A Roast and a Rewind
My pie crust is baking. I'm un-paywalling my favorite essay of the year.
This week is always the busiest of my year.
Two years ago, by virtue of being the most geographically convenient member of my extended family and also the only real volunteer, I inherited my grandmother’s role of Thanksgiving host. I’ve approached the job with something like mania. I bake pies, I use arcane kitchen equipment, I make a neurotically detailed schedule that once prompted a friend, upon viewing, to ask “are you a Capricorn?”
I also elected to start this marathon week by attending a marathon preschool birthday party at an indoor playground. Somehow I’m more exhausted than the three-year-olds who spent the afternoon cannonballing around the trampolines. But parental fatigue aside (do you know how many times my kid tried climbing up something called the “Super Speed Slide?”) I’ve found a real magic in watching my oldest and his friends navigate the world with more independence. It’s like the outlines of their older selves are emerging and I can begin to see who they are together.
All of this is to say I’ve been thinking about friendship and togetherness, but absolutely slammed this Sunday, so this week I’m going to publish a previously paywalled essay that I wrote in response to New York Magazine’s recent cover story on friendships after parenthood.
I didn’t care for the New York story. Here’s why:
In New York, Allison P. Davis takes up the problem of friendship between people with kids and people without. When friends start having children, Davis writes, their new offspring “throw the social order into disarray.”
I’m sympathetic here. I had two kids before most of my friends had one. Friendships suddenly require more deliberate work, more coordination. Some have stagnated anyway. This sucks and Davis is right to mark the phenomenon, along with some language about the “loneliness epidemic” said to plague American adults.
But then Davis pivots from a useful premise to a prestige magazine feature lamenting loss of attention from mom friends and flattening a complicated question (how do we accommodate children in a country hostile to them?) into a materially bereft interpersonal struggle between parents, nonparents, and babies, where all parties are at equal fault for missing happy hour.
“Parenthood (specifically motherhood) is a known contributor to feeling isolated,” Davis writes, “but though we tell friends, ‘You work too hard,’ or even, ‘Your new girlfriend is a drag,’ we never point our fingers at the baby and say, ‘That thing is tearing us all apart.’ My close friendships have survived most, if not all, the big-adult life events. As my friends settle into new parenthood, I can’t ignore the ways we’re drifting apart. I think it’s time to discuss the babies in the room.”
I’m curious why the author, and others of this mindset, choose to take up their argument with individual, pre-verbal people (“that thing”) instead of more ambitious targets. Is every baby, coincidentally, inventing this isolation anew? Or are there structural reasons why so many parents and non-parents find themselves distanced from each other?
What kind of social cohesion do we really enjoy if it doesn’t even allow for new life? How are the parent friends of this article’s childless protagonists actually faring?
New motherhood (sorry, that’s “Oh my God, not another one,” per New York) is a precarious moment for American women. The U.S. is one of six countries in the world without a national policy of paid maternity leave. (The others are the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga.) Parents might receive time off from employers, who likely also provide their health insurance, but U.S. employment is generally at-will. I know multiple families in media, alone, who’ve seen a parent laid off weeks before a baby was due or shortly after the child was born. Paid leave, if you get it, is short. U.S. work hours are long. Child care is hard to secure and prohibitively expensive and projected to get much worse starting next month when Covid aid programs expire. The omission of these factors from the New York piece is literally so strange.
The U.S. is not economically conducive to parental hangouts, though we make them work because the alternative, I suspect, is sort of like dying. But we also have a national aversion, probably born of our work culture, toward the kind of open and collaborative friendships that families need.
For most of our history, humans have relied on alloparenting, a care system in which children are raised not just by parents, but with support from a broader community. It’s a system of informality and openness, of invaluable assistance that looks a lot like showing up for and hanging out with your buddies.
But alloparenting is less common now. It cuts against the American fetish for rigid nuclear families and tough work schedules, against unwalkable neighborhoods and the weird professionalization of friendships (I’m thinking of this great piece on therapy-speak) that we might also attribute to the work lives and economic realities that leave us exhausted and clawing for every moment of free time.
These factors don’t just affect parents. I’d argue that they’re major contributors to overall issues of adult atomization and loneliness. Every six months or so, a tweet like this one will go viral lamenting the U.S.’s relative lack of the casual “errand hang,” which one oft-quoted writer describes as “the grocery run, getting a pair of pants tailored [...] The errand hang dismisses the usual setting of a bar or a lunch [...] Instead, the errand hang dances in the sweet vulnerability that comes from the everyday.”
You might call it allo-erranding—a kind of companionable coexistence that brightens mundane tasks (often the unpaid work expected of women). This premise is usually greeted by calls to “normalize the errand hang,” or rejected on the grounds that it’s asking friends to perform unpaid labor of their own (recall this year’s Twitter discourse about whether it’s wrong to ask a friend to pick you up at the airport). And I mean… I guess! Sure, it’s seeking support in situations that are less than maximally fun! But that’s friendship, no? It should be!
