NYMPHE: Childless, Childfree, Parent, Stepmom.

My Fault, I'm Female...

MFIF—My Fault, I'm Female—is collecting everyday stories about how we are mistreated and belittled for being girls and women. Shouldn't be any big news to anyone who's been a chick for very long, but it makes for a strangely addictive read.

This post talks about being flipped out on by a very-breeding guy because the writer is female and CFBC (childfree by choice). 

(Photo is of me and Carrie in a high school play approximately 4.5 billion light-years ago...)

ALL JOY, NO FUN: CHILDFREE & CHILDED VIEWS TO PERUSE

Is parenting like being an ex-patriot or showing horses? Folks from across the spectrum weigh in, following The New York magazine article "All Joy and No Fun" by Jennifer Senior. The piece has stirred up conversation about whether parenting makes people "happy" or miserable, and makes [some of] us look at what the heck "happiness" is in the first place. How some others are responding to the piece:

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Sarah Wildman, a foreign policy correspondent, likens parenting to being an ex-patriot, where everything is more intense compared to the previous, childless/childfree life:

"When we were expats we liked to say the intensity of experience was different, different from living at home. Living in another language, in another culture, sharpened our senses. When things went wrong, they went disastrously, horribly wrong. But when they were right, the reward was so much sweeter.
Having a kid is a little like being an expat in the world—the highs are that much higher, the lows that much lower, the intensity like nothing else. Joy and pain; tears and laughter; everything that much sharper than it was before."

Read more at politicsdaily.com, where you can't make comments unless you're signed in as an AOL or AIM user. Not Facebook, not Google, freakin' AOL. (Wtf? Who the hell is an AOL user these days?)

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Rufus Griscom, a co-founder of Babble, sent writer Biz Mitchell on assignment to find out how previous studies worked, studies that consistently showed higher levels of "happiness" among childless/childfree people, or among eventual parents before having kids and during times of life when the kids get more independent.

"Biz did indeed find a silver lining, carefully extracted from Gilbert and his fellow gloomy scientists, and it was as follows: though average happiness goes down when you have kids, experiences of extreme pleasure and pain increase. In effect, by having kids you are re-submitting your life to the turbulent intensity — the highs and lows — of earlier phases of life."

Griscom's new article is here on Babble:    where a commenter called tableforthree also says, "For me, parenting is sort of like travel. There's a lot of suffering when you travel, but the moments of transcendence and discovery more than make up for the time stuck in airports."

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Writer Elizabeth Mitchell ("Biz", I assume), delved into issues of happiness and parenting—and took on the dismal studies—in "Are you happy? Are you sure? Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded" way back in 2006 on Babble. The article is thorough and entertaining.

"And maybe having children never actually promised happiness. We misunderstood all those cooing grandparents when they said they were so happy for us. They truly meant that they were happy, not you. They were happy you were finally going to be broken of your tenacious selfishness." Ha, that's pretty good. Misery loves company!

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Amanda Hess of Sexist Beatdown and Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown swap some lighthearted, occasionally interesting tidbits about the NY mag article at the Washington City Paper. The piece's intro starts strong, noting that feminist women writers have long bemoaned the drudgery of parenthood, whereas now that men often share the day-to-day miseries, suddenly it's big news that parenting can be a drag.

The comments on this piece are far more thoughtful and thought-provoking than the usual Internet childfree-versus-parenting fare, which is quite nice to see. Too bad the meat of the article tends to brush over real issues in favor of self-congratulatory humor about being childfree. Here are some of the good nuggets:

Amanda: 'I think the happiness part is some new-agey conception of raising children. It’s important to remember that joy aside, the fact is that now a lot of people get to choose whether they have children or not, and if so, when. And so it becomes much more of a quality-of-life question than a biological-necessity one. And so I think it’s fair to expect that you do the thing that you think will make you the happiest. But there’s also a lot of fear-mongering about that, because of that whole ovary-loss thing. So people are like, “If you don’t have kids now, you will never be happy and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!” And people on the other end are like, “Once you pop it out, there’s no turning back! Life-ruiner!” When, actually, I bet that a lot of people could find meaningful, happy lives doing either of those things.'

Sady: 'I think it’s worth noting that a ton of the parents interviewed, who were speaking most directly about being unhappy and frustrated, were women. Men in that article were mostly “experts,” even if they were also fathers.'

Sady again: 'But I’m also wondering if being told that children are the KEY TO HAPPINESS (if you are a woman) has to do with the disappointment (among women) that children don’t auto-fulfill you? I mean, Simone de Beauvoir talked about this. Her whole deal was that women are told having children will fulfill them, and then it doesn’t, and then they hate their children. Her solution: Make something else in your life more important than getting pregnant?'

