Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.
My boyfriend and I had just hired a nanny to spend three days a week caring for our baby, to do a kind of work that I’d been shocked to find intimately rewarding but also far harder than anything I’d ever tried to do for eight hours straight. We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a... See more
People shying away from having babies because they heard that it’s so hard are making one of those category errors that are inescapable in this rotten decade in this awful century: they think that hard is the opposite of good.
I have heard tales of creative rushes during the postpartum period, of women who ride the energy of human creation to power other creative acts. It is a beautiful idea, and one I would of course hope to experience. Make a human AND have a personal creative renaissance!? Yes, please. But alas, this is very, very far from my current state of affairs,... See more
on mothering, productivity, and caring for an infant
Wow, what a beautiful framing. Some people feel called to build families, others feel called to build ideas. They're not mutually exclusive, of course, but they're both ways to spread parts of ourselves:
"My religious cousin, who is the same age as I am, she has six kids. And I have six books. Maybe there is no great... See more