Young Dads, Old Moms

On a walk this morning, I saw what I realize is commonplace in Portland, which is a dad taking care of his kids. Today, it was a 35ish guy holding the hand of a five-year-old boy, while carrying a toddler girl on his hip. There was no marching band behind him, and he wore an expression of neither taxation nor self-congratulation; he was just getting his son to school. I started seeing these men and their kids, on bikes, at video stores, in markets as soon as I moved to Portland, and realized I almost never saw them in LA. Part of it is the car-culture down there, but another is when people choose to procreate.

I had my daughter in my 20s, which seemed pretty normal, until I enrolled her in private school in Los Angeles and saw I was usually the youngest parent. I raised her myself, I worked at home, had no nanny, barely hired a babysitter; this, as I watched older moms who did not work and with full-time help freak out because they were expected to put a chicken in the oven while the kids were dumping cartons of Lincoln Logs down the stairs. One mom I knew dealt with this by popping Xanax and, when her little girls started to screech, which they did for hours each evening, stood in the vestibule and shrieked lourder. This is the same mom who once said to me that, while she appreciated my money woes, if she were me, she'd just work at whatever job she needed to in order to get her kids through college.

This was a fantasy, the sort of parental musing one sees personified in Ralph Lauren ads, where model moms and dads and children lie in the grass wearing fresh, pressed clothing, and looking as though they will never have to do anything more strenuous than slowly condition their hair.

This is not parenting. Parenting is getting ready to walk out the door to hear Frank Geary speak and having your child vomit down the back of your coat. The enusing conflict is not the fault of the child, but the schedule, and schedules are things people in their 20s and 30s are almost always more flexible about, because they do not yet believe that, if they do not make the meeting in London, the world will shift off its axis and explode into flames; they're evolving, and if they're urged to move over and make room for one, two or three more, they're limber and often interested enough to do so. This is what I see here, young dads shouldering parenthood easily or, at least, with apparent grace.

I saw the opposite last week, in the photo of a 66-year-old Romanian woman. It was a close-up, and before I saw the copy, I expected to read, "so-and-so has just died," but in fact she'd just delivered triplets, two of which died because they were so tiny, another of which survived, at three pounds. As I read that the woman had undergone nine years of fertility treatments for this child, I found myself perplexed, and then angry. She decided she wanted kids at 57? Well, okay; how about adopting one from Romania, a land of notoriously horrific orphanages and national laws that make it almost impossible for outsiders to adopt? No; she wanted her own, her argument being, a woman has a right to have a baby at any age. A right, perhaps, but not the ability. Shoot, I might want to play for the Denver Nuggets, but guess what? I can't. And while I am all for medical breakthroughs, as we know, they can fly in the face of common sense. Oh, and how about living long enough to raise the kid?

In the introduction to Choice: the Best of Reason, editor Nick Gillespie wrote, "Within the broadest possible parameters, we believe that you should be able to think what you want, live where you want, trade for what you want, eat what you want, smoke what you want and marry whom you want. You should also be willing to shoulder the responsibilities entailed by your actions." (Emphasis added.)

It turns out my best friend, a single woman without kids, was similarly enraged by the elderly mom story, and told me another: a single woman in her late 40s who decided she wanted a child, underwent fertility treatments, and wound up with quadruplets; this, because she simply could not go through with selective reduction of the embryos. Now she has all four, no father, no way to hold a job, and so gets money from the state and appears in articles in the local paper, talking about her plight and announcing the location of the next pot luck where we can all bring covered casseroles and drop off checks to help support her munchkins. Uh, no.

Comments

[allan]

I concurred on Gillespie's "we believe" list. Except...the one about live where you want. That one may need some delineating. My condo is off limits for starters. And probably his domicile, too. I like the idea of traveling unfettered, but throwing up walls and laying down welcome mats wherever one chooses seems a bit chaotic. Perhaps he meant doing away with borders and such. Nah, not a Reason guy. I heard there are buildings in NYC that restrict ownership of units through screening and voting on candidates. And there may still be those gated communities somewhere doing similar things. But mostly, if you have the loot, you can live just about anywhere you want. What's the deal, then? Or I am ignorant of a problem here?

[Charlie]

Allan, the deal with those gated communities is that they are trying to exercise their right of association. It's mostly a forgotten concept these days, because it's most often only used in the case of race, but the idea was that if you owned property or a business, you should be able to hire who you like and not hire who you don't like, sell your property to who you like, and not sell it to who you don't like. Unfortunately, the most common example that comes to mind for most people is delineated by race.

[nancy]

Gillespie is talking about the borders. More on that: "We're proud that the ideas that have always animated our magazine--that economic and civil liberties are indivisible; that markets and borders and societies should be open and government should be limited..." and etc. He does not, however, mean your house, or his, or mine; seems to me Reason stands about as far as a sane man can from centralism.

[leigh]

Nancy, re: the 1/27 post about your friend Matt's photo on the book cover. Too bad it wasn't on a jar of instant coffee instead, eh?

[nancy]

No shit. He'd have, what, $8.1 million now? Though I did have to laugh at the earnestness of the model, how he felt taken advantage of by Taster's Choice despite never having known he was on there. And what up with that? I think if my face were on, oh, 80 million jars around the world, I mighta gotten wind of it.

[Amy Alkon]

Equally horrible and selfish (as that Romanian woman) is the behavior of people with a likelihood of transmitting a genetic disease who have kids anyway instead of adopting. There was an article about one such woman in Sunday's NYTimes. I was especially offended by the way she tried to literary it up and rationalize it as some beautiful wonderful thing...the need to have her DNA and her husband's DNA on the planet, even if it meant she gave birth to a kid whose health was compromised from the start.

[Jackie]

It's difficult to know where to draw the line on that one, Amy. I've had this debate with my boyfriend, a lifelong asthma sufferer who has serious doubts about the possibility of passing asthma onto any offspring of his (there's a good chance he would). Obviously there are degrees to consider here, but in principle I think you're right. (I'll be controversial and say that my pet hate is single women who just have to have a baby, as if it were a fashion accessory, and talk themselves into thinking there's nothing important missing in a kid's life if it doesn't have a father figure.)

[nancy]

These are both big cans of worms. As for the NY Times article: I see your point Amy, and yet, what she might pass on, while tough, wasn't a death sentence. Yeah, they probably should adopt, and I think couples who know, for instance, that they are going to pass on Tay-Sachs should, but as a mother who wanted to get pregnant about as much as I wanted to breath, I well know the urge to procreate. And what about all the crap babies get by accident? No guarantees. As for the no-father deal: I think it's a wise idea to have a dad in the picture, absolutely, even if he's a half-assed dad. That said, I went to breakfast last weekend with three people: one met her dad only once, he was a first-class shit; one has a father who said to him, "You know, it used to make me nauseous to think of you," and the other, well, let's just say they approach each other with ten-foot poles. I was the only one whose father was not either absent or a passive-aggressive a-hole.

[Robert Fiore]

Living in Koreatown (which, as its name suggests, is predominantly Central American), I see fathers with their children fairly often, thought not as often as with their mothers or with both parents. Among Central Americans, as you may be aware, having children is a higher priority than having an automobile. Asian children I see almost always with their mothers. White people in the neighborhood are generally young and single, and any children young couples have will be babes in arms.