Amanda again: 'The story did mention that the most unhappy parents of all were those who were the non-custodial parent (mostly fathers). So having a kid and not raising it? Depressed for life. Having a kid and raising it too much? Also depressed—single parents and moms in general were less happy. Solution: Move to Norway?'

One of their commenters, Rachel in WY: 'to me it’s funny that people don’t conclude from studies like this: the cultural expectations we have are really fucked when it comes to parenting, and especially mothering. Instead, in this narrative it’s the kids themselves that make you unhappy.'

Adds commenter PD: 'In my case, it took me a while to come to the conclusion that I wanted children. I spent a long time agonizing over all the possible issues that could come up when raising children, and debating with myself over whether I was willing and able to handle them. It took my husband maybe a week to come to the same conclusion, and he’s been very serene about it because, I believe, he just hasn’t thought about it very much.'

Says commenter Socrates, a dad: 'If you spend parenting time obsessing that you could be doing something else, well it is hardly surprising you won’t enjoy it. Happiness is a choice a lot of the time.' (Typepad seems to be barfing out on this formatting. My apologies if it comes out weird.)

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Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, wrote Stumbling on Happiness, a book that clearly illustrates how kids bum out their parents around toddlerhood and teenagehood, even though parents say that parenting has made their lives happier. "When they replicate this study in France," says Gilbert to Mitchell, "women in France are not quite as unhappy when they are interacting with their children as women in the United States. We could imagine in some cultures it's not true at all.

"The differences aren't genetic differences. They are cultural differences, and one cultural difference is that in most of Western Europe people are not living lives that are quite as — what shall we call them — professionally frenzied? Running to the job in the morning, coming home at night, both parents working night and day. People in Europe are a little more relaxed and are able to spend more time with their families. And if children were really a source of agony, then the more time you spend with them the worse you would feel.

"But it turns out that people who have a little more time to spend with their kids are happier with them. Which once again points to the problem being conflict, which is not that children make us unhappy it's that doing too much makes us unhappy."

These interview snippets come from the same Mitchell article above, on Babble.

While I'm pretty sick of any sentence involving the word "should" these days, I appreciate Gilbert's assessment that "Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn't all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn't what we're trying for. As human beings, it's not our aim. It shouldn't be our goal.

"What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average. In my own experience that's probably not a bad description of a day with a kid." Since the article is about parenting, he doesn't note that these kinds of experiences are frequently felt by non-parents who take on challenging situations: not light and fun in every moment, but unbeatably worthwhile in the bigger picture.

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...which is pretty much what I noted on Nymphe in "Meaning & Bigtime Satisfaction vs. Moment-to-Moment Happiness."

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Columnist Bonnie Erbé's article "Childless? Heck No—Child-free!" provides a non-parent point of view on politicsdaily's site. Unfortunately, it breaks little new ground for anyone who follows these issues. The word childless is a sucky way to describe people? Yep, we knew that. People treat you weird if you're childfree/childless by choice in a pronatal, family-centric culture? Yep, knew that too, especially if you're female.

Many childfree people would trade their "accomplishments," experiences, and memories for those of parents any day, we also discover. Well, duh! And many parents feel the same. They wouldn't go back in time and eliminate children from their lives in order to stay childfree forever. This is healthy. This is how we make sense of our lives and find joy in what we do, instead of wallowing in regret and doubt 24 hours a day.

Erbé compares her experiences showing horses with those of parents who bring kids to show their ponies. It's a nice example of different modes of living. Again unfortunately, because I for one would love to see the cliché of self-centered childfrees laid to rest, she comes off as smug, uninterested in other people, and a little shallow. But she does prove that she is happy, which I think was her point.

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Can I just say: come ON, childfree writers, step up to the plate! The parent-writers are kicking your *ass* on this one. At least on the blogs and papers I'm finding. This is exactly the sort of discussion that could lead to greater understanding of the childless/childfree minority by the childed/parenting majority. But being defensive, flippant, and shallow is not gonna engage 'em in the discussion. Urgh.

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Albert Mohler, a Christian blogger on Crosswalk.com, sees in the New York mag article that "Many parents do see their children as described by Senior — as "subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed." Parental authority is replaced by constant power struggles, lest the children be psychologically warped by a parent who stands in authority. Discipline is replaced by never-ending negotiation. The peace of the home is replaced by constant activity and frenetic energy. The earliest years of a child's life are increasingly filled with organized activity and institutional settings.

