Kim Brooks - Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

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For my children

In March of 2011, a person I didnt know, and would never meet, tried to have me arrested for what she viewed as criminally irresponsible parenting. The consequences of that action played out slowly over the course of two years, and ultimately motivated me to begin writing about the experience, and about the broader subjects of parenthood and fear. To learn about these subjects and their points of intersection, I spoke to other parents, psychologists, social workers, historians, sociologists, legal experts, parenting rights advocates, safety advocates, medical professionals, and writers. My goal in initiating these discussions was not to justify my actions or to establish myself as a parenting expert. My goal was not to gauge my own success as a mother, or to arrive at any consensus about how much freedom parents should be allowed in the choices they make for their children, or how much independence children need to thrive. My goal, in fact, was not to provide any particular answers at all but, rather, to pose questions that were not being asked with the frequency or urgency they deserved.

Why, I wanted to find out, have our notions of what it means to both be a good parent and to keep a child safe changed so radically in the course of a generation? In what ways do these changes impact the lives of parents, children, and society at large? And what, in the end, does the rise of fearful parenting tell us about our children, our communities, and ourselves?

Inevitably, some will argue that my recollections of anxious motherhood, the story of what happened to me, and the path of inquiry down which it led me are not representative, or that they represent only one womans unique experience. They may argue that my experience of motherhood would not have been what it was if I had had more money or less, a more high-powered career or no career at all, a more supportive network of extended kin, a different group of friends and neighbors; or if I were a single mother, a woman of color, an older or younger mother, a mother who needed, wanted, and expected something more or less from motherhood. Id like to concede the point from the start. Id argue only that the subjectivity of one womans or, specifically, of one mothers experience does not render it irrelevant any more than the subjectivity of one soldiers experience, or one lovers experience, or one criticsor any of the individual experiences more commonly deemed suitable for serious discourse.

This problem of diminishing or demeaning womens experiences by challenging their universalityto insist that if you cant speak for everyone then you cant speak for anyonereminds me of a recent encounter I had during a panel discussion on motherhood and creativity. During the question-and-answer portion, a woman in the audience raised her hand, then made an incisive and thoughtful remark about the multitude of practical and artistic challenges mothers face as writers. She followed up her comment by adding that she wasnt any sort of expert but just a mom. The idea that being just a mom was both an admission of a form of amateurism and a justification for disregarding a personand all of her experiences, observations, knowledge, and so onsaddened and infuriated me. There is an extended musing about the inherent problems of perspective in Doris Lessings masterpiece The Golden Notebook that I wanted to share with her. Ill share it with you (and, if shes reading this, that so-much-more-than-just-a-mom) now:

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Nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely ones own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotionsand your extraordinary and remarkable ideascant be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of subjectivity, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvelous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience into something much larger; growing up is after all only the understanding that ones unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

* * *

With this in mind, I share with you the story of the day I left my son in the car and the journey I embarked on in its aftermath. It is just my story. But it belongs to you as wellas yours belongs to me.

You had a Dame that lovd you well,

That did what could be done for young

And nurst you up till you were strong

And fore she once would let you fly

She shewd you joy and misery,

Taught what was good, and what was ill,

What would save life, and what would kill.

Thus gone, amongst you I may live,

And dead, yet speak and counsel give.

Farewell, my birds, farewell, adieu,

I happy am, if well with you.

ANNE BRADSTREET, IN REFERENCE TO HER CHILDREN, 23 JUNE 1659

In his late sixties, Herman Melville took a four-year-old granddaughter to the park and then forgot her there.

DAVID MARKSON, READERS BLOCK

Oh, honey, youre not the worlds worst mother. What about that freezer lady in Georgia?

HOMER SIMPSON

It happened in the parking lot of a strip mall during the first week of March 2011, my last morning in Virginia, at the end of a visit with my parents. The day it happened was no different from any other: I was nervous, and I was running late.

I was thirty-three at the timea young mother, a frazzled woman, an underemployed writer, a mostly stay-at-home mom, secretly wishing I was something more, something else. I had a husband, a son, a daughter, and a dog. We lived together in a town house in Chicago. But all of this happened in Virginia, in the rural-suburban community south of Richmond where Id spent most of the first eighteen years of my life. Id taken my children there to visit my parents for the week, and now the week was over. Back to Chicago. Back to life.

The morning it happened, I was packing and planning. Packing is utterly transformed by becoming a parent. There had been a time when packing had been fun and easy. For an entire summer in Israel, Id once packed nothing but sundresses, a pair of Birkenstocks, a few Edith Wharton novels, and a package of oral contraceptives. For a semester in France, Id packed a few pairs of jeans, black shirts, an English-French dictionary, and an asthma inhaler in case I decided to take up smoking. When my husband and I traveled in the days before having children, we mostly packed books. Travel was for reading, walking, eating, seeing. It was for sex and sleeping in. I remember once being out at dinner with a friend who said, I have to go home early to pack. Id wondered what she meant. Dont you just open up your suitcase and throw some shit in? Id asked. That was how I thought about packing until the age of twenty-nine. Then something changed: The something was parenthood. When you have small children, there are no vacations; there are now only trips. When you have small children, packing is a challenge, a project, an ordealor if youre me, and you spend hours thinking about every worst-case scenario and how you might prevent it and what you might need if it comes to pass, a destination as exotic as Massachusetts seems impossibly inhospitable simply by virtue of not being the place where you have all of your shit.