All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (29 page)

For some parents, fear and joy are even more deeply intertwined. In a 2010 lecture that has since been seen by hundreds of thousands, the University of Houston’s Brené Brown began with the following challenge:

Christmas eve, beautiful night, light snowfall, young family of four in the car on the way to grandma’s house for dinner. They’re listening to the radio station, the one that starts playing the Christmas music, like, right at Halloween. “Jingle Bells” comes on. The kids in the back seat go crazy. Everyone breaks into song. The camera pans in on the faces of the kids, mom, dad. What happens next?

She told the audience that the most common answer is “car crash.” In fact, 60 percent of all people who respond to this question say “car crash.” (Another 10 to 15 percent have “equally fatalistic answers,” said Brown, “but more creative.”) She acknowledged that this reflex could simply be a demonstration of how well we’ve all internalized Hollywood’s lurid imaginings. But she suspects it’s more than that. The fact is, scores of parents tell her the same thing, describing real-life situations. She gave a typical example: “I’m looking at my children, and they’re sleeping, and I’m right on the verge of bliss, and I picture something horrible happening.”

Brown calls this feeling “foreboding joy.” Almost all parents have known some form of it. All parents are hostages to fate. Their hearts, as the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, are “running around inside someone else’s body.” So much vulnerability can be agonizing. But how else can parents experience ecstasy? How else can they know awe? These feelings are the price mothers and fathers pay for elation, and for fathomless connection. “Joy,” writes Vaillant, “is grief inside out.”

ALL OF WHICH TAKES
me back to Sharon, the Minnesota grandmother raising her grandson, Cam. She has faced the unimaginable, burying not just one child but two. In the case of Michelle, Cam’s mother, Sharon at least got to see her child reach adulthood, even motherhood. But with her firstborn, Mike, Sharon never got that privilege. He died in 1985, at the age of sixteen.

Sharon and her family were living in Tucson at the time. Michelle was angry and had an IQ of 75, which posed one kind of problem; Mike was angry and had an IQ of 185, which posed quite another. His brilliance, rage, and loneliness flared early. At four, he spent a lot of time on his own, memorizing the spellings of long words (“Constantinople,” the perennial “antidisestablishmentarianism”). “And he was always making very weird little jokes,” said Sharon, “that none of his peers could understand.” Briefly, in elementary school, Mike went through an outgoing phase. “But then he moved it inward, like it was up to
him
to save the world,” said Sharon, “and then he
was
trying to save the world.” He’d sit in the park, for example, hoping to catch the men who were beating up the local homeless population. This was in sixth grade. Then Mike went to a “gifted and talented” junior high and found his crowd, kids who played
Dungeons & Dragons,
made up languages, wrote poetry. But their fellowship wasn’t enough to subdue his depression, which grew especially severe in high school. He started talking to Sharon about how much he was suffering—how he was invaded sometimes by the impulse to take his own life, which he eventually did.

“He came into my room on a Thursday and said, ‘I’m feeling suicidal, I think I should go back to the hospital,’ ” said Sharon. She told me all this while Cam was napping. “So we called the doctor, and the doctor said, ‘No, he needs to stand on his own two feet, and you need to stop intervening for him.’ ” He added that Mike should be in charge of his own medication from now on. “So he was,” said Sharon. “And that’s what he chose to do with them.” She found him the following morning.

How, I asked her, does she make sense of her son’s life now, all these years later?

She didn’t answer right away. “When I think about my life with Mike . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know. It’s so big.” She rummaged around for a starting point and landed on perhaps the most logical one. “From the day he was born, I expected a girl. In those days you didn’t know. And it took me a couple of weeks to adjust to the fact that he was a boy. But, I mean, he was beautiful. Blond-haired, blue-eyed. Perfect little body. Size and everything. He was just such a . . .” Again, words deserted her. “He was really the joy of my life.” His depression eventually showed, and his anger. “But that was always a piece of a bigger life,” she said. “He was funny, he was helpful. Going to the mall when he was twelve, he would
still
hold my hand. Walking around. I don’t know. He was a great kid. I was proud of him. I always hoped we could find some way to help him. I don’t know how to sum all that up.”

I hadn’t asked that, exactly. I’d been afraid to be too direct, I think, fearing the question would seem either naive or cruel. But what I’d meant was, did she ever despair about what all of it was
for?

She considered the question for a while. “I don’t think so,” she said, after a bit. “I meant to have a child; I had a child. That child had an illness, but he was still a whole person. I raised him. We interacted. I wish he had made a different choice. I wish he were still alive today. But . . .” She only paused briefly here. Her answer was simpler than I’d expected. “Raising Mike was still raising Mike,” she said. “I am
still
his mother. The fact that he died at sixteen doesn’t change the ‘what for’ for me, in the same way that it didn’t with Michelle dying at thirty-three. I still have their lives. They’re still my children.”

They are part of her history. They are people she loved, people she nurtured, people she sometimes failed, people she sometimes rescued, people who made her feel the best and worst she has ever felt. “They’ve still brought a full parenthood to me,” she said. “It’s not a full happiness. It’s not a full sorrow. It’s a full parenthood. It’s what you have when you have kids.”

duty, meaning, and purpose

Almost by definition, we associate children with the future. In the crudest evolutionary sense, that’s why we have them: to see ourselves—to see our species—continue.

But there’s a difference between viewing our children as a continuation of our own DNA and burdening them with our hopes, which may or may not be met. Those who let go of having too many personal expectations may in fact have a healthier attitude toward child-rearing.

