Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  The first thing I noticed when she showed me inside her house was how clean and organized everything was. Toys in the basement. Kitchen stuff in the kitchen. Living furniture in the living room. The whole place was sitcom-tidy, which both amazed and embarrassed me. I followed her into the kitchen, accepted a cup of tea, and was about to sit down at the table when I noticed the ducks, four of them, waddling around her backyard, circling the swing set at its center, wandering in and out of a coop.

  “Ducks!” I said. “You have ducks.”

  “We do,” she said. “Everyone talks about chickens now. Chickens are the new big thing, backyard chicken coops. I was ready to do it; I ordered the coop. I put it together. We were excited, and then, at the last minute, my brother—he’s a wildlife biologist—says to me, ‘No, no. Forget the chickens. Get ducks instead.’ They’re so much better. Cleaner, friendlier, less chance of disease. And the eggs. Duck eggs cost twenty dollars a dozen at the farmers’ markets. We have them for breakfast. Plus, the kids are crazy for the ducks. They wanted a dog, but I grew up on a farm, and I can’t get past the feeling that animals belong outside. So I said, ‘You can pretend the ducks are dogs,’ and that’s what they do. Occasionally I even let them put a diaper on one and we let it in the house for a few minutes. Only occasionally.”

  I was still admiring the ducks when Julie handed me my tea and said, “The ducks were really helpful during the DCFS home visit.”

  She explained to me that when the social worker arrived at her house to investigate, the thing she was most concerned about was the emotional toll it would take on her kids. So when the caseworker arrived, Julie met her outside and persuaded her to agree to play along with the story she had devised. They had just set up the coop for the ducks, and she told her girls that a lady was coming from the city to talk to them and find out if their home was in good enough shape to get the permit to keep them. “They have really high standards in Chicago,” she told them. “She needs to make sure there’s enough space, enough light, for the ducks to be happy.”

  We both sighed after she said this. The mutual feeling was more exhaustion than disgust. The kids were laughing and squealing from the rec room below us. The afternoon had gone gray, and it began to drizzle outside. I glanced a little wistfully at the ducks in their puddles as we talked.

  * * *

  “People are just nuts about this issue,” Julie said as she recounted her story. She told me that the afternoon it happened, she’d left the side door open on her minivan so she could keep an eye on the girls while she stood in line for her coffee.

  I asked her if she wasn’t scared about a man driving a white van coming to snatch them.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t worry about the man in the white van, and I’ll tell you why. I’m a Cook County public defender. I have been for twenty years. And never in my twenty years of working there have I ever seen a single child abduction case. Not one. I’ve seen parents who abused their children. I’ve seen parents who killed their children or whose relatives or spouses killed their children. But I work in the building where any case in Cook County would come if someone abducted a stranger’s child, and there just aren’t any. In twenty years, I have never seen a child abduction case.”

  And yet, as Julie walked back toward the car that day after buying her cup of coffee, an officer was leaning against her vehicle, barking at her kids. He was having what seemed to her an aggressive conversation with them. The oldest of them was covering her ears, the middle one was crying, and the youngest, the four-year-old, was frozen in her seat.

  “What did you think was happening when you saw this?”

  “At that point, I saw him as someone attacking my kids. It doesn’t matter if he’s a police officer or whoever the heck he is. He is an individual who is making my kids upset. ‘What are you talking to my kids like that for?’ I asked him. I acted like any mother would when they see a man who is making her kids cry.”

  The officer asked where she had been, and when she lifted her cup and said she’d been getting coffee, he said to her, “So you abandoned your children?”

  Julie began to laugh. “I didn’t give him the deference that he thought he needed, which is what most people do because they’re intimidated by the uniform. I’m not. So I challenged him. I don’t want a police officer telling my children that they could be snatched at any opportunity. I told him I knew for a fact that I was not doing anything wrong here. It’s not against the law in Illinois to leave your children unattended. You have to prove that I’m willfully endangering their life by going into Starbucks and getting a cup of coffee where I can see them. Good luck getting that case approved by a state’s attorney.”

  The officer replied that he could take her kids if he thought she was putting them in danger, and Julie replied, “You know what, let me call my husband down here in that case. Let me call my mother down here too. Both of them are also attorneys.”

  At that point, the officer walked away and contacted the Department of Child Protective Services, who could investigate Julie without his pressing charges.

  It’s not lost on Julie that her ability to stand up for her rights and to refuse intimidation is largely the result not only of her professional background but also of her privilege as a white, suburban mom. In her view, this fact makes it all the more important that mothers like her, mothers like me, stand up for our right to parent our children without public shaming or investigation or prosecution.

  “Your view is that people who have more privilege and more power have an obligation to stand up.”

  “Yes, for all the people who can’t. If this had happened to anyone of color, they could have been shot in the street for doing what I did. My color is protecting me, so I have to push the envelope so that it gets out in the news that this can happen to white moms too.”

  “Because if it’s happening to white moms, then people might care.”

