How odd, this wish not just to have children but to spend time around them for some reason.
My toddler daughter waddled over and held up a finger puppet shaped like a popular cartoon mouse.
“You be Mickey,” she said.
Sigh. You knew this time would come. You knew you’d have to let the child know about the ways of the world, but so soon? Sorry, hon; copyright provisions prohibit me from being Mickey. Now, you can argue that the copyright should have expired a long time ago, and the Disney company has no ethical claim on the character, but if Mickey entered the public domain, the carefully manicured image would be shredded in weeks by gleeful vandals.
“You be Mickey.”
Even if I could, what does it mean to be Mickey? To occupy his character entirely? Our own selves are a mix of what we know about ourselves and what we chose to push away; all we know about Mickey, really, are his outward manifestations. His actions, his adorably high-pitched words. Without knowing his inner self, one can only be a caricature, a shell, an automaton cobbled together from observation.
She paused and held up another finger puppet.
“I be Minnie.”
Ah hah. See? Gender is innate. She identified with Minnie without my prodding. I only wish she had handed me Donald, because every Dad can imitate Donald. If you cannot you will be shamed by other dads. No, they will not teach you; some things cannot be taught.
This was one incident in one day in a long, long string of housebound days, years ago. Snow outside heaped to the sills; if you didn’t have to go out, you didn’t, because of the bundling and the mittens and the freezing car seat and the shrieking wind. You can’t run across the parking lot because the collapsible stroller wasn’t made for icy conditions, and it skittered all over. So you stayed home and read stories and watched Elmo and tried to slip some learning in their malleable minds. One day in a few thousand.
I thought we were happy, but in retrospect it was a colossal waste. I should have been in an office making money.
Lots of money. Wonderful heaping stacks of lolly. I have only memories of being a stay-at-home dad, and of course whatever impact it had on my child, but really: Wouldn’t I have been happier making money? The president thinks so. A few days ago, he was opining on the composition of the family and the workforce — you know, the usual constitutionally enumerated duties — and he said something quite telling:
“Sometimes, someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result,” he said. “That’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”
Hmm. Well. It’s possible that he longed to say something else: “In the future, citizens will gestate in enormous communal tanks, then be extracted after nine months for insertion into individual pods that pass a nutritious slurry through a catheter while the telescreens display alternating tableaus of workers, May Day parades, and the brave boot of the proletariat stepping on the scurrying hordes of capitalist rats!” He knew this would go down poorly, although what the hell, the way this election is going, Go for broke, man. No, not wise; keep the mask on tight. So . . . something about women making more money.
The scenario above assumes he is a doctrinaire enemy of the family structure who realizes that separating the child from the horrid deprivations of the nuclear unit and placing her in communal environments is essential to remaking society. Probably not his way of thinking, and besides: That sort of fundamental transformation takes work, and he’s just not into heavy lifting. He’s more the sort to have read about stuff like that in college, and thinking it was kinda out there, and then getting himself elected to the committee to bring the author to campus so he could introduce her.
It is tempting to say that this exposes the Left’s hypocrisy on choice, but again, he probably didn’t know exactly what he was saying. But if he did — if this line actually represents his thinking on the subject — then, sure, we have a familiar refrain: Choice is important only if you make a certain choice. If people choose the wrong things, it’s for one of two reasons.
A) They are women who stay home because they are under the thrall of glowering men who believe Jesus personally escorted to hell the fashion designer responsible for women’s slacks, and while these women might seem to be pitiable, they actually laugh when you suggest they would be more fulfilled working in a mortgage office collating papers for the 7:45 a.m. signing than taking care of children. They laugh. It’s like they never knew the pleasures of cleaning out all your office coffee mugs and finally getting the stains out.
B) They are delusional women who stay at home because they have internalized the messages beamed into their brains by an enormous phallic tower in the geographical center of the country, telling them not just to have children but to feel as though they should be around them for some reason.
If the president had said, “We want to make all choices available for women, so the individual may chose the path best open to her,” everyone would have nodded and yawned, knowing it was a pitch for more magic federal dollars for day care. Something along the Exalted Enlightened European model, where the state requires employers to provide a year of paid maternity leave: That bonding time is so incredibly important. And the state mandates free child care, because after a year, whatever.
That’s probably what he meant. But even so: What if someone decides to stay home for five years and then reenter the workplace and finds that people with more experience make more money? Unless the administration is prepared to draft the Equal Pay for Less Experience Act, preferably named after someone who was martyred for reentering the workforce and discovering that her area of expertise was obliterated by a technological shift, that’s life.
The ideal seems to be this: Pop ’em out, bond a bit, then get back to the Office, the Most Rewarding Place on Earth. Whether women leave their children with someone else because taxes and wage stagnation require two earners is irrelevant; a woman’s place is in the cubicle, whether she knows it or not. Maybe it’s just my own loathing of offices or the wonderful life I had as a stay-at-home dad, but I don’t get it. Those early years are ineffably precious. You have to be there to know it. Otherwise it’s like leaving the movie Titanic after the ship sails and telling someone to text you when they rescue the heroine. It means more to be there. Someday — some day soon — they clamber on the yellow bus and head off out of your arms. You know it’s the start of the attenuated goodbye that will be a thickening thread, winding through your next decade. It’s entirely possible my daughter will remember nothing of our first decade together except “he always met the bus,” but even that says something about parental constancy and fatherly involvement.
But all this just overthinks a lazy line intended to show that the president is on the right side of the War on Women. To reassure a certain portion of the base that if they ever do have children, his party will be there, helping them find someone to take the tiresome things off their hands so they can get back to the real meaning of life, making more money.
“Do you know how you sound?” is a line my daughter uses in jest with friends when they’re just talking nonsense. Did the president know how he sounded? Oh, of course. Great! Brilliant as usual. Why do you ask?
— James Lileks is a columnist for National Review Online.