No wonder parents are less happy now." Lack of discipline, having kids late in life, and the transition of parenting from a normal life expectation to a lifestyle choice, contribute to the difficulties and unhappiness of modern parenting. Of course there's a solution: Christ! 

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Core Knowledge blogger Robert Pondiscio  writes of Senior's article: "For those unaccustomed to New York-style navel gazing, the piece can read dangerously close to Onion-style parody—“Parents surprised to learn parenting isn’t fun”—but if you can get past the whiny anecdotes from Manhattan habitués there are interesting ideas to chew on." He takes care to note Senior's discussion of how our currently popular mode of overbearing, overachieving parenthood might be sucking the happiness out of it.

MEANING & BIGTIME SATISFACTION VS. MOMENT-TO-MOMENT "HAPPINESS"

Does Parenting Suck?

Does parenting suck? Surveys and scientific data have sure supported that notion, indicating especially that for Americans, parenting is making people more and more "unhappy" over the years—especially people with money. Now some data show that parenting is rewarding on the long-  haul and in a different way than momentary pleasure.

_{- - -Note to childless/childfree readers: you might want to avoid the last section, about my own experiences step-parenting and approaching biological parenting. The whole piece does discuss parenting/childing issues in general and ain't necessarily safe for those wrestling with the grief of childlessness.} - - -

Can we get a big "duh" on that? Do you feel "happy" and "unstressed" and like life is a big bowl of cotton candy when you're climbing Mount Everest, frozen and oxygen-starved and convinced you're losing your mind and about to die? Probably not. Does that trip up Everest become a major, beautiful, amazing defining moment of your life? I should freakin' hope so!

Are Tough Challenges Rewarding in a Special Way?
Same with other gripping, deep, frustrating, yet rewarding aspects of life. For each hour of bliss, "fun," or "happiness" I experience writing, making art, and trying to facilitate ways for other people to do or distribute their writing or art (ya know, community events, putting out a magazine without getting paid, etc etc)—I probably spend two hours in drudgery mode, thirty minutes in grumpy mode, and fifteen minutes in hell. Some people say they can't staaaand writing, it drives them crazy, they're such a martyr, but they HAVE to do it. I've always thought that was silly, but if I break down my own time, I gotta admit it's not like I'm swimming in creative ecstasy all the time. 

It might be that difficult activities generate a sense of meaning, importance, and some ineffable feeling a bit more transcendent than moment-to-moment "happiness," not despite their difficult-ness, but because of it. I hate to admit this (because my parents were always on about it when I was a kid and I thought it was soooo dumb), but earning something, going through a challenge, brings a sense of reward, contentment, pride, and amazement that I don't usually find in something that just plops itself neatly into my lap.

Does Writing Suck?
A recent example from my professional life: winning a grant vs. getting a sweet writing gig. Most writers I know, especially younger/newer ones, would dance a zillion jigs to get a nice, regular, well-paying gig like my new one for the Science Fiction channel. The drudgery and undeniably dull bureaucratic hassle of a grant proposal would pale in comparison; having it be successful would be fairly unglamorous, too. I experienced the reverse. I'm very pleased to write the SyFy.com "Eureka Idea Lab" blog, but I've got lots of experience writing similar things. Landing a gig like that feels great in the moment-to-moment; the hard, impossible work of becoming a professional writer is mostly far behind me. Landing a gig is a familiar and pleasant sensation. Trying to get the gig didn't suck my soul dry and make me throw my calculator across the room in a fit of frustration—unlike attempting to write the grant.

I've been trying to sort out the whole grant-getting game for years now. It's aggravating and difficult in most moment-to-moment work. I feel like a loser and a failure, in addition to being an idiot for not giving up this wretched game. But my cool blog writing gig doesn't make me feel like I scaled Mount Everest. Winning a $12,000 RACC grant I wrote for Plazm magazine? That felt like reaching the peak! Writing the grant sucked big donkey balls. Having written the grant, especially as it succeeded, feels fantabulous. It's not just about the money, it's about knowing I worked my ass off to learn something that, for whatever reasons, was really hard for me to figure out.

Everyone's lives are full of such examples, from the small ("Ha! I fixed that broken alarm clock all by myself!") to the huge ("I got through twelve years of Alzheimer's disease as my mother's caretaker, and I'm a better person for it"). Moment-to-moment irritation and drudgery may not produce instantaneous "happiness," but they can culminate in major life satisfaction and deepen our sense of wonder, humility, and amazement in the face of human strife, the vastness of the universe, little things like that. To me, it's no surprise that parenting operates the same way, but perhaps on a longer scale. Instead of gaining satisfaction after working at something challenging for a short time, like getting a difficult Masters degree in two years, you're putting in decades of challenging drudgery peppered with moments of intense satisfaction and awe. 

