The Micro and the Macro

I've been cleaning old files off my computer, forgotten and outdated stuff, and found this little essay of mine. It's from four years ago and I only vaguely remember writing it. I suppose it deals with issues I'd rather forget.

The Micro and the Macro

My darling daughter, my only child, moved out yesterday to live with her boyfriend. She’s barely eighteen. On top of all the worries and concerns—“Will she be okay? She’s really so inexperienced and not street-wise enough.”—there are the quiet questions. As so many before me have asked, “Where did the time go? How did she grow up so quickly?”

There are other questions, too. Did she leave because we were at each other’s throats, constantly battling for control on the one hand, freedom on the other? Where did I lose confidence in knowing what to do, how to do it, and know that this was not what I had expected after 18 years of motherhood?

And back to that sad, echoing question: “Where did the time go? Where was I while this was happening?”

I was at work, or commuting to work. Or commuting back home. One summer evening, soon after moving to the suburbs and doubling my commute time to two hours each way, I was sitting in the backyard with my toddler daughter. We were admiring our flourishing vegetable garden and she asked me when I’d be home the next day. I tried to make the miserable facts poetic: “I’ll be home when the fireflies come out.” That sounded much better than, “I’ll be home when it’s almost dark, after leaving the house before you’re awake.”

Then came the years that I’d get calls at work. She’d be crying, or wanting, or sick, and what could I do? I was 50 miles away. So I’d talk and soothe as much as I could, and give instructions to the babysitter, and stew at my desk.

I have a message for women: You can’t have it all—at least not the way modern American society is structured in its beliefs, values and priorities.

Lest anyone think I am advocating a return to the days of “women, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen,” please let me state that my feminist principles are strong. But this isn’t about feminism, or maternalism, or the proper role of women in society.

This is about what our society is doing to destroy families, mothers, fathers, children and the entire extended clans of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins.

For most of human history, children knew what their parents did each day. Their parents worked in the fields, or hunted, or made useful things to sell, or performed services that people needed, like getting the horse shod. The children often helped, and so became accomplished and responsible as well. Mom and Dad were rarely, if ever, far away, and grandparents, aunts, cousins, the extended family were on hand as well.

Now we have “Bring Our Daughters/Sons to Work Day.” One day a year to try to make the unimportant and unintelligible seem like a good enough excuse to keep Mommy away from home for so much of the time. What will they put on my epitaph? “Here she lies, She filled a filing cabinet for MegaCorp Inc.”

Why do we do it? For some of us, it’s what we want to do, what we’ve trained to do, and we love the work. For most of us, I believe, it’s because we must. We need the money to pay for things, for mortgages, for cars, for college educations, for insurance, for food, for toys and expensive amusements for the children we’ve left each day. For too many, one income isn’t enough, even for the necessities.

So we travel long distances to jobs that may or may not be interesting, but these jobs are a mystery to our children, who resent how the job has robbed them of parents. It’s not just Mommy, it’s Daddy as well. When we were a nation of small farmers and shopkeepers and artisans, we were around to see our children grow up. And they could see us, and know we were there for them. A cellphone doesn’t replace that. And please spare me the nonsense about “quality time vs. quantity time.” Children want and need quantity.

The problem, as I’ve come to see it, is the complete package of Western industrialized capitalism. Equilibrium is abhorred in this system. It must be ever-growing, ever more consuming. We strive as a society for a larger GDP year over year. In order to accomplish that, we must be ever more productive, working ever harder. And all that production must be consumed, so we are trained to buy new, buy more, buy larger, and work ever longer to keep that engine of commerce, production, capital and profit running. Technology has been the midwife of this swelling burden. For every benefit that technology has wrought, it has bound us tighter to the treadmill.

Please don’t turn away now, convinced I’m a Luddite of the most ignorant sort, or a Commie-pinko throwback to the commune movement of the Sixties. I’m just calling it as I see it. I don’t deny my own personal responsibility for the choices I made, nor do I blame the feminists, the economists, or any of the salesmen for the American Way of Life that we’ve heard daily since mass media entered the television age.

But I wish I’d known then what I know now—that the time with my precious daughter would be so short, and hers with me, and that I would be squandering way too much of it just trying to give her what I thought she needed. It wasn’t what she needed after all, and I’m left asking, “Where did the time go?”

There’s a larger lesson in this, as well. As a society, as a species, we can’t keep squandering the time we have on this earth to make everything bigger, better, more powerful or more consuming. It’s not what we need, nor what the earth needs. Something has to change, and change soon, because this arrangement can’t last forever. Or we’ll all be asking, “Where did the time go?”