All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (31 page)

invest considerable time, money, and energy into ventures whose long-term payoff is hardly a sure bet. Raising children, teaching Sunday School, agitating for social change, working to build up valued social institutions—these kinds of generative efforts often involve as much frustration and failure as fulfillment. Yet, if one’s internalized and evolving life story—one’s narrative identity—shows again and again that suffering can be overcome, that redemption typically follows life’s setbacks and failures, then seeing one’s life in redemptive terms would appear to be an especially adaptive psychological thing to do.

Children can often play a role in our life-redemption narratives. McAdams says he frequently hears from fathers, “If it hadn’t been for my child, I’d still be unfocused and running around.” And children often play the biggest role in the stories of those whose lives as parents are hardest: poor women. In
Promises I Can Keep,
an ethnography of young, single mothers by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, the authors write that “the redemptive stories our mothers tell speak to the primacy of the mothering role, how it can become virtually the only source of identity and meaning in a young woman’s life.” Absent better economic and marital prospects, the interviewees in Edin and Kefalas’s book say that their children saved them, sparing them from more self-destructive lives.

Because they are lucky enough to have options—and therefore more than one way to create a meaningful life—the middle class may feel more constrained once their children come along, as if their lives have suddenly been condensed into a teacup. But children expand these parents’ lives too. Kids open windows to new activities and new ideas and “bring different worlds to your home,” as Philip Cowan puts it. They become obsessed with chess, for example, and you’ve never played it; they start learning about Islam at school, and you’ve never formally studied it—now the evening news makes a bit more sense. Their competence at things you can’t do, and their mastery of subjects you know nothing about, can engender a wild sense of pride. Think of Nancy Darling staring at her son playing the violin, or Gayle, from the previous chapter, marveling at her daughter actually knowing who Erik Erikson was. “That’s the kind of thing you live for,” she’d said. “You want them to be better than you.”

This pride need not come from kids’ accomplishments either. It can stem—and often does—from their simple transformation into moral, compassionate creatures. All children start their lives as tiny narcissists. Yet somewhere along the line, almost without your noticing, they begin to appreciate suffering and want very much to assuage it. They bring you soup when you get sick. They tell you about keeping their mouths shut at lunch, because their friends were discussing a birthday party and not everyone present was invited. And you realize that all the love you showed along the way, all the lectures you gave about compassion and grace and respect—it has somehow all managed to stick.

McAdams has noticed a commonality among the stories from his most generative adults. They were consciously telling their tales to a younger generation, seeing them as parables their children could learn from. “It comes out as, ‘I’ve developed a story for my life, replete with wisdom and folly, and this narrative exists as something I tell my kids about,’ ” he says. “My narrative identity can have an effect on other people.”

The most productive, generative adults see their children as their superegos, in other words. Their kids hover over them and guide all of their moral choices. If these adults falter or behave ignobly, they know their kids will see; the same is true if they do well. They are exquisitely aware of themselves as role models. They know they are being watched.

This isn’t, in McAdams’s experience, how everyone thinks. Roughly one hundred years ago, Freud observed that many people spend their time reenacting the dramas of their pasts, seeking the approval of ghosts. They think of their
parents
as their superegos, the imaginary judges they’ve constantly got to please. But this is not true of the adults who are most concerned about leaving a lasting legacy. In their eyes, “the evaluator shouldn’t be the past generation,” says McAdams. “It should be the next.” They are freed up to invent their own lives, knowing they won’t be governed by the norms of a previous generation. They want their children to be their final judges.

“NONCALORIE CHOCOLATE” IS WHAT
the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls his granddaughters. “They’re all the joy and as much fun as you want,” he says, “and none of the responsibility.”

But Sharon’s circumstances are different. Her grandson
is
her child—both functionally and now in the eyes of the law. She adopted him after Michelle died.

Margaret Mead talked about the helplessness of modern American parents, who, without years of folkways to guide them, were at sixes and sevens about how to raise their children—vulnerable to fads, untrusting of their own instincts, suspicious that anything their own mothers knew about child-rearing was bound to be out-of-date.

One can only begin to imagine how acutely Sharon must have felt these anxieties throughout her parenting life. She had little information to go on about how to raise a child with depression, and little to go on about how to handle an adopted child with cognitive and behavioral problems. Her whole young motherhood was a master class in winging it. And then, decades later, she found herself raising a child all over again—Cam—only to discover that many of the rules and habits she’d learned the first time around were again useless. Now it wasn’t okay to leave a child unattended in a car for five seconds to go grab something from the store. Now opening a stroller required two hands and a foot. Now all the experts were telling her to get down on her hands and knees—as a senior citizen!—and engage in intensive play, rather than simply encouraging her to tell her grandson to go entertain himself.

