It Runs in the Family (8 page)

“No,” she said, her lovely little face wrinkled with concentration and confusion.

“Don’t worry about it. Sometimes I just need to talk. I am sorry. Do you forgive me?”

“Yes,” she said simply and emphatically. I am a lucky stepmom. Then she told me that during sharing circle at school she said that her chore was putting her clothes away, but that one boy said his chore was watching TV. We laughed together at that.

Once they were off to soccer, I tried to reflect on how to become a better parent. I needed to have patience with my kids and myself, and learn not to take things personally. Rosena was not being
disobedient
, she was being distracted. I need to work on creating a household culture of gratitude and appreciation through modeling that with Patrick. I also need to understand that my maternal habits come from my own upbringing, my role as a daughter and as an eldest sibling. I also know that I am going to have to say I am sorry again and again and again—to Seamus, to Rosena, to Patrick, and to myself.

The biggest lesson I took from this, however, is that you don’t have to call your kids names, or hit them, to be violent. Blame, retribution, shock tactics, yelling, disproportionate consequences, diffused anger, misplaced anger, and scary, out-of-control anger are all just as bad. In both of these cases, I felt like I did violence to my kids. I used my power against them instead of using my size to protect and educate them.

It comforts me a little to realize that not everything happens all at once, that life is long, that we are all growing and changing every day and that I can’t do it all on my own. I also realize that Patrick’s help is essential, as is asking each other for help. I could do a much better job of realizing that I can’t do this all on my own.

Since Seamus was born, I have hurt my back three times. Three times Patrick stayed home from work for as long as he could and then arranged for his parents and sister and brother-in-law to come and hang out with Seamus. They did things like lift him into his high chair or changing table and carry him up the stairs. I could not do any of that on my own.

It was hard—hard to admit that I needed help, hard to allow myself to be helped, hard to see other people, even family, doing what I thought I should be doing. But it was also an important lesson every mother needs to learn at some point: I am not the only one who can take care of Seamus. He needs and loves other people, and that is a good thing.

Seamus and I traveled to Baltimore once on the train before Christmas. While I was in the bathroom at the train station in Connecticut, Patrick asked a young preppy guy to help me with my bags because he couldn’t stay with us until the train got there. When the train was announced, this guy came over to me, picked up my suitcase, and followed me to the train. Turns out he went to Connecticut College, was a business major, and was hoping to get a job at Lockheed Martin upon graduation. His dad worked there. I had lots to say about that, but it is hard to lecture someone about the merchants of Death when they are carrying all your bags.

At every juncture of that trip (and the many others I have been on), people asked if I needed help. I mostly said no, even when their help would have made getting from point A to point B easier. Do I want to sit down? No thanks. Why? Why say no? What am I trying to prove?

On an airplane a year ago, I carried Seamus to the back when I could no longer ignore nature’s call. I did not have a plan. “Do you want me hold him while you go?” the flight attendant asked. “Yes please! Thank you!” I do need help. I can’t get everything done that I want to get done.

It would be different if I had a job to return to—finding childcare would have been automatic, a necessity, a non-issue. It would have happened months ago—most women are lucky to get three months maternity leave before they have to go back to work—and it would have cost a lot. A 2013 Census Bureau report found that childcare costs have more than doubled since 1985. The average family with a working mother and a child under fifteen pays $143 a week for childcare, a whopping $7,400 a year. Despite these sharp increases in costs, the wages for most childcare workers have not gone up. The report also found that because childcare costs are so high, kids are spending more time unsupervised. Not just teenagers, but even five- to eleven-year-olds. I don’t have a job, but I do have commitments. So far, I have mostly done my work during Seamus’s naps, or on walks, or while Seamus has been engrossed in the serious work of being a baby—moving blocks from one place to another, pulling books off the shelves, pulling all of his pants out of the drawer, playing with the Velcro on his diaper until it fails and he is diaper-free.

But there are times when that doesn’t work and I can’t just say that the baby ate my homework. Nevertheless, we can’t pay $143 a week for daycare so that I can be a good board member at the War Resisters League.

There are lots of options out there that don’t require $143 a week. Patrick and I both played in babysitting cooperatives when we were little, where parents took turns watching each other’s kids. We are doing a date night kid pile with two other couples. One family hosts and the two other couples drop off kids and have a few hours of grown-up time. The kids love the critical-mass playtime and the hosting parents just roll with the chaos for a few hours, dreaming about the two dates they are earning in the process. It is the beginning of creating something new, free, and community-building.

Back when I lived in Brooklyn, I commuted to work on my bike. Once I passed my mid-twenties, I spent a lot of that time imagining how little my life would change when I had a baby. I was living in Red Hook, a neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying but still quite poor. I imagined myself riding the same route, the same bike, with a baby somehow safely stacked on top. I was already carrying a lot of stuff with me—work clothes, gym clothes, books, lunch. I could cram diapers, fresh outfits, toys, and all the other things that a baby needs into my overflowing panniers. As I cycled and imagined, I saw toddlers and little kids riding with their parents, mostly European-style in front, mostly with their dads.