  “Yes. Let’s be honest. I’m a privileged white woman who left her kids in a $30,000 minivan watching Dora the Explorer to go in for a Starbucks. Is there any clearer picture of privilege than that? But no matter what color you are, no matter how much money you have, you don’t deserve to be harassed for making a rational parenting choice.”

  It’s funny, but in all the time that had passed, I had never thought about what was happening in quite those terms—as harassment. When a person intimidates, insults, verbally abuses, or demeans a woman on the street, in the bedroom, at the office, in the classroom, it’s harassment. When a woman is intimidated or insulted or abused because of the way she dresses or her sexual habits or her outspokenness on social media, she is experiencing harassment. But when a mother is intimidated, insulted, abused, or demeaned because of the way she is mothering, we call it concern or, at worst, nosiness. A mother, apparently, cannot be harassed. A mother can only be corrected.

  “You can call it what you want, but it’s harassment,” Julie insisted. “There’s no better word for it. It’s harassment by people on the street; it’s harassment by the system, by the police. And frankly, there should be consequences for people who harass parents.”

  I asked Julie what, as a woman and as a defense attorney, she would tell all the other mothers I’d talked to if she were standing beside them as it happened.

  “I would tell them to ask the officer what law she was breaking. I would tell them to ask why and how going into a store for a few minutes meant she was abandoning her child. I would tell her to ask if she was under arrest and if not, if she was free to go. And if it’s a person on the street, calling them names, yelling at them, scaring their kids, threatening to call the police and have their children taken away, then I’d tell them to be extremely calm and clear with that person. I’d tell them to take out their own phones and start recording the interaction. I’d tell them to say calmly and assertively, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong; I haven’t broken any law. I don’t know you. So please step away from us. You are harassing me, and you’re harassing my child
ren. If you don’t stop harassing us, then I’ll have to call the police and file a complaint.’”

  * * *

  Of course, it doesn’t always become so contentious. There are plenty of times when a child is left for a few minutes in a car, when a passerby becomes concerned, but when nothing so ugly ever comes of it. Julie knew this as well as anyone, that so much of the tenor of our interactions is determined by circumstance and by all of our unconscious biases. Julie revealed to me near the end of our talk that day, that a few years before this happened to her, something very similar but not quite the same had happened to her husband.

  The day it happened to Julie’s husband, she had taken the kids to a museum in nearby Skokie. “They have food for kids there, but they don’t have anything for an adult, so we were there all day and I got hungry, so my husband brought me some food. He had the baby with him in the car. He pulls up to the building, puts the blinkers on, leaves the baby in the car, gives me the food, we maybe talk for two or three minutes, then he comes back out and there are two women and a police officer standing there in front of the car. He asked the officer what the problem was, and the guy says very matter-of-factly, ‘You’ve left your child in this car unattended. These two women have called me.’ Then he turns to the women and says, ‘Okay, ladies, I’ve got this now,’ and he sends the women away. Then he turns to my husband and says, ‘Listen, you can’t do that in Skokie; these women will call and complain. You’ve got to take your kid in everywhere, because I’m telling you, these women will call the police on you.”

  Julie’s husband was too surprised to say anything. He just stood there until the officer softened and said, “Don’t worry about it this time. And don’t be too hard on yourself. We’ve all done it. I get it. But just a heads-up that these women are crazy and will call the police.”

  “I didn’t know,” her husband said. “I had no idea.”

  The officer told him not to worry about it. “I’ve got kids of my own,” he said. “I know how it is.”

  7

  QUALITY OF LIFE

  The majority of mothers are not going to be arrested or harassed. The majority of mothers are not going to be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor or child endangerment; they are not going to be placed on a registry of neglectful parents. It might be happening far more than we realize, it might be a new form of harassment, but it’s not going to impact the lives of the majority of American parents the way it impacted me or Debra Harrell or Julie Koehler or any of the other mothers I talked to. And since this is the case, you might wonder if the cost of fear is really so prohibitive, after all. If arresting and harassing and publicly shaming a few dozen parents, even a few hundred parents each year, would make kids a tiny bit safer, maybe it’s worth it. I’d be willing to say it well might be if it weren’t for the fact that there are other costs, costs not just for mothers like me or Debra or Julie or Lenore Skenazy—mothers who assert their right to make rational parenting choices that go against convention—but to all parents attempting to raise children in an atmosphere of fear. What about the typical, not horrible, perfectly responsible, good-enough mothers or fathers who would never, ever, ever take their eyes off their child, not even for a minute, because you just never know? What is the cost of fear for them?

  * * *

  A few months after I published my essay in Salon, I decided to visit a friend in New York. My two kids, by then seven and four, were at home with my husband and my parents, so the vacation involved all the small, rejuvenating pleasures and indulgences that children make impossible. I stayed up late talking with my friend and then slept until eleven, rising slowly and lingering over coffee. I took long showers and shaved my legs. I dined in restaurants where the food was coursed and there wasn’t a single chicken finger on the menu, and through it all, I walked around the city carrying a purse that felt slim and impossibly light for its lack of sticker books and Goldfish crackers and wet wipes and crayons. The second day of my visit, my friend asked if I wanted to meet some of her other friends for dinner.