It’s not lost on me that most of the friendship battlegrounds described in the New York story are Going Out locations: a bar, a club, a restaurant, Coachella, a Broadway theater. They’re places where someone outside the social group is doing the cooking, the cleaning, the entertaining. Can these friendships bear the weight of work, is what I’m asking, or do they only thrive in manicured settings that require you to spend money?
(An aside: public spaces are often unfriendly for children. Tonight I’m taking my baby and toddler to a Mets game with friends (I’m a fun mom! I can still hang out!) and I am fucking dreading getting the kids to Citi Field around dinner time, and getting a stroller inside and checked into the single “fan assistance booth,” to say nothing of whether my baby has any interest in baseball. At least I’m not nursing anymore. This is also a very American problem. I’ve traveled internationally with two tiny children (I’m a fun mom! I can still hang out!) and one of my core memories was leaving JFK airport, where the bathroom’s lone changing table was hanging uselessly off the wall by a single screw, and landing in Australia, where the terminal’s bathroom had a suite for babies complete with a pristine infant bathtub. I found dedicated nursing rooms virtually every time I was out.)
But the New York cover story doesn’t reckon much with non-public spaces or the work that takes place in them. In fact, they’re hard to spot at all. Instead there’s a lot of loose language that situates parenthood in some off-stage world of mystery and loss. We read that “friends might drift away” after children but eventually “stumble out” again. A mom friend “truly dropped off the planet” but later “reemerged.”
I’ve taught two babies about object permanence, so I’m not going to do it again here, but we can safely assume that those parents did not disappear but were at home or at work, trying to make ends meet despite an extensively documented lack of time and resources. A friend could, perhaps, visit? Text? A tray of lasagna is always nice if you’re in the neighborhood.
Likewise, “isolation” is never really interrogated. Removed from what, and by which forces? We read that “parents start engaging with their friends again” when their kids are five—coincidentally when some publicly funded child care kicks in and kindergarten starts. Imagine that.
I’ve avoided addressing it so far and I’m still reluctant to because it feels mean and because I’ve spent ~1,000 words decrying Structural Issues, but I think I need to touch on Davis’s self-described behavior in this piece. I’ll take the coward’s route and quote Rusty Foster, who already did in yesterday’s “Today In Tabs” newsletter.
“The real delight of the piece is the slow-burn self-revelation that Davis’s struggle to maintain friendships with the parents in her life is mostly because she’s kind of awful to them,” Foster writes, and while I don’t want to linger on it, I agree.
Davis describes choosing not to invite a mom friend to a party (“though I didn’t mean to hurt her, the slight wasn’t completely unintentional”). Davis declines another mom friend’s invitation to go dancing (“too tired”) but extends little grace for mom friends who miss events for similar fatigue. She describes having a panic attack and leaving a picnic because a friend talked about parenthood, then later grills a different mother on whether her childless friends “felt left out of that part of her life. Maybe they wanted to be included.”
I’ve been fortunate to have different friends than these since becoming a mother, and I’m open to the possibility that Davis is a better friend than she gives herself credit for in this article; that these are self-deprecating jokes that just aren’t landing with me.
I’m less patient with the article’s language toward children (“that thing is tearing us all apart”). Davis is often hyperbolic in her negative description of babies: “those little assholes,” “like a popular girl transferring into school in the middle of the semester,” “my mortal fucking enemy.”
I don’t know Davis or how she actually feels about children. But I am very cautious of overstatements intended to conceal barely-worse sentiments beneath their surface. So assuming the best of Davis, then, let me note that her language, even if overinflated, is indistinguishable from what I see in communities that genuinely hate children. And without an argument that checks against those communities’ views, the article and its language are compatible with them.
“What do you do when your child-free friend has no interest in being surrounded by children?” Davis asks. “When they love you but don’t really love kids? Or perhaps your friend’s child just doesn’t like you. Are you supposed to debase yourself by pulling silly faces just for the sake of impressing a tiny person when all you wanted was to be able to spend time with your adult friend?”
Does your friend’s child really not like you? Really? If that’s the case, I think it’s an incident of statistical insignificance compared to the occurrences of adults who openly proclaim their dislike for children and their wish not to see them in public spaces. To be clear, I think everyone should have the right to decide against having children. But announcing that you dislike—I see “hate” tossed around with incredible ease—an entire class of people is mindblowing. What other class is more vulnerable, and of what other class is it acceptable to speak so cruelly?
Children are part of society. They’ve always been around and will always be around and it’s frustrating, actually, to see friendship dynamics that appear predicated on the assumption that no one will have children. If an adult “has no interest in being surrounded by children” in spaces open to the general public, they should move away from those children.
Any other outcome of this one-sided antagonism is to banish children and their parents (most likely mothers) back out of sight.
And after that, you can’t reasonably ask why you don’t see your mom friends anymore.