You can’t see the person taking the picture when you take pictures of your kids (but they can)

I’ve been thinking about why a passage I read in The Media bugs me, and I’ve been trying to turn my irritation with it—the way I respond, instantly, reflexively, with what might be a very predictable and overdetermined disavowal—into the narcissistic question of what my annoyance says about me. This is a blog, I can do that.

It’s an excerpt from a book I haven’t read, by an intellectual with a two-year-old, asking whether “becoming a parent will alter one’s identity” and largely insisting that the answer can be no. Intended as an intervention into a discourse that (as she characterizes it) insists that motherhood will “reconfigure the deepest core of one’s being” and that it will be “a divine encounter so powerful that it would shatter them to pieces,” she describes replying to work emails from the hospital bed and generally continuing to be who she was.

On declining to be transformed, she writes:

I have spent my entire life tracking excellence like a hound dog. Finding what I could do best has become a habit for me as much by temperament as by circumstance — my family life was so unstable, and the financial resources available to me so limited, that it became clear very early on that whether I would attain any measure of success beyond mere survival depended on my ability to excel. Excelling opened access to the scholarships I relied on for my education, which was in turn the basis of nearly every relationship and opportunity I have enjoyed since. The problem wasn’t that having a child kept me from excelling at my job. It didn’t help, but the real issue was that for most of my time spent with her in those early years, I wasn’t giving expression to any talent or ability whatsoever. I wasn’t growing, I wasn’t learning. So often I was barely doing anything at all.

This is the maddening paradox of parenting: It both had to be me and it absolutely didn’t. It had to be me: I wanted to offer my daughter the benefits of having a loving mother stably present in her life, there with her, attentively, day in and day out, deadlines permitting. But often it seemed like it really didn’t have to be me at all. Nothing about me — my ideas, my personality, my judgment, my sense of humor — really mattered. She wants her mother to sit next to her while she’s on the potty, or in the bath, or in bed, or in the car, but I’m at best just okay at sitting. She wants her mother to follow her on the playground, but I have no unique talent for the seesaw or pushing a child on a swing. I’ve always considered myself to be rather whimsical, silly, playful, but I did not consider how much time small children spend struggling to process discomfort, frustration, and disappointment; how much time I would have nothing to do but stand there and absorb a baby’s vociferous expressions of displeasure. It needed to be me but a me not so much transformed as reduced to very basic functions. 

Now, is this “the maddening paradox of parenting”? Does this generalization hold? Or is the author describing something so specific to a person who “track[s] excellence like a hound dog” that it says almost nothing at all about what “parenting” is like for most people (or me)? Alternately: When I read this and say “That’s not what it’s like at all!” am I declining to be interpellated into her description, precisely because I actually am? Another possibility: Am I just a man, narcissistically reading and objecting to a very published-in-The-Cut piece of writing that is about women for women?

These are sticky questions. Here is the easy and cheap way to avoid them: to disavow the parts of this passage that make broad claims about “parenting” by saying, simply, skills issue. you can observe that parenting a toddler is a skill, a skill you can learn if you don’t know it, and if you find yourself just sitting there, present but idle, as your toddler does everything on her own, maybe you’re not very good at it? And maybe you’re in a little bit of denial about that? Your self-image of yourself as “whimsical, silly, playful” might simply be off base. You might be those things in one context, but a two-year-old wants you to be a very different kind of playful and silly; if you find yourself not being that, to them, then a good way to become better at it would be to watch what more skilled caregivers do, learn from them, and emulate them. Maybe the problem is that your elevated soul rebels at the notion of singing the stupid little songs they like, and playing the stupid little games they enjoy; the problem might be that you are too smart to learn something new, to humble yourself and learn from people without graduate degrees. (Maybe I’m talking about myself, here?)

This is one (fairly unkind) way to respond to the author’s professions of “excellence”: to let the words “gifted student syndrome” and “myth of meritocracy” wander through your mind and deduce that the discovery that you can’t “win” parenting is an unwelcome one to our benighted and foolish author. You might snidely speculate that she wants to attend to her daughter (deadlines permitting), but that when she finds herself just sitting there, reduced to mere presence, a body, her beautiful spirit rebels against mere adequacy. This can be a hard discovery, that the ways an identity wrapped up in excellence—not only in self-image, but also the forms of social identity that one learns to perform as an intellectual, a thinker, a speaker, and a writer—could not be less relevant to the task of parenting a toddler, a person who barely knows how to do anything (much less critique a text). And so, such a parent is presented with a choice: to become a new person, one whose sense of self is not so wrapped up in the sociopathic hierarchy games of “excellence”—and in the pretense that work emails are very important, and deadlines take precedence—but fully embraces the goofy, embodied sufficiency of parenting, a thing that, manifestly, anyone can do. Or not to. Such a person might choose not to become a new person, and not change, and to simply not be the kind of person that a child wants them to be.

I am definitely talking more about myself here, than about someone who I only know through their words. For me, as a dad—a form of parent that may differ from mothers in some respects—I have found that what she presents as a kind of objective phenomenon—a thing that either happens or doesn’t—is a lot more like a choice. How much will you change on becoming a parent? How much do you want to change? How deep will you throw yourself into this new identity and let it reconfigure who you are? What does it do to your sense of self—and to your performed, imagined, social self—to become a person who is a “Mom” or a “Dad,” and how much will you lean into that transformation? You can choose to try to remain unchanged, to send work emails from the hospital bed, to let your values and priorities remain as they were; you can try to incorporate child-raising into a childless life, and attempt to remain unchanged by it.

These are, of course, different choices for different people. One of those differences is that we bring differently gendered baggage, needs, and socially-imposed burdens to bear on the issue. It certainly can’t help but matter, on a variety of levels, whether you built that kid inside your own body, and then—in an apocalyptic event that no one fails to euphemize—birthed it right the fuck out of you. Being present for such a cataclysm really confirmed for me the sense that whatever it was that makes me a dad, it wasn’t that; this fact matters to how I am, and am not, a parent. Things that are too obvious to be said are sometimes, also, important things to say, such as, “gender matters a lot in how we talk about parenting.” “Parenting” disappears the difference between the baggage imposed by being named “mom” or “dad.” And I do think that I respond to this passage the way I do because it is a more gendered question and answer than she renders explicit. Her choices annoy me because I identify with them, because I feel myself interpellated, and I don’t like the feeling: the choices she makes, as a mother, don’t sit easily with my self-image as a dad, or my expectations for other dads. Were this passage written by a dad, I suspect that most of its readers would respond just as differently to it. Disconnected from specifics, the sense that dads should do more so moms should do less is a fairly general normative assumption, among the population which holds it; a dad who declares that parenting hasn’t changed him, that his life remains as it is, who sends work emails from the hospital, will be suspected of being a shitty dad. A dad whose life hasn’t changed very much by parenting might be suspected of not doing very much parenting at all.

And so, maybe I get annoyed by those paragraphs because when I see myself reflected in her prose, I picture myself as a bad parent. I don’t like when her self-image matches my own: an intellectual—in scholarly formation, in social and professional identity, and in just being, in daily life, the sort of person who uses the word interpellate and write something like the kind of thing I am writing. I too have found myself “sitting around” feeling superfluous while my kids play, wondering what to do with the all of me that doesn’t seem relevant to the current endeavor. Before I had kids, I didn’t see myself as destined to have them, and I was fully prepared (even expected) not to have them; on having them, I sometimes can’t recognize the person I spend most of my days being, and who, sometimes—which I sometimes I try not to notice—I don’t want to be. Sometimes I want my old life back, the one where I didn’t have kids, and could be the kind of selfish person that I can no longer, in good conscience, allow myself to want to be.

It makes me worry that I have been a bad parent. Or that is the thought I have, when I think about what it would mean for me to remain “unchanged” by my transformation from dude to dad, and when I let myself want that. I was listening to a podcast once, at the park, and my daughter fell off something and hit her head (she was fine). Maybe I don’t read to them as often “as I should,” because I don’t find their books all that interesting? Maybe I don’t like their songs, and so, sometimes, I don’t sing them? What if they can tell, sometimes, that I would love to do anything but play with them? What if, in my heart of hearts, I feel the same things she does, and want to be unchanged? What kind of monster am I, really?

And so on, goes the voice of my inner self-hatred, which fears that I am failing my children, not just in the way that no parent can fail to fuck up their kids, but out of the selfish choice to be the person I always thought I was, before having kids, which is a desire not to be the person I know that I “should” be, for them, the choice not to be the person that they enjoy me being. At some point, maybe, my kids will need me to model some version of adulthood for them—reading books, writing, thinking deeply about the world, and doing all that bullshit I learned to do in graduate school—but right now, mostly, they want me to help them manage their terrors of the world: how to poop, how to eat, how to play. What things do, what their names are, and what can be made to do.