  We met them at a macrobiotic restaurant in the East Village. The place was shaped like the cabin of a passenger jet, a row of bamboo tables against a wall, a narrow passage for the servers to pass. There was not a child in sight. I squeezed into the booth side of the table and found myself doing two things I hadn’t done in years: eating a bowl of beans with a pair of chopsticks and sitting at a table with a group of childless women.

  They were around my age—intelligent, sophisticated, independent women. One was an editor, another a professor, the third was working at an art gallery, and the friend I was visiting had just published her first novel. They were all beautiful and interesting and funny. And I, the only mother at the table, felt like a creature from outer space. It wasn’t so much what they talked about—jobs, men, books, parties—as it was how they talked about it. They spoke slowly and thoughtfully. When they sought advice about decisions that lay before them about love interests or career changes or friendships or just the direction of their lives, they did so with seriousness, but without the urgency to which I’d grown so accustomed. They wanted to know what the others thought, and I sensed no fear of judgment, no hint of anxiety in their voices. They seemed to me open, vibrant, free. But more noticeably than any of that, their lives seemed to possess a fullness, a roundness, that I’d forgotten was possible. If they were struggling in one area, there were other areas in which they were thriving. They had jobs, friends, sex lives, hobbies. They had different kinds of relationships with different kinds of people. Their identities were still malleable, multidimensional. They were still, in some essential way, the heroes of their own stories.

  I could remember a time when my own life had been like that, when my anxieties about my children and about motherhood had not crowded out all the other parts of my identity, but the memory was fading. For more than six years, I’d been embracing, or at least blindly accepting, the assumption that a woman who has small children doesn’t just become a mom. She becomes Mom—that is her name, her station, first and foremost the essential thing she is. In a New York Times op-ed, Heather Havrilesky wrote, “Motherhood is no longer viewed as simply a relationship with your children, a role you play at home and at school, or even a hallowed institution. Motherhood has been elevated—or perhaps demoted—to the realm of lifestyle, an all-encompassing identity with demands and expectations that eclipse everything else in a woman’s life.”

  For six years, I’d assumed this was an inevitable transformation, an inherent part of parenthood. It seemed to be what most parents (but especially women) did, moving their children to the absolute center of their lives and pushing everything else—marriage, friendship, civic engagement, creative work—out to the distant edges where maybe, possibly, it could be revisited in fifteen or twenty years. Or at least, I thought it was parenthood we were moving to the center, but what if that was only part of it? What if the thing taking up so much space was not the fact of parenthood itself, the actual relationship with our children, but the feeling surrounding that relationship, the fearful feeling that we could never quite do enough?

  * * *

  Halfway through the meal, the woman who was an editor turned to me: “So you have two little kids?” she said.

  “It’s true,” I replied, growing nervous, wondering if she knew my secret, which was no longer a secret, since I had published a widely read article about it.

  She took a sip from her bowl of miso. She was recently married, thinking about starting a family herself. “Would you say,” she asked in an impartial journalist’s voice, “that having children changes your quality of life?”

  I sat without moving, a single black bean clenched between my chopsticks. I expected laughter, but instead there were stares. They were all looking at me, waiting for an answer.

  “Well,” I said as the waiter came by and refilled our glasses. “I guess I would say that when you have small children, you have no quality of life.”

&
nbsp; * * *

  In Perfect Madness, Judith Warner begins her exploration of motherhood and anxiety by contrasting the experiences of American mothers with the experiences of mothers she encountered during her years living in France. She writes, “I had friends in France who were full-time stay-at-home moms with three or four children, but I had never once encountered a woman whose life was overrun by her children’s activities. I had never met a mother, working or otherwise, who didn’t have the ‘time’ to read a book … Only an unbalanced person would be doing something like that. A woman insufficiently mindful of herself. A woman who was, perhaps, fearful of adulthood.”

  Upon returning with her children to America, Warner describes her amazement and horror at “the breakdown of boundaries between children and adults and the erosion, for many families, of any notion of adult time and space.” She remembers feeling angered by the beating-up on working mothers, the pressure to breast-feed and to endure natural childbirth, to give herself over to “attachment parenting,” to baby-wearing, to co-sleeping, to the constant and endless subjugating of her own needs as an adult woman to the real or at times imagined needs of her child. She writes, “I was amazed by the fact that women around me didn’t find their lives strange. It appeared normal to them that motherhood should be fraught with anxiety and guilt and exhaustion.”

  Of course it did, I thought when I first read this. It certainly did to me. When all of the parents you encounter have rearranged their lives to make room for a style of parenting that demands total control, micromanagement, endless monitoring and measurement and observation and intervention, when you’ve never known a different way, you accept that this is what parenthood is. Most of us join the stampede without ever bothering to ask or wonder what we’re chasing.