Utopia for the Modern Family

My thirteen year old is starting to get a handle on her online classes. When we started the year, I expected that both the course material, and the reality of signing in every day and keeping up with the class and the teacher, would be an uphill climb. