Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  * * *

  The brochures the nurse gave me at that first appointment were only the beginning of the mountain of literature I would read in the coming years. Even before I laid eyes on my son, my shelves were filled with parenting books, books full of advice on the best ways to feed, bathe, sleep-train, and discipline my kids, books by experts, books by other mothers, books by doctors, psychologists, nutritionists, and every other parent who might have a useful bit of wisdom. In this sense, I was intensely American in my parenting orientation. I wanted to be an informed consumer. Whatever the subject and whatever I thought I knew about it, I believed that there was an expert out there somewhere who knew more and knew better. It was only in the months and years following the incident in Virginia that I gradually began to read a different kind of parenting book, not the how-to kind but the what-exactly-are-we-all-doing-when-we-do-parenting kind—that is, I became more interested in historical, anthropological, and sociological examinations of American parenthood. Much of what I’ve read has focused on the all-consuming, increasingly intensive, super-pressurized, status-obsessed, safety-fixated world of modern, American, middle-class parenthood. For example, in How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare your Kid for Success, Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean at Stanford and mother of two, describes how competitive overparenting has harmed a generation of children and the parents raising them. She highlights the multitude of ways we as parents engage in some combination of “overdirecting, over-protecting, or over-involving ourselves in our kids’ lives; we treat our kids like rare and precious botanical specimens and provide a delicate, measured amount of care and feeding while running interference on all that might toughen and weather them.” She describes how easy it is for highly educated and informed parents to be sucked into a cyclone of anxiety and micromanagement, accepting an expanded notion of parenthood that includes not simply loving, sheltering, feeding, and counseling one’s children toward adulthood, but managing their day-to-day lives to a degree that would have been unthinkable one or two generations ago.

  Likewise, in Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, the sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman describes how many parents speak and think about parenthood as though “it were a giant school project,” feeling that if they only “start soon enough, read the right research, and do the right things, [they] can get the particular end product” they desire.

  The historian Paula S. Fass echoes these observations in her book The End of American Childhood. She examines a generation of mothers—including herself—who are “increasingly fearful that the slightest deviation in oversight will ruin their children’s carefully prepared path into the future.” According to Fass, parents of this generation “yield to their most directive instincts and attempt to manage all parts of their children’s lives.”

  No wonder that American mothers today spend more hours with their children than ever before in recorded history, even though most have now entered the workforce. As Lisa Belkin describes in a New York Times blog post, “Now that parenting has become a verb—an active, measurable, competitive thing—it brings with it an infinitely expanding job description. We create one for ourselves, different from our neighbors’ or even our partners’, but always broader than the ones our parents used.”

  Long gone are the days when a woman would be naturally inclined to ask her own mother or grandmother or aunt or neighbor for advice or guidance. My maternal grandmother smoked through three pregnancies, gave birth under ether, and hardly saw her children past the age of eight. I would have asked her for help building a spaceship before I sought her guidance on having a baby. And so, with few of those who have gone before to guide us, we set out to reinvent the wheel of child-rearing, all of us in our own way.

  * * *

  After that first appointment with the nurse practitioner, I tried to learn everything I could on the subjects of carrying, birthing, and caring for a baby. As I read, I’d often share my findings with my other pregnant friend, Tracy. Tracy and I had known each other since graduate school, and while I’d always enjoyed spending time with her, we became especially close that fall when we realized that we were both pregnant and that our boys would be born just six weeks apart. We had lunch whenever we could, bought maternity clothes together, sent each other “stroller porn,” images of the high-end, time-travel-looking contraptions that we couldn’t afford but really, really wanted. At the same time that Tracy and I were growing closer, so many of my other relationships were feeling more distant.

  I was twenty-eight when I became pregnant with Felix. By geohistorical standards, this is hardly young. Many of the girls I’d known in high school became mothers even younger. But among the women I’d grown close to in college and graduate school, feminists with advanced degrees and career ambitions and various forms of domestic ambivalence, I was the first to think about having kids, the first to want them.

  “You’re really odd,” my friend Amelia observed of me on this subject. We were teaching English at the same community college when she said this, and a colleague had brought in her brand-new baby to show off in all his baby splendor. The other teachers smiled and oohed and aahed and complimented the mother on such a beautiful child, then got back to work. I, meanwhile, completely lost my shit. “Oh my God,” I said. “Amazing. Oh, oh, oh. I need one. I must have one of these. I must have one now. Give him to me.” I took the baby from its slightly perturbed mother and pressed it to my chest. I announced to a roomful of coworkers that my ovaries were throbbing, that I felt as if they were about to burst.

  “Sounds like endometriosis,” Amelia said.

  “No, you jerk. It’s my biological clock.”

  “Oh, I see. Puke,” she replied. “But thanks for clarifying.”

  I ignored her and began kissing my colleague’s baby on its rolls and folds of puppy fat, breathing in the baby smell of its bald, baby head. “I need one of these,” I repeated. “I want one.”

  “Oh, pull yourself together,” Amelia said, taking the infant from me and passing it back to its mother. “We’re practically children ourselves.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m twenty-eight and you’re thirty-two.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Children.”

  In a sense, I knew she was right. For people like us, it was weird to want a baby at our age, much less to have one. In 2008, 72 percent of college-educated women between twenty-five and twenty-nine had not yet had children. All of my closest friends were in that 72 percent. Amelia was perhaps the most adamantly in that 72 percent. At the time, she was absolutely certain that she didn’t want children at all. Much later, after her marriage had ended and she’d started down the path of single-motherhood and then a healthier relationship, she’d tell me that what she really had been feeling was that she didn’t want to have children with her former husband. But at the time, she’d felt sure that motherhood wasn’t for her. And really, there wasn’t anything unusual about it. “I have my work,” she’d told me. “My students. My friends. My dogs. My adorable nieces and nephews, on whom I get to lavish attention when and only when I feel like it. What else does a person need?” It was all perfectly reasonable. I recognized that I was the weirdo, and yet there I was. If I’d announced to her or to any of my friends like her that I was planning to have an orgy or an open marriage or a spiritual conversion or a monthlong lemon-coconut-water-cayenne cleanse, they would have shrugged and rolled their eyes. But a baby? It was, as Amelia had put it, extremely odd.

  Fortunately, when it actually happened a year later, I had Tracy, my one and only mom-to-be friend whom I could talk to and commiserate with about everything I learned and experienced and most of all worried about along the way.

  “Are you taking folic acid?” I asked her not long after that first appointment with the nurse. “You have to take folic acid. And a prenatal vitamin? It’s important for preventing spina bifida. Are you thinking about natural childbirth? Are you leaning toward a midwife or an ob
stetrician? Your chances of having an unnecessary C-section go way down with a midwife. Have you picked a hospital? Northwestern is basically a baby factory, totally impersonal. Would you ever consider a birthing center? Also, have you started looking into childcare yet? When do you think you’ll go back to work? Have you heard anything about HypnoBirthing?”

  And so it went. Looking back, I wish I could say I’d never been this person. I wish I could say I found the world of pregnancy vigilance and baby-planning mania pointless and bourgie and gross. I wish I could say I bristled at what seemed the widely held assumption that having a child was a fraught and perilous event that could be navigated only by those who exercised the highest level of caution, preparation, and care. I wish I could say that I didn’t spend many, many hours of my life deciding which stroller I would buy, or which crib mattress, or which car seat, or which baby monitor, or which baby-wearing sling. I wish I could say I didn’t spend a great deal of money on HypnoBirthing instructional DVDs that I barely watched, and on a certified doula whom I’d send home one hour into labor because, in the pain of contractions, her face and voice enraged me. I want so badly not to have been the kind of woman who tried to forge an identity—or, help me, God, a … brand—out of pregnancy and motherhood, an identity that other women would notice and approve of and admire. I want this so badly that I’m tempted to rewrite this story altogether, to draw myself as a caution-to-the-wind alterna-mom—the kind of pregnant woman who seems hardly to notice she’s pregnant—gaining only seven pounds during her final trimester, drinking the occasional glass of wine, raving about pregnancy sex, traveling to Goa during her thirty-fourth week, going into labor at a crowded music venue. How I wish I could say that had been me.

  The truth, though, is that right from the beginning I was as self-conscious and insecure and competitive about motherhood as I’d been about anything else in my life. As Adrienne Rich wrote in her memoir of motherhood, Of Woman Born, “I had been trying to give birth to myself; and in some grim dim way I was determined to use even pregnancy and parturition in that process.” And so the unappealing truth is that I came home from my appointment with the nurse practitioner that day, made myself a pot of decaffeinated Earl Grey tea and a plate of saltines, sat down at the dining table, and read every pamphlet, every brochure, every piece of printed information she’d given me, not just the warnings and prohibitions but the footnotes too, the small print elaborating the horrible fates that might befall me and my child if I failed.

  Then I went on the internet and read more. I wanted to read every horror story, every guideline, every morsel of advice. I wanted to know everything that could go wrong if proper precautions weren’t taken: miscarriage, preterm labor, stillbirth, rare chromosomal syndromes, and emergencies that might leave me hemorrhaging on the kitchen floor. I read and read and read. “Terrifying,” I said to myself, determined to go over the material with Pete the moment he walked in the door, and also to tell Tracy all of it, to get her up to speed as well as every other pregnant woman I encountered. I ate it up—the competitiveness, the performance, the fear. What kind of pregnancy did I want to have? The best one possible. The one that would demonstrate to the world that I’d done the homework and applied myself, given the task at hand my full and undivided attention. And what kind of parent did I want to be when the pregnancy was over? Well, the kind that viewed parenthood not simply as an event in which I was just one of many participants but as a process I carefully orchestrated—the general commanding her troops, the scientist studying the data, the director with her eye pressed to the viewfinder. The kind for whom parenthood was not a state of being, but an extended and intensive exertion of mind, body, and soul. I wanted to be an amazing mother, amazing in her own right but, also, better than everybody else.

  * * *

  If someone had suggested to me at the time of my first pregnancy that there might be certain drawbacks to viewing motherhood in this way—as a contest, an Olympics of sorts, an arena to prove my goodness and my worth, that perhaps viewing the parent-child dynamic as an endeavor rather than simply as a relationship might not be a recipe for well-being or even baseline sanity—I would have surely dismissed that person out of hand. In truth, I’m not even sure I would have understood what that person was talking about—the implication that there might be any other way. Even before I became a parent, my notions of what it meant to be a parent, that this was a fundamentally anxious endeavor that required planning and control at every level, were so deeply ingrained, so omnipresent and unexamined in those around me, I couldn’t have begun to question the soundness of my own enthusiasm and competitiveness as I entered the fray. I wasn’t really aware of entering anything at all—but simply thought I was moving forward to a new stage of life I’d occupy in my own way and make my own.

  Other parents often describe being swept up by the intensity and relentless pace of parenthood. There’s a mania about it, and a constant economizing of time and resources that, once you’re in it, makes it easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Still, my own innocence, looking back, seems particularly extreme. I set out into the landscape of competitive, intensive, hypercontrolling parenthood with so little self-awareness, diving headfirst into the world Jennifer Senior describes so evocatively in her book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. Senior captures the sleepless, manic, tightly regimented lifestyle of families whose days are crowded with drop-offs and pickups, classes and playdates, birthday parties and lessons and countless other child-centered activities. She describes how together, these activities make up what sociologist Annette Lareau named “concerted cultivation.”

  Senior offers several theories about how this became the accepted standard for middle-class parents. She refers, for example, to a century of shifting attitudes about the role of children, one of which the sociologist Viviana Zelizer calls the “sacralization of child life,” a shift in which children became “economically worthless and emotionally priceless.” Senior speculates about social changes brought on by women’s full-fledged entrance into the workforce over the past five decades, and how this movement has stoked fears about the quantity and quality of time parents (but especially mothers) devote to their children. As Hilary Levey Friedman explains in Playing to Win, a heightening sense of class anxiety permeates much of twenty-first-century American life, and a symptom of that is the fact that parents now view their children’s educational achievement, prestige, and future success as “the only protection, dicey as it may be, against future family downward mobility.”

  Senior also details the unprecedented expansion of choice that has changed the way parents approach matters of family life large and small. “Not long ago,” she suggests, “mothers and fathers did not have the luxury of deciding how large their families were or when each child arrived. Nor did they regard their children with the same reverence.… They had children because it was economically necessary, or because it was customary, or because it was a moral obligation to family and community.” By contrast, for many parents today from the middle class and above, caring for children is not an obligation or a necessity, but a long-anticipated life decision; we take on parenthood after a level of deliberation and preparation that would have been foreign to our grandparents or even our parents. And because we have our children later, because we have fewer of them, because many of us really, really want children if and when we have them, our identification with both the parent-child relationship and the work that parenting entails takes on enormous significance.

  When child-rearing is something most people do for one reason or another (economic necessity, religious obligation, creating future warriors for battling rival tribes, and so on), when birthrates are high, parenthood common, children abundant and well integrated into various aspects of communal life, a baseline level of cooperation and benefit-of-the-doubt-giving pervades. But when being a parent is elevated to the most important thing you will ever do, a thing you in particular have chosen, a special duty and responsi
bility that only some accept, the stakes rise. If parenthood is no longer just a relationship or a part of “ordinary life” but instead a new kind of secular religion, then true tolerance of each other’s parenting differences becomes a lot more complicated and a lot less common. As Paula S. Fass writes in The End of American Childhood, “Once having children is defined as an individual choice, American parents often imagine that when they do not succeed or are less than completely successful … it is somehow their fault. Having made the choice, they are somehow obligated to do it right.” But obligated to whom?

  * * *

  As my first pregnancy progressed, I continued to study for parenthood as though giving birth was a final exam. My belly swelled. I settled into my new job, the job of preparing to be a mother—the first job besides writing that I’d ever really cared about. I complained incessantly about every minor pain and inconvenience of pregnancy, because when you are pregnant you get to complain; you have complaining carte blanche. I let myself gain thirty pounds. At my favorite Mexican restaurant, I couldn’t drink beer, so instead, I ate buckets of guacamole. I ate it with a spoon. My hair turned shiny and my fingernails grew. All the complaining was pure performance; pregnancy agreed with me.