Joy, Fun, Hate, Parenting, and Scientists
"All Joy and No Fun: Why parents hate parenting" by Jennifer Senior in New York magazine (thanks, Jane, for sending it my way) covers some of these studies in parenting satisfaction. I highly recommend the article. It looks a bit at how much parenting has changed in American culture, and how that affects our ability to enjoy it on a moment-by-moment basis. Comparisons are made to French and Danish parents, whose daily life happiness is higher than Americans', possibly because there is more direct social support for childrearing in those countries. However, Senior doesn't tackle the challenge of what parents here can do now to make the day-to-day more tolerable. Given that no one's going to give us a paid year's parental leave or free childcare, how can we truly enjoy the  individual moments with our kids? A little Buddhist mindtraining, perhaps?

(The article also kicked off a fine froth of online commenting about childless and childfree living versus parenting, the usual venomous and/or self-righteous arguments, with a particularly New York flavor. Dotted among The Usual Huffiness you'll find evidence that people are actually thinking about the conversation, reading the article carefully, and being open-minded.)

Step-parenting, Bio-parenting: What'm I Getting Into?

Coming to biological parenthood for the first time, under two months 'til I deliver if all goes well, I understand that I'm getting into something challenging that will dull my wits and rattle my core. I know that having a baby will threaten my marriage and wreak havoc on my other relationships. I worry about my mental and physical health. There will be little time for the things that I have considered "fun" during most of my life: sitting alone, writing, going to Burning Man, eating a decadent meal out on the town, going on artist's residencies, and the like. I fully expect to become a zombie mom who can barely utter three words that aren't about baby's bowel movements, sleep, or nursing.

And the rewards? I'll just have to see what they feel like. Being a stepparent has been extraordinary, and heavily influenced how I approached the biological clock when it hit. Aspects of my childfree life that seemed perfect in the past paled in comparison to the moments of joy, and the larger sensation of exhilaration, that I felt as a stepmom. It rarely felt like I was "giving up" frequent late nights out on the town in order to romp in the park with A., have family dinner right at 6 pm, go to a 9 a.m. soccer game (me??? at a kid's soccer game?? wtf?) or even to stay up through harrowing nights of temper tantrums or illness.

The question of whether it was "worth it" wasn't even a question for me. It wasn't just "worth" the frequent hecticness, semi-frequent pain, and occasional tedium; step-parenting and my relationship with A. made my life just plain better. Richer. Weirder. Funner. Unpredictable in new ways. Chock full of love and intensity. Guess it must've happened at the right time in my life, with the right cast of characters, including a frickin' fantastic guy and his unbelievably cool, wild daughter.

It's this experience that I look at when I read the New York magazine article or consider how having a baby may affect my life. Every kid is different. Every birth is different. I have no way of knowing what's coming up.

Being a stepmother has its advantages; not only did I skip the whole diaper-poopy-screaming-toddler phase, because I met A. when she was 4 and 1/2, but other parents were around to do much of the heavy lifting. Now I'll be the poopy-screaming-diaper-toddler-exhausted-freaking-out mom, and I won't be able to call this kid's "real mom" for the occasional tête-à-tête about discipline, school, or what the child should be allowed to post on Facebook. *I* will be the "real," biological mom. Eek.

But if raising a biochild brings even half the love, satisfaction, beauty, and astonishment I've experienced co-parenting A., I will have to consider the experiment a huge success... even if I don't feel "happy" and "light" and "fun" every day, moment by poopy-diapered moment.

Images from "Please Rescue Me," a performance I did at the Haybarn Theatre, Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, in 2006. I think Em Delaney shot the pics.

COULD IT BE THAT THE CONVERSATION IS FINALLY GETTING MORE REASONABLE? CHILDFREE VS. BREEDERS IN A NEW LIGHT.

Obligatory warning: This post mentions pregnancy but doesn't otherwise get deep into infant/preggo talk. Should be safe for most CF/CL readers, I think...

The tenor of conversation online about childless, childfree, and parental issues seemed shrill, unreasonable, and unlikely to solve any problems in the long run, when I started this blog a few years back. I was vocally childfree for many years, got interviewed about it, got published about it, etc., but hopefully not in any hateful way. Still, it was an important component of my identity.

