erotic French film from the 1970s—“and watching Thanksgiving dinner cooked in Grandmother’s kitchen,” he says. “They’re both forms of pleasure.” But the first turns the individual inward, while the second turns the individual outward, toward others. The second is what intrigues Vaillant. “It’s watching your grandmother,” he says, “who’s too fat, and your mother, who’s got too many improving ideas, and your little brother, who’s chasing you.” That familiarity, that sense of bondedness, and “those kitchen smells,” he says, “are all about Thanksgiving connection.” Joy is about being warm, not hot. In
Spiritual Evolution,
he offers this lovely maxim: “Excitement, sexual ecstasy, and happiness all speed up the heart; joy and cuddling slow the heart.”

Some of the most poignant testimony I heard from parents was about this need for connection. As Angelique, the mother of four in Missouri City, was describing her thirteen-year-old son, who’d lately taken up football, I asked her what made that age magical. “When he stands in front of me and wants a hug,” she told me. “They still
need
hugs, thirteen-year-old kids.” Leslie, who lived in the neighboring town of Sugar Land, told me something similar about her ten-year-old: “He’ll say, ‘Can I go to so-and-so’s house?’ ” She pantomimed a nod, a wave of the hand—
Go, shoo
. “And he’ll be halfway out the door,” she continued, “and then he’ll say, ‘Oh, I forgot something,’ and he’ll turn around and run into the kitchen and give me a hug.”

They seem so jaunty and independent, playing on their Wiis or hauling off to practice in their oversized football gear. But all they want, and what they need most of all, is you. And you, them.

But connections, no matter how strong, are still made of a thousand gossamer threads. If that’s what joy is—connection—then to fully experience it requires something terrifying as well as exalting: opening oneself up to the possibility of loss. That’s what Vaillant realized about joy. It makes us more vulnerable, in its way, than sadness. He’s fond of quoting William Blake’s
Auguries of Innocence:
“Joy and woe are woven fine.” You can’t have joy without the prospect of mourning, and to some people this makes joy a difficult feeling to bear.

Especially in parenthood, where loss is inevitable, built into the very paradox of raising children; we pour love into them so that they’ll one day grow strong enough to leave us. Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they’re about to no longer be. In
The
Philosophical Baby,
Alison Gopnik uses the Japanese phrase
mono no aware
to describe it: “bittersweetness inherent in ephemeral beauty.” Joy and loss are part of the inherent contradictions of gift-love. “We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching,” wrote C. S. Lewis. “Thus a heavy task is laid upon Gift-love. It must work towards its own abdication.”