Parenting: The Business of Living versus Raising a Human Life
It was something my mother said that triggered this latest train of thought. “Caring for another human life isn’t easy — now you know.”
“Caring for” not “raising”. “Raising” brings to mind images of chickens being raised for a specific purpose — eggs or butchery. “Caring for” calls up images of nurses tending to the ill in wards. Chickens serve purposes. The ill are human beings worthy of our time, attention and emotion. How many people raise their children and how many people actually care for them?
Worse yet, how many people entrust the care of their children to others (because they either have to or want to) so they can get on with the business of life, that is the raising bit?
“My doctor’s office was harassing me about my second one because I’m 38,” a woman recently told me in the bookstore. “So, with my first about two I just gave in and said ‘ok, let’s do this and get it done’!” The business of having children today is a weird one for many reasons, timing being at the top of the list. Today’s women are taught to treat children like an item on a checklist, a box (filed under the heading ‘optional’ of course) to be ticked off by a certain age. They juggle career, love life, spouse’s career, home life, health issues, money issues all so they can check children off the list. But, by then they’re so used to juggling and checking that the kids are just more balls thrown into the mix.
Still, other women I know place a high value on human life. So high, in fact, that they proudly pump out children and parade them around as if to tease Duggar-esque comments out of anyone who dare ridicule them with a confused brow. They all march to the tune of I Love Babies, RA RA RA! and rely on multiple social media outlets (I’m looking at you, Pinterest) to prove to the world that they run on Mommy Fuel (coffee) and feel that yoga pants and messy buns are the true fashion statement of women who care. Remember those little girls who collected dolls that sat on shelves only to be touched once a year for dusting and formal photos? Now they collect babies the way they used to collect dolls: mainly for personal pleasure and the occasional selfie-companion.
Both types of mother illustrate how great we as a culture are at raising our children and how terrible we are at caring for them. We demand plans be put in place to raise children in cost- and time-effective manners. We defend the righteousness of family leave, universal pre-K, affordable daycare and quality public schools. We beat ourselves over the head with manuals, TED Talks and discussions about a child’s social and emotional health and well being. Yet, we never stop to consider how much quality time we’re actually spending with the child or children in question.
How much time does a mother spend just watching her child play? Whether she goes to work or stays at home the answer is going to be pretty much the same: Nearly none. If a child receives one quality hour of face-to-face playtime a day from one parent, let alone both, it’s probably a miracle. Working mothers truck their children to daycare anywhere from 4 to 12 hours a day. Stay at home mothers truck their children to classes, story times and playdates for half the day and spend the other half running errands and doing chores. Women, in short, are so consumed with the business of raising children that they hardly have time to care for them.
The Internet’s strongest demographic? Women ages 18–49. Everyone wants to create content to draw in women surfing social media via phone. Notice more moms on their phones than on slides during playtime? Don’t be surprised. Their working counterparts are doing the same in the office, only they call it a “coffee break”. If they want a distraction they surf celebrity news. If they feel guilty they hit up parenting sites. In either case all they really want to be doing is the one thing our culture doesn’t see as a valuable use of time: taking joy in caring for their kids.
Jeff Bridges remarked in The Dude and the Zen Master that his mom had a daily ritual with each of her three kids called “time”. They’d each get a set amount of one-on-one time with their mom each day, from birth to adulthood, to just be with one another. His mom would let them take the reigns and they’d do or talk about whatever they wanted. You don’t build relationships through Baby Mozart or making friends at the park, you build them through time.
My mother is right, caring for another human life isn’t easy. We have systems and devices that make the raising part fairly manageable, but the caring bit we have yet to figure out. So, while the experts toil I’ll be over here with a cup of coffee watching my kid tear apart my house thinking, “Man, he is just so cool.”