In his memoir
Family Romance,
the English novelist and critic John Lanchester makes a beautiful plea. Specifically, he calls for a revival of the concept of duty. “ ‘Duty,’ ” he writes, “is one of those words that has more or less vanished from our culture. It—the word, and perhaps the thing as well—exists only in specific ghettos like the armed services.” And then he turns, almost instinctively, to the topic of caring for others:

We often prefer to use “care” or “carer” for people who would once have thought that what they were doing, in, say, looking after incapacitated relatives, was a duty. To call the act of changing someone’s soiled underclothing a work of caring can make you feel as if you should be doing it because you want to do it, whereas the idea that you’re doing it because it’s your duty makes it more impersonal and therefore—to my mind, anyway—a lighter burden. It leaves you free to dislike what you are doing while still feeling that you are doing the right thing in doing it.

Children are not the same as incapacitated relatives. And Lanchester is not saying, at any rate, that caring for others can’t be pleasurable, or that it can’t be something one very much wants to do. But by removing pleasure from the equation, he alters our expectations—essentially by giving us permission not to have any expectations.

It’s a liberating thought in an age when kids are not only planned but aggressively sought, through fertility treatments, adoption, and surrogacy. Having worked so hard to have children, parents may feel it’s only natural to expect happiness from the experience. And they’ll find happiness, of course, but not necessarily continuously, and not always in the forms they might expect. Those who start with Lanchester’s very simple idea—that they will love and they will sacrifice—are probably at a great advantage. Finding pleasure in the idea of duty alone goes a long way. As I noted in chapter 1, freedom in our culture has evolved to mean freedom
from
obligations. But what on earth does that freedom even mean if we don’t have something to give it up
for?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi contemplates this idea quite a bit in
Flow.
He brings up Cicero’s observation that in order to be free, one has to surrender to a set of laws. In our personal lives, Csikszentmihalyi writes, rules can liberate us even as they bind: “One is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns.”

Jessie told me that she and her husband, Luke, came to this same realization as soon as the rules of their own lives multiplied. “We both became happier,” she said, “when William”—their third—“was born. It was the tipping point between having an independent life and diving into parenthood. With one or two, you can
kind of
pretend you still have an independent life. But with three, we accepted our lives as parents. This new reality sets in.” Three kids created more definitive rules, more definitive structure. “We actually considered having a fourth,” she said.

Sharon, too, seemed to find comfort and structure in making larger commitments. As she told the judge when she adopted Michelle, “Yes, I get it, it’s for life.” She actively and freely chose to care for Michelle, to make that a part of her daily program. And that’s how she still views the experience of having raised Mike and Michelle: it was her life’s work, what gave it shape. Everything she did for them, day in and day out, was not yoked to any kind of outcome, either tragic or triumphant. She woke up each morning and took care of them because that’s what she’d signed up to do.

One could say that this commitment was part and parcel of Sharon’s Catholic faith—of any faith, in fact. (“Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward,” Krishna tells his student Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.) But it’s also part of a parent’s creed. We don’t care for children because we love them, as Alison Gopnik says. We love them because we care for them.

And this is what Vaillant, too, ultimately told me. He has five children. One of them is autistic. This boy was born at a time when most spectrum disorders didn’t have names, and if they did, the pediatric establishment seldom had optimistic things to say about them. I asked Vaillant whether his son made him readjust his expectations about what it meant to be a parent. He knew, after all, that his boy would never lead a life that looked like his or mine. He shook his head.

“I didn’t have children because I wanted to have an heir or because I wanted someone to take care of me in my old age,” he answered. “I had children for the same reason I like growing grass and I like walking in the mountains. Having children is part of the way I’m wired, and it’s easy to go with the flow. I had no expectations.”

Perhaps Vaillant is simply a product of his generation. Men of his age don’t associate children with self-actualization. They had children because that’s what they were supposed to do.

But it may also be that Vaillant developed this dutiful perspective over years of caring for a son with autism. His child may have taught him something about what to expect from parenting, and what not to expect. “Here’s what’s coming to mind,” Vaillant told me a few minutes later, after mulling over my question some more. “And this isn’t happiness, but it’s certainly love: when my son was six, I had to button his buttons for him.” He looked off, and several seconds ticked by. “And tie his shoes.” While other six-year-olds were already buttoning their own buttons and tying their own shoes. “And that was a chore,” said Vaillant. “But so is, when the grass is long, pushing a lawn mower. And how else are you going to have a lawn?”

ONE OF THE MOST
famous thought experiments in modern philosophy is Robert Nozick’s “experience machine,” which he wrote about in his 1974
Anarchy, State, and Utopia:

Suppose there were an experience machine that could give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?

His response is no. And many people would instinctively agree. We care about much more than getting our kicks. We long for experiences “of profound connection with others,” he writes, “of deep understanding of natural phenomena, of love, of being profoundly moved by music or tragedy, or doing something new and innovative.” Just as important, we long for esteem and pride, “a self that happiness is a fitting response to.” Implicit in Nozick’s experiment is the idea that happiness should be a
by-product,
not a goal. Many of the ancient Greeks believed the same. To Aristotle,
eudaimonia
(roughly translated as “flourishing”) meant doing something productive. Happiness could only be achieved through exploiting our strengths and our potential. To be happy, one must
do,
not just feel.

Raising children requires a lot of doing. It’s a life of clamorous, perpetual forward motion, the very opposite of Nozick’s passive experience machine. Not everyone wants children. But for many—especially those of us who don’t have the imagination or wherewithal to create meaning in unconventional ways—having children is a way to exploit our potential, to give design and purpose to a life. Robin Simon puts the finest point on it: “Children are a reason to get up in the morning.”

Simon isn’t just making an informal life observation. She is stating a statistical truth. Parents are much less likely to commit suicide than nonparents, and most sociologists, starting with Émile Durkheim’s 1897 book
Le Suicide
, have speculated that is true for just the reason Simon cites: parents have ties that bind, earthly reasons to keep going.