But Sharon’s circumstances have
always
been different. Her life hasn’t just involved extemporizing her way through parenting. It has also involved extemporizing her way through grief, and far too much of it, mourning not just one child but two. Losing a loved one, like having a child, is another one of life’s abrupt transitions for which one can never adequately prepare. And now Sharon finds herself extemporizing through yet another abrupt transition.

I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t phoned, nearly two years after meeting her, to let her know that my book was almost done. When I reached her—it took several attempts, which should have been a clue—she sounded very tired, but underneath the fatigue was the same Annie Oakley toughness. “Well,” she said, “my situation has changed a bit since we’ve seen one another. . . .” And then she shared her news.

Sharon is dying. It’s cancer, it’s in her brain, it’s quick and aggressive. She talked calmly about it. “You can’t be a person of faith,” she said, “and not have thought a lot about dying.” For a few months, she experienced no pain, and she tolerated the chemo very well. She was so well connected—through her church, through her friends at ECFE, through years of living in the same neighborhood—that she and Cam never wanted for company or help or home-cooked meals.

But then her short-term memory started to fade, and there were complications from her treatment; it became all too clear that she was no longer fit enough to handle a small boy. So she reorganized her life. She made plans to move to the same city as her one remaining grown child, to whom she’s still close. And she arranged for a younger relation to take Cam in, and it’s with this relation that Cam will probably stay once Sharon is gone. He’ll be part of a family with children who are still at home; they all love Cam and Cam loves them.

Parents do not, if they are lucky, have to grapple with the fact of their own mortality from day to day. But if they are forced to, as Sharon has been, something can happen. The clarity of their role, rather than its complexity, locks into view. Meeting daily obligations, arranging for the future, communicating unconditional and eternal love—these become the primary tasks of a parent who is dying. They are the primary tasks of a healthy parent too, but the snowy static of the outside world often makes them difficult to see. In an award-winning essay, the writer Marjorie Williams, who was also diagnosed with cancer while her children were young, talked about this: “Having found myself faced with that old bull-session question (What would you do if you found out you had a year to live?), I learned that a woman with children has the privilege or duty of bypassing the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes.”

I spoke to Sharon the week that Cam was set to leave. I caught her at home—she was now always at home—and she and Cam were sitting in the living room together, watching
Curious George.
When Cam briefly walked out of earshot, she told me how he was doing. “He’s been showing a lot of anger,” she said. “There was a day when he picked up a shoe and threw it at my head. He knew that that’s where the cancer is.” But he also knew that Sharon didn’t choose to have cancer. Even at four and three-quarters, Cam could make that distinction. What his anger provided was a glimpse into how much he’d miss her, and a chance for Sharon to explain that love doesn’t stop once a person dies, and neither does parenthood. “He’s also very loving, saying, ‘I love you forever and ever and ever,’ ” said Sharon. “We talk to each other a lot about loving each other forever and ever and ever. And that even without seeing each other, I’ll be his mommy and he’ll be my son.”

I wondered if she felt guilt. “I do,” she said. “I feel like I’m abandoning Cam.” But then she said something I will never forget. She said she also felt relief. “Now he’s going to have
two
adults who love him and will be taking care of him for the rest of his growing up. It’s very comforting. It’s a better life for him than he would have had if he’d stayed with me.” Sharon didn’t think she’d have had the courage to make that choice for Cam if she’d remained well.

For the moment, she said, she was just trying to savor their last few days together in her beautiful old house. “I’m trying to be present,” said Sharon. “That’s all I can do. That,” she added, “and spending a lot of time watching
Curious George.
”

Which is just as Marjorie Williams had said. Normal life, but with more pancakes.

Kids may complicate our lives. But they also make them simpler. Children’s needs are so overwhelming, and their dependence on us so absolute, that it’s impossible to misread our moral obligation to them.
It’s for life,
as Sharon says. But it also
is
our lives. There’s something deeply satisfying about that. Williams wrote that motherhood gave her permission to circumvent existential questions when she fell ill, and perhaps that’s true. But I suspect that parenthood helped reduce the number of existential questions she had in the first place. She knew what she had to do each day, and why she was here. And the same was true of Sharon. Even at her weakest—even when she was well past the point of charging through the sprinklers at the splash pad or hoisting Cam onto a jungle gym—she knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing with her last moments of strength. She was supposed to be watching
Curious George
with Cam.

And when she dies, a member of her family will do for Cam exactly what Sharon did for Cam’s mother all those years ago: sign on for life. It seems to be a recurring theme in Sharon’s family, a sacred code of conduct that they all share in the happiest and worst of times. This is what parents do—what all of us do, in fact, when we’re at our unrivaled best. We bind ourselves to those who need us most, and through caring for them, grow to love them, grow to delight in them, grow to marvel at who they are. Gift-love at its purest. Even in the midst of pain and loss, it is, miraculously, still possible to summon.

acknowledgments

Writing your first book is not unlike the early days of raising your first child. You’re awed by the magnitude and meaning of this new undertaking, certainly, but also housebound, perpetually preoccupied, and (perhaps worst of all) presumed to be competent at something you know essentially nothing about. It takes a huge network of friends and family and colleagues to make such a project work.

There is, for starters, Tina Bennett, who isn’t just a brilliant champion of writers’ ideas, but (secretly) a brilliant editor of them; she also has a genius for friendship, which I enjoyed long before enjoying her genius as an agent. Her colleague Svetlana Katz is a model of effortless professionalism.

At Ecco, Lee Boudreaux swept up this project with so much enthusiasm that her energy alone could have powered my laptop. As an editor, she’s part of a dying breed: someone who pays close attention not just to individual sentences but big ideas; someone who talks through chapters as well as rereads them, endlessly. That she also happens to be one of the funniest and loveliest women to hang out with seems almost too good to be true, but there you have it. I’m also grateful to her for making me look like I talk at a normal speed.

The whole Ecco team is tremendous: Dan Halpern, the publisher, gave me the freedom and (toward the home stretch) extra time to get it right; Michael McKenzie, Ecco’s publicity director, knows the media almost as well as us journalists; and Ashley Garland gave good PR guidance at every step of the way. Art director Allison Saltzman produced the perfect, playful cover. And thanks, too, to Ryan Willard, Andrea Molitor, Craig Young, and Ben Tomek for everything they’ve quietly done to keep this strange process running so smoothly.

I could not have written this book without the full support of Adam Moss and Ann Clarke at
New York
magazine. Maybe there are other employers out there who allow their employees two years off from their jobs, but if there are, I haven’t heard about them; for a while, Adam and Ann had me more or less convinced I was living in Sweden. Adam also published the magazine story that formed the original basis for this book. A couple of paragraphs from it—as well as a couple of paragraphs from a subsequent story I did about the enduring effects of high school—appear here.

At
New York,
it was Lauren Kern (now at the
Times
) who heard me pitch the original magazine story, thought it was swell, and edited it into a readable state. Throughout my career, I’ve been lucky to work with editors who’ve made my writing much better, including John Homans, Vera Titunik, Al Eisele, Marty Tolchin, David Haskell, Ariel Kaminer, and Mark Horowitz (more on that last guy in a bit). David and Ariel were invaluable early readers, too, providing terrific comments and suggestions (Ariel read not just early, but often); so were the amazing Bob Roe, Kyla Dunn, and Caroline Miller (who’s done wonders for my understanding of adolescents, and first hired me at
New York
magazine in 1997). My friend Josh Shenk talked me through the early stages of this book. My colleague Chris Smith provided crucial advice at the end. My colleague Bob Kolker troubleshot this book over so many lunches that he needn’t have bothered reading the final product, he knew it so well. Elaine Stuart-Shah helped a great deal with the initial research; Rachel Arons had a singular talent for archival spelunking; Rob Liguori made fact-checking this book look easy, which Lord knows it wasn’t. I thank him for the many times he artfully rescued me from myself.

Though I mainly quote published research in this book, many scholars also made time to speak to me by phone, in person, or by long email volley, including David Dinges, Michael H. Bonnet, Mimi Ito, Linda Stone, Mary Czerwinski, Roy F. Baumeister, Matthew Killingsworth, Arthur Stone, Dan P. McAdams, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, David E. Meyer, Tom Bradbury, Susan McHale, Mike Doss, Kathryn Edin, Alison Gopnik, Sandra Hofferth, Andrew Cherlin, Steven Mintz, Dalton Conley, Kathleen Gerson, E. Mark Cummings, Clay Shirky, Brené Brown, Gerald R. Patterson, Donald Meichenbaum, Arnstein Aassve, Ann Hulbert, and Andrew Christensen. I owe all of them my heartfelt thanks. I feel especially indebted to Dan Gilbert, George Vaillant, Robin Simon, Nancy Darling, Larry Steinberg, B. J. Casey, and Carolyn and Philip Cowan, all of whom went out of their way on my behalf.

When I was struggling to find a methodical, dignified approach to pulling together a sample of parents, it was Bill Doherty at the University of Minnesota who suggested I try ECFE (a remarkable state education program). He and his daughter Elizabeth hooked me up with Annette Gagliardi and Todd Kolod, who shared their wisdom, planned my trip, and graciously allowed me to attend many of their classes; Barb Dopp, Kathleen Strong, Valerie Matthews, and Kristine Norton let me sit in on theirs as well. It was my pal Shaila Dewan who wisely advised me to go to Sugar Land and Missouri City, on account of their shifting demographics; Mimi Swartz sent me to Kathryn Turcott and Rallou Matzakos, both of whom plugged me into the PTO at Palmer Elementary in Missouri City. Mimi and Lisa Gray and Amy Weiss helped orient me in Houston, for which I can’t thank them enough.

Nor, of course, can I ever sufficiently thank all the families who gamely participated in this book: Angie and Clint Holder; Jessie and Luke Thompson; Marta Shore; Chrissy Snider; Paul Archambeau; Laura Anne Day; Leslie Schulze; Steve and Monique Brown; Lan Zhang; Cindy Ivanhoe; Carol Reed; Angelique Bartholomew; the moms and dads who shared their thoughts during ECFE classes; the moms and dads of teens who shared their stories in full. You were generous, you were warm, you took a flier on a total stranger. You spoke honestly about intense subjects and intensely about what that honesty meant. This was especially true of Sharon Bartlett, as inspiring a woman as I’ve ever known. She died on July 9, 2013. Her surviving daughter has clearly inherited the generosity of her mother. I suspect Cam will too.

If Sharon taught me anything, it was the necessity of friendship and community. A number of people in my life made the loneliness of book-writing bearable, not just by boosting my morale but by spitballing ideas so that I might feel less alone with them. So thanks to: Sarah Murray; Nina Teicholz and Gregory Maniatis; Mikaela Beardsley; Sue Dominus and Alan Burdick; Steve Warren; Brian Baird; Rebecca Carroll; Brian Hecht and Doug Gaasterland; Fred Smoler and Karen Hornick; Josh Feigenbaum; Doug Dorst; Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen; Howard Altmann; Dimple Bhatt; Julie Just and Tom Reiss; and Eric Himmel.

One cannot write a book about parenthood without rethinking one’s own parents. Norman and Rona Senior had me when they were young,
so
young, making trade-offs and compromises I still cannot imagine although I’m a parent myself. Their love and unconditional support are what launched me into the world and still power me through it. In Ken Senior and Deanna Siegel Senior (another early and wonderful reader), I’m pretty sure I have the most loving and least complicated relationship a human being can have with a brother and sister-in-law; I don’t think I’d have written this book without their friendship, feedback, and babysitting. Jon Sarnoff and Allison Soffer may as well be my brother and sister. Thanks to them—as well as their spouses, Ellen Lee and Bob Soffer—I’ve learned what mothering and fathering looks like at its best; how I wish their mom were here to see her children parent as she did. (And thanks to Dylan, Max, Miles, Mia, Ben, and Caroline, Rusty will never want for cool cousins, who’ll be just as close, with any luck, as all of us.) Sam Budney and Stella Samuel aren’t related by blood, but they may as well be, and they made my life possible, as well as my son’s. George and Eleanor Horowitz aren’t related by blood either, but I admire them, would take a bullet for them, feel a stubborn connection to them that takes me by surprise; I feel so grateful for the many efforts they’ve made, because blended families are, no matter how much you work at them, really hard.

And then there’s Mark Horowitz, who
stole my heart one day when he declared that sometimes we did things in life—made sacrifices, took risks—simply because we loved someone, and that was reason enough. He taught me how to write; he taught me how to be a wife; he showed me the importance of old-fashioned concepts like duty and honor. He cooked several hundred meals for me as I was writing this book, and cooked up several hundred ways to improve my writing too. Together, we had Rusty, to whom this book is dedicated—as is, in large measure now, my life. Without this kid, the world wouldn’t be half so beautiful, or half so meaningful, or half so large. How I love you, darling boy. You’ll never know the half of it, and that’s just fine.