Under lockdown, society starts to fissure along all its old divisions. Haves versus have-nots, young versus old. And then the bitterest divide of all: those with children versus those without, two tribes that seem to regard each other with deepest incomprehension and fury under the common suffering of pandemic. But the kingdom of the parents and the kingdom of the non-parents have long been at odds, and the latter have some justice to their resentments.
For those who haven’t reproduced, there is infinite insult in a world where progeny are treated as proof of moral worth. Andrea Leadsom was clumsy enough to say it out loud during her 2016 campaign for the Tory leadership when she told the Times that being a mother gave her an edge over childless Theresa May because it meant she had “a very real stake in the future of our country”, but there are plenty who hold similar opinions without ever quite voicing them.
Being a parent supposedly gives you purpose, access to a love that makes other loves seem flimsy, is a statement of global optimism (why have children if you don’t think there’ll be a world for them to live in?), and an act of sublime selflessness.
Which leaves the non-parents implicitly adrift, with nothing to comfort them but their allegedly shallow version of human affection, their bitter pessimism and their selfishness — and, presumably, a powerful urge to point out that being a parent didn’t actually make Josef Fritzl a better person. The injury is compounded for those who would like to have had children but for whatever reason haven’t been able to.
In truth, the myth of parental satisfaction is at least half over-compensation. Being a parent is hard. You sacrifice your social life, your sleep, your disposable income, your once-reliable lack of contact with humans waste. Such great cost is more bearable if you can fool yourself that it’s purchased access to knowledge and goodness. But claims of individual illumination hide the fact that bringing up children is a collective enterprise. Lockdown has cut us all off from the collective. And so, the cracks begin to show.
Parents are tired, in a bone-deep, desperate way. Entertaining a small child all day with no nursery, childminder, grandparents or nanny to step in is exhausting — doubly so if you are trying to work from home at the same time. Older ones need homeschooling, and for every parent boasting about their artistic interpretation of the water cycle, there are a dozen whose efforts to explain long division or whatever have dissolved into tantrums (theirs, their children’s, probably both).
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