Sitting in my office, typing away, answering calls, I would imagine where I would put the baby bassinet and bouncy chair. I worked in SoHo for the Arms and Security Initiative at the time, a progressive think tank where I did research, writing, and resource development about military issues. My office was just my boss and me. In my imagination, my future infant would sleep in the bassinet, and then I would nurse him or her, and then they would play in the bouncy chair while I came up with new ways to argue for a common-sense foreign policy in which the use of force was a last resort. “Perfect,” I thought. “Totally doable.”

At the time I was living in a series of dingy, neglected, periodically rat-infested apartments with a partner who worked incredibly long hours during the week and large portions of every weekend, and who was constitutionally unsuited for—and adamantly uninterested in—fatherhood. We struggled financially despite having good incomes. Despite all of this, I saw a baby fitting seamlessly into our lives. It wasn’t that I wanted to “have it all” in an ambitious, striving kind of way. It was that I assumed that I could have a child—children even—without my life changing at all.

At some level, it is not so strange that I should think kids could seamlessly integrate with my life. That is how my parents dealt with the surprise of children. Pack the bottle and keep on going to meetings, demonstrations, and to the courthouse. All our family photos from our early years are pictures snapped at demonstrations. There are no portraits taken against fall foliage backdrops at Sears, there are no photographs where we all cozy up near the Christmas tree with mugs of steaming cocoa in ironically awful seasonal sweaters. We did not go to Disney World or water parks or the zoo or baseball games or on vacation. The Berrigans didn’t do stuff like that. We resisted.

Here is how my birth was announced in my parents’ book
The Time’s Discipline
:

Throughout Lent of that year, [we] mounted a series of direct actions connecting the war in Indochina with North America’s support of tyrants abroad and with the war against the poor at home. [Chilean president Salvador] Allende had been assassinated with CIA and NSA support. This we exposed in the only demonstration held at NSA headquarters. Holy Week brought the first action in which actors faced serious consequences (longer jail terms) at the Vietnamese Overseas Procurement Office. Holy Week also brought the birth of Frida Berrigan, our first daughter
.

Here is what they say about Jerry: “The ouster of American troops from Indochina in April 1975 coincided with the birth of our son, Jerome, and with the initiation of our community’s anti-nuclear work.”

It is not that our parents were not overjoyed that we burst onto the scene. But as they celebrated, they bundled us up in the back of the old Volvo sedan and kept on going. As Dad wrote, it is

for the love of children that community gathers its witness again to speak publically of truth, sanity, and compassion against a public scarred by a militarist spirit, and a state mad with corruption and blood lust. Liz and I have pain, inconvenience [when in jail and away from the kids]. But what is it next to the pain of those in the Ukraine or Armenia or Indonesia or El Salvador or wherever the superpowers grind their iron heels?

The fact that I was raised on the picket lines is not the only reason I felt compelled to shoehorn kids into my frenetic and ungrounded New York City life. Like most women, I believed that the older I got, the harder it would be to have children. No wonder I fantasized about baby-bike commuting and a new life that did not upend my old one. I was afraid to wait.

An article written by Jean Twenge in the July/August 2013 issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
challenges the prevailing wisdom on declining fertility:

The widely cited statistic that one in three women ages 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, for instance, is based on an article published in 2004 in the journal
Human Reproduction
. Rarely mentioned is the source of the data: French birth records from 1670 to 1830. The chance of remaining childless—30 percent—was also calculated based on historical populations
.

In the article she talks about how “baby panic” leads women to have babies with the wrong guy, to turn down career opportunities, and to have kids before they are emotionally ready. And all this worry is “based on a few statistics about women who resided in thatched-roof huts and never saw a light bulb.”

In a recent study of modern women, Twenge goes onto note, “the difference in pregnancy rates at age 28 versus 37 is only about 4 percentage points. Fertility does decrease with age, but the decline is not steep enough to keep the vast majority of women in their late-thirties from having a child.”

Sure enough, when the time and the man were right, I got pregnant right on schedule—four months after our wedding. And a month and a half before I turned forty, we had another one!

Commuting five miles by bike with an infant in New York City? I am sure someone does it. My hat is off to them, but I was barely brave enough to bike solo around the city, and I had my fair share of scrapes and scary moments and two relatively serious accidents. Seamus was six months old before I got used to driving with him in the car. And I still don’t like it. I would rather walk: no matter how hot the weather and how heavy the kid—nothing about getting a baby in and out of a car (or a bike seat) is easy.

When Seamus was an infant, I could—if I planned everything just right—type for twenty or thirty minutes at a stretch while he nursed and slept. Through diligent time management and with lots of support and flexible deadlines, I managed to write my column for
Waging Nonviolence
more often than not. But I did it in the comfort of my own home, spread out over three rooms, wearing sweatpants and completely on my own schedule. I never stopped to consider what would have happened when my imaginary New York baby developed a mind of his own, an appetite for power cords, and a very loud voice. When Seamus was a year old he barely napped and didn’t spend all that much time alone. Writing involved a lot of wrestling the pen, the mouse, the paper, the keyboard out of his hands, being a skillful distractor, and making use of the early-morning and late-night hours.

Babies do not fit neatly into our lives; they turn our lives upside down and insist that we do everything differently. The challenge is to see that as a gift, an opportunity, and a new beginning.