Some 10-15 years ago I joined an online CF group, a small one populated by some folks I knew in real life and other people too. Some stuff I found humorous; I didn't mind the word "breeder" (which my "fruit" friends had long called us "hets"); it was nice to share experiences with like-minded people.

However, the viciousness and bitterness of other posts seemed way out of whack. Well-off white people with graduate-level educations and good futures in the tech industry snarling about how put-upon they were by those nasty, evil breeding types—it seemed bizarrely cruel, classist, elitist, and frankly sometimes sexist. The conversations tended to be about how fuckin' cool we were for not being like the pond-scum normals who procreate. Many of whom were not just unenlightened and prone to talk about dull subjects like children, but poor and uneducated. La ti tah.

 So, though I really wanted to hang with fellow CF/CL people, I left the group.

When I wanted to rediscover resources for CF/CL folks online, years later, I found many a place that was even worse. Especially as I began, to my utter dismay, to experience the biological clock and question my previously rock-solid decision not to breed, I really sought good conversation about these things. From comments posted to newspaper sites when they ran articles about childfree living, infertility, any related issue... to blogs... to closed-loop discussion websites... I mostly found black-and-white thinking, bitterness, defensiveness, offensiveness, ad hominim attacks, and a lack of sympathy or interest in how other people lived. Everyone was a victim, it seemed—a whiny, angry one whipped to foaming peaks by the injustice of it all.

In other words, I found the Internet, in all its anonymous, cowardly glory.

This gave Nymphe an instant niche. I am still astounded by the feedback and support I've gotten for this one tiny, unpublicized blog. Just because I wrote about my experiences without assuming that parents are assholes and children are yucky. Just because I said, hey, there's a grey area of childless people, and we shouldn't have to fake that we're Totally! Happily! Childfree! all the time in order to fit the mold of the childfree cheerleaders. I still get the emails, some from people who've read current episodes of the blog and know I've crossed over... some from people who think I'm forever childfree.

I think the feedback has just been a sigh of relief from readers: thanks for writing this, because we're sick of the divisiveness. We're sick of the nastiness. Maybe we are victims in some ways, but we know things are more complex than many of the defensive CF groups want them to be, more complex than the defensive über-parents want to pretend.

Some people think it's weird or even unacceptable that a pregnant lady like me still reads and posts about childfree/childless/etc issues. But I do, because even if I were to squirt out two dozen screaming brats to drive all the other shoppers insane at the supermarket and overpopulate the planet and suck up all the tax money for schools, I would still care about inequality in our society. And the childless and childfree people in our society are treated unequally. That's just truth, supported by many facts. (See The Childess Revolution by Madelyn Cain for stats; it was written by a parent btw.)

In the last year I've noticed an uptick in reasonable, useful, interesting conversations about these issues online. Parenting blogs have them (see CafeMom post below). Childfree blogs have 'em too. (See this conversation at thebritgirl.com—the comments are probably more revealing than the initial post; you can see people mulling over each other's ideas.) Generalist newspaper articles tend to inspire pathetic posts lacking in thought, but strewn among them are really good discussions.

What I'd like to think is this: maybe we're actually listening to each other. Maybe we can guide the conversation to a point where it becomes useful. And then? There's hope for meaningful social change.

CHILDFREE & MIND CHANGERS ON OFFBEATMAMA

This post mentions pregnancy and such; it ain't fully childless-safe. Also, comments to the linked articles have a lot of moms and parents posting.

Well, I'm sorta sad that I didn't take Offbeat Mama up on it when they asked me to write a piece about childfree-childless-communication-changeovers, etc. Now that I'm pregnant, I'm too busy doing God's procreative work to dabble in such time-sucking hobbies as blogging.*

They did ask a still-childfree person, rainy, to write a piece, and it's good. The comments thread is great, too; it's so refreshing to find thoughtful people online genuinely discussing issues instead of wallowing in their own cleverness and defensiveness. Read it at offbeatbama.

From a different POV, there's an intriguing piece by a woman who preferred not to talk much to friends or in public when she and her partner started considering perhaps having a child. When she did finally come out about it, already pregnant, people's reactions were pretty darned weird—and very revealing about how society views childless and childfree people, the assumptions that are made. Check it here.

*The personality transplant from the old-me to mom-person hasn't completely worked yet. Apparently I'm still tongue in cheek sometimes, perhaps even sarcastic. The real reason i couldn't write it is that I'm on a very time consuming professional blogging/writing gig for NBC/Universal, and just got a grant to help produce the next issue of the magazine i co-edit. So... not so many unpaid blog posts these days.