Introduction: Parenting is Hell

Parenting is hell. Parenting is work—much of it pure drudgery, in fact—with little "real world" reward or status. Stay-at-home-parents, most of whom are still women, have their own special ring of hell allocated to them. I inhabit that ring, though I also belong to the generation of women who had, in theory at least, all options open to them. It isn't as if I chose not to pursue a career. I dabbled in editing, publishing, freelance writing. I completed a BA, then an MA. I drifted again, thinking the world would eventually come to me, as it had to my older, baby-boomer siblings. (I was on the tail end of the boom, the edging-towards-bust end.) The world laughed, and I went back to graduate school—started, completed most of a PhD. in English. I got caught up in the world of "theory." I "theorized" about a lot of things, not just literature. I theorized that having children would be ruinous to any remaining possibility I might have of succeeding in a career. A friend of mine, a fellow graduate student, told me, "if you're going to have a child be prepared to "put your life in the shredder." Another who had recently had a baby, told me point blank, "there is no me."

But yet . . . .You're probably thinking, here comes the sentimental part, how I met a suitable partner (that would be true), and decided to have children, and it was all worth it in the end. Well, yes and no. I met a suitable partner and we agonized for years over whether or not to have a child. We did not just worry about how such a life-altering act would affect our still inchoate careers. We also wondered what two curmudgeonly, pretentiously cynical, Foucault-reading people could offer children. We saw how boomers around us handled parenthood and we cringed. Hyper-scheduled, under-disciplined, over-privileged children; stressed-out, over-involved, pseudo-democratic parents using soothing monotones when addressing their out-of-control charges. ("Now, Johnnie, do you want to talk about your feelings around biting Jessica?") But in the end we chose to pursue parenthood for the somewhat banal reason that we worried we might regret it later if we chose not to.

Irony of ironies (okay, it's not really irony, I know that from my grad studies but, thankfully, now I don't have to care), I became pregnant with not one, but two babies. I had a horrifically nauseous pregnancy, quit grad school, and the rest is . . . well, our particular hell.

But, I have to add (and this is why I think parents, or mothers at least, have a hard time being writers, because every little thing we do or say in the public realm affects or has the potential to affect our children), I love my kids to death. But I don't love all kids, and I don't love being a mother. My twins are now ten years old. To the world it looks as if in ten years I have done nothing (see Meg Wolitzer's insultingly titled The Ten Year Nap). But there is nothing more arduous, more physically and psychologically—and yes, intellectually—demanding than staying at home with children. Which I chose to do because 1) I still had no career to speak of 2) I didn't understand how anyone not related to my kids could possibly care enough about them to do a good job raising them and 3) circumstances related to my partner's job allowed me financially to do this.

Okay, okay, but the title of this blog-to-be is: Parenting is Political. I do not think that we need another "Bobby had the most awesome poop today" type of blog. There are many, many blogs that document the day-to-day realities of parenting very well. That is not my intention. In my grad school days I learned and took to heart the adage "the personal is political." I still believe it to be true, though not in any simple way. I especially believe it to be true when it comes to parenting. When I am at home with a child in tears and me with heart palpitations over a ridiculous "media studies" project, this is not just a personal predicament. To me, it is a socio-political predicament, one that is not adequately addressed in the socio-political sphere. Even when parenting issues become political issues—for example, the availability, or lack thereof, of daycare—the coverage and commentary is at best superficial. The hard right in both the US and Canada (where I live) sees parenting as a purely personal, pay-as-you-go enterprise. (Yet, interestingly, most of them send their children to public schools.) The liberal left sees parenting issues as political only in the most narrow, superficial sense: pre-school education good, daycare good, and that's about where it ends. Never discussed or debated is the fact that earlier and earlier education may not be good for children (but it is indeed good for working parents, which is not the same thing, though not insignificant either); the example of countries such as Finland, where formal education does not begin until the age of 7, and yet whose educational outcomes are second to none, is rarely brought to bear on the public discussions of the importance of early schooling. What if what we needed was better, later schooling? Or salaries for parents staying at home taking care of their own children? The truly radical possibilities are endless. It is these possibilities—born of the personal, but dragged kicking and screaming into the realm of the political—that I would like to explore in this blog.

Thanks for reading.
NorthTOmom