Hipper-than-thou Eliza Gonzalez Clark has an article over at the San Franciso chronicle lamenting some of her friends’ lifestyle decisions. More specifically, she’s pissed that they’re now changing diapers instead of making out with strangers in club parking lots. Or something like that. Regardless, Clark wants you to know that she is Punk. Rawk. And they are not, because they gave birth. Or something like that.
Amanda at Pandagon has some good commentary on how drivel like this plays into stereotypes about those who don’t want children, and generally just makes the deliberately childless look bad. I agree. While Clark’s piece nicks the surface of what could be interesting commentary about the fetisization of motherhood, or why modern parents (men and women) fall into the trap of sacrificing their own lives for their children’s, what it ends up amounting to is a lot of whining about why her friend won’t put on a mini-skirt and go out looking for men with her anymore …
One of the commenters at Pandagon suggested that the article was really “a lament of having her friend buy into the Woman==Mommy ideal so much that she had erased all of her pre-baby interests and personality.”
Perhaps. But that’s not what Clark says. Instead, she sticks to surface indications of her friend’s descent from rocker chick to desperate housewife (oh no! not the suburbs! not diapers!)
I’msingle, childfree, relatively young, and still in (graduate) school. I have a friend back home who recently got married and had a kid, and I rarely ever call him anymore when i’m in town. However, that’s more a function of the fact that all he and I ever did together was go out and get wasted and do massive amounts of drugs, which, while still plausible with my current lifestyle, is kind of incompatible with his.
You have friends that are your friends because you like to go out to concerts and get wasted and do drugs and, if you’re Clark, “make out with bad boys” together. And you have friends that are friends because you share their life values and attitudes, enjoy them as a person, care about them, care about what’s going on in their life, enjoy their perspective on your life, etc. etc. In the latter case, it really shouldn’t matter what stage of life you are at and your friend is at, you’re still gonna be friends because you appreciate who they are. In the former case, lifestyle changes make a big difference, because your friendship is not based on who they are but what you do together.
Point of this long rambly-ness is: if Clark feels her friendship was somehow destroyed by her friend’s decision to have a child, get married, and stop spending time moshing with skinheads, they probably weren’t really friends on that sort of deeper level to begin with anyway … And it’s kind of disingenuous to turn that into a larger critique of having or not having children …
First time reader and commenter; I followed your comment from Pandagon, Elyzabethe.
I’m a single, early 30’s guy trying to decide what to do for a Ph.D. while I work as a research consultant at a public university. I’m at the tail end of that period of my life where most of my friends in the five year age range around my age are either having kids or having second or third kids.
Because of my job’s context, I have a rare perch where I know folks who are in their early to mid 20s who are just finishing undergrad degrees and are brimming with peer-reinforced untested defiance as well as having friends who are in their late 20s and early 30s who have been married for a few years and who, in most cases, either have kids or are starting to have kids. I get to see both sides of the fence at once when it comes to The Great Sellout Debate.
I appreciated your comment because I think it gets at what, in my experience, is the larger issue in TGSD: People choose to have children (at least until the fundamentalists have their way). There’s a choice being made before the children are born and therefore it’s not the children that change people; it’s the people who change.
I’ve had lots of friends over the years, and I’m still friends with most of the people I knew before they got married and had kids. We’re not as close as we once were, but that’s all part of our lives and interests changing. I lost touch with or quit trying to keep in touch with far more people who were single at the time than people who went from being single to being married or people who went from being married to being married with kids.
Why? Like you and your friend who were friends in a given context, the change in that context is what led us to drift away from one another, not getting married or having kids.
I think it’s simply easier emotionally and mentally for most folks to chalk up getting married or having kids to being the source of change rather than the result of change.