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Monday, February 14, 2005

I always knew this
Posted by Jill | 7:02 AM

All the talk of "family values" we're enduring now presupposes a certain kind of family: straight, white, two heterosexual parents, and two or three children. The pressures towards this kind of life are enormous. People I know who have one child report pressure to have another; people with two report pressure to have three. Women whose biological clocks are ticking often make disastrous choices in partners. Couples with fertility problems are spending hundreds of thousands of both their own and insurance dollars in often futile efforts to conceive.

Then, once the kids come, the keeping up with the Joneses starts in earnest -- the house with more bathrooms than bedrooms, so each kid, adult, and guest can have a private bathroom. The relentless parade of organized sports, karate classes, dance lessons, scouts, play-dates...God forbid a kid should have an afternoon to just play. And if they do get such an afternoon to, say, take a bicycle ride, the kid has to dress up in full body armor before leaving the house.

I always knew I didn't want children, and I was lucky enough to find someone who also didn't want them. And after just shy of 20 years together, we still enjoy each other's company....probably because we still have it.

An op-ed piece in today's New York Times reports that the "everything for the children" obsession is taking its toll on marriages:

If you flip through the magazines aimed at moms this month, you'd be hard pressed to find much talk of romance, unless you count all the articles on modern marriage's lack of romance, which are legion: Working Mother pleads, "Make Time for Your Valentine." Good Housekeeping insists, "Men can be romantic." Child magazine offers tips on "Staying Lovers While Raising Kids." And Parents, acknowledging that marriage with children often feels "about as romantic as changing a dirty diaper," offers advice for getting "back in the groove," like establishing "no-sex nights." (Absence makes the heart grow fonder?)

In many marriages, erotic love has been supplanted by what The New Yorker once called "the eros of parenthood." Up to 20 percent of couples now report having sex no more than 10 times a year, qualifying them for what the experts call "sexless marriages." Many mothers freely admit to preferring their children's touch to their husband's, without regret or shame.

Where did our love go? Look no further than the adorable little girl on the cover of this month's Parents, clutching a huge, red-sequined heart in her chubby little hands. According to a recent report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, children are a "growing impediment" to a happy marriage.

That's a sobering thought. And it raises an important question: Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?

It may well be. After all, in an era when Parents magazine can suggest, in its love issue, a "Second Honeymoon with Kids" under the rubric "Fun Time," it's clear that something is very much askew. In many households, the distinctions between married life and family life have all but disappeared.

With the widespread acceptance of "attachment parenting" - family beds, long-term breast feeding and all the rest - the physical boundaries between parents and children have worn away. Marital romance has dried up. Real intimacy has gone the way of bottle-feeding and playpens. In fact, the whole ideal of marriage as a union of soul mates, friends and lovers that's as essential to a happy family life as, say, unconditional love for the children, has taken a direct hit. And in its place has come the reality of a utilitarian relationship dedicated to staying afloat financially and child-rearing of a sort we tend to associate with frontier marriages, arranged marriages, marriages of convenience - marriages far removed, in time and place, from our lives, our parents' lives and even our grandparents' lives.

Some would say that's not a bad thing. After all, hard work and commitment are much better indicators of marital stability than are passion and that fickle thing, romantic love. The divorce rate is slightly down, to about 50 percent from a high of 52 percent in the early 1980's. Virtually no one believes anymore that the potential "self-fulfillment" that might come from leaving a less-than-satisfying marriage could in any way outweigh the harm that divorce does to children. Indeed, for many couples these days, staying married is not so much the definitive sign of their love for each other but the ultimate expression of their love for their children.

But does this virtuous child-centeredness equal family happiness? Apparently not. For although the divorce rate has gone down, the percentage of couples saying they're in less-than-happy marriages has gone up. According to the National Marriage Project, fewer children are growing up with happily married parents today than a generation ago. From 1973 to 1976, 51 percent of children under the age of 18 were living in a household in which the parents' marriage was rated as "very happy," the study found. From 1997 to 2002, only 37 percent were so fortunate.


Now, as someone who came from a "broken home" that emerged after the end of a profoundly unhappy marriage, I think the "harm" that comes to children of such homes after divorce is highly overstated. Believe me, when you're twelve, the quiet of a relieved parent is far preferable to sitting, cringing, in the basement while screaming is going on above your head. My parents' split was the best thing that could have happened to me.

But let's talk instead about your average garden-variety child-centered straight marriage in which one partner, usually the man, either feels or is completely neglected after the kids come. Is this really necessary? Are kids really better off in a home where they have nonstop activities, and Mom drives the biggest SUV on the block? Do they even NOTICE the big curving staircase and the crystal chandelier in the front foyer -- the one as big as a Buick -- the foyer that exists SOLELY for the purpose of Mom imagining her kid coming down the stairs in her wedding gown FOR ONE DAY? Is a kid who has the latest X-Box games and 47 planned activities, but sees his parents behave as little more than strangers better off than the one who maybe lives in a smaller house, has less STUFF and fewer planned activities -- but whose parents still talk to each other?

There's much talk of marriage these days, but is marriage really what we revere? Or is it simply that we revere a structure in which children can be raised with as much material goods as possible? If women are going to make their husbands superfluous once the kids come, why marry at all? The technology is there so that women can have this eroticized relationship with their kids without men. I mean hell, if you're not going to have some kind of a relationship with the father of your children, what's the point?
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