Previously, my monthly newsletter had a section called "Your Monthly Baby" where I showcased a picture of my growing son. Now that he is not a baby, I write something about parenting instead, which I am posting retroactively here now. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.
As a parent, you pretty much always lag behind in your understanding of how to address any new stage of development. Everything that happens (the first no, the first tantrum, the first time your toddler says "leave me alone, Mommy"--devastating--or reveals that this whole time, he has learned with perfect, agonizing clarity how to use the word "fuck" in context) is startling, because you're completely unprepared. But sometimes this is a wonderful thing, because sometimes you don't realize how much your child understands about the world until they suddenly reveal it to you.
A very magical thing my son does is thank people. Not in that he says "thank you" (obviously that's just manners and I've made a concerted effort to teach those) but because, without prompting, he will specify exactly what he's thankful for. Bear in mind, my son started talking quite late, so a lot of the time I'm still more surprised than I should be that he's putting together full sentences. But I get truly bowled over whenever I simply tell him to say bye to someone as we're leaving, and he interprets that with additional augmentation: "Bye-bye, thank you Miss Wendy for my haircut," or "Bye new friends, thank you for playing with me." This is pretty mind-blowing to me, because I don't think I ever actually taught him that part--the complex part of gratitude, where you can identify what someone has done for you and acknowledge them openly for it.
I find gratitude to be a very interesting concept these days. I mentioned a bit ago that a lot of my recent thinking has been influenced by/occurred in tandem with MONOCULTURE: HOW ONE STORY IS CHANGING EVERYTHING by F.S. Michaels, which posits that our current cultural story is defined by the economy (this is the underlying subject matter for much of my work, including the Atlas trilogy), as opposed to, say, religion. We are not in a particularly religious age, and to my observation, it's affecting the way progressive-identifying parents do the work of child-rearing. Relatedly, I came across a post somewhere about how "gratitude," in the context of woo-woo mindfulness, is quite a recent concept--i.e., gratitude as something we owe to other people. In the religious story of culture, the foundational tenet is typically The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you think about it that way, gratitude is quite a different thing. It's an extra step, because if we simply treated people how we want to be treated, then gratitude as an a la carte add-on would not be necessary. Instead, compassion would be what we owe to each other, and I have to admit I find that to be a more appealing way to live.
The demand to "be grateful" leads to a lot of fatigue, especially in parenting. Or maybe I should say, it makes it harder, as MONOCULTURE suggests, to exist in a community where everything we do is calibrated by how far above and beyond an action is from an individualized mindset rather than simply part of a baseline humanity. I do feel that community has fallen away in general--I always thought that parenting, motherhood, etc., these ultimate community-driven activities would offer me community IRL; that naturally there would be some kinship with other people because we're sharing the same space and experience. But in reality, the places people used to find community were neighborhoods (see also: the abysmal housing market, What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Street), the workplace (which I don't have, and many remote workers don't--not to criticize this in a time of plague! it's simply a fact), and of course places like church, which I no longer attend due to overarching mistrust in generalized institutional rot. Even schools as communities are threatened (The Unequal Effects of School Closings as far-right doctrines, in re the ideals of the "traditional" insular home, proliferate; Is Homeschooling Isolating Us Too Much?).
What do we owe to each other?
This is not an informed essay in any sense; this is just a little bit of space about my experience parenting my toddler and I'm literally typing this out while running late for something else. I'm not trying to answer this question--rather, I'm asking it because I think we all should be asking it. Really, all I want to say is that I'm grateful (upside-down smiley of distress) that my son is willing and able to recognize what other people do for him, and that he chooses to mirror that naturally. Of course, he doesn't yet know that I pay for his haircuts or his daycare fees.
I want to believe a different monoculture is coming, that the fact that we can see the pitfalls of this one--the one that presumes all people are individualistic, self-motivated, and incapable of satisfaction--means something new will take its place. So, should it be the expectation of gratitude? Or the understanding of the world as something we exist in, and therefore have an obligation to mutually protect?