Grad school and the world of letters gave me few tools for doing that well; I have learned a lot more from watching random moms and professional caregivers, and emulating them badly, than from any of the books I’ve ever read. But when she describes “nothing to do but stand there” and “basic functions,” I also just have to say: what are you talking about? Watching a human being discover how to be a human being—and being called to take part in it—is one of the most immersive, exhausting, and all-encompassing experiences I’ve ever had. Maybe it would be different if we didn’t have twins (and the exotic life of parents of singles is an ongoing fascination for us). But I’m not sure. I suspect that dismissing the depth and richness and intellectual interest of the most basic and fundamental humanistic endeavor—a stomach wrapped in a body inventing thought and turning itself into a human being—is a choice. You can be fascinated by it, and dip deeply into it—you can be open to how wildly strange and interesting children are—or you can put your attention elsewhere; you can re-focus yourself on the modes of excellence that matter in a society still very much structured by an assumption of professional childlessness.

I don’t, to be clear, think that the author of this passage is a “bad parent.” You have to be a pretty silly person to think you can judge that from a piece of writing like this, especially one published in The Cut. So many of the most viral articles in The Cut are like this, and perhaps it says something about the kind of feminism-adjacent article that “works” online that this forms a kind of genre: an essentially confessional utterance that becomes a defiant refusal to improve. The author describes who she should be—the person who everyone knows she should be—and then says “Actually? No. I choose not to be that. I choose, instead, to be me.” This lavish embrace of the symptom being diagnosed—in so many of these articles—suffuses what, in another hand, in another publication, in another place, might resolve (or formulaically stumble) into catharsis or moralism or revelation; it achieves an effect that is not unique to The Cut, but that you see there a lot, where the author seems proud of what they show you of themselves, even as what they show you is so unsparing, so merciless, that one’s first response to such writing is going to be to praise one’s perspicacity as a reader, and as a human being, to see through her descriptions and revelations and perceive the deep flaw at her core—“What kind of a person would do that? I would certainly never do that! How can she not realize what she’s saying?”—and in so doing, to forestall the realization that this is exactly the set of reactions that the writing has scripted for you. We flatter ourselves that we see through them, see them as they are, and as a result of our own pride in our intellect, we fail to notice that we are seeing literally only what she has shown us. We see as avowal what is maybe just an insistence on ambivalence, or an attempt to loosen the security of normative expectation.

At its best, such writing inhabits an identity—derived from real life, and effective to the extent that it captures something that its readers recognize in themselves—but the person on the page isn’t the person that person is when they are with their kid, necessarily. But I am still talking about me, because the same is true of my own fears of who I am, as a parent, the person my kids are talking to when they call out for “dada.” I am a vicious wretch, I know, and I suck as a parent; I know this about myself, and yet my kids seem to think they have a dada who loves them, who is always there for them, and they love him far more than he deserves. They forgive me my failures, because they don’t notice or remember them, along with so much that passes beneath their narcissistic perception. I know a lot of things about myself and the world that they, in their grace, have not yet been burdened with. I know how much I have failed and will fail them. There are times when I can know that, and forgive myself; there are times when it makes me feel bad. But they don’t seem to be ambivalent. They just look up at me, when I’ve been gone for a minute, and say “dada!”

I think about their love for me, sometimes, and wonder who this person is, this person I can barely know myself to be, that is their very favorite person in the world (along with everyone else they love, who is also their favorite person). I know that being that person doesn’t make me any less the other persons I am, even if find enough chairs for them all can sometimes be a logistical challenge. But in these moments, I can know myself to be lovable, and see myself as the person they see me as. And I think this is what, ultimately, is wrong with the idea that parenting might, in some objective sense, be a thing that changes us, or doesn’t: the model of identity that it presumes is too knowable, too one-dimensional, and too narcissistic. Not only aren’t we one person—and not only don’t we know ourselves as well as we’d like to think we do, or have any kind of solid handle on how we are or aren’t changing—but our children know us in a way that is true, and real, and transformative, even as they correctly know and care absolutely nothing about all the bullshit that makes up our professional lives. The better question is: will we listen when they tell us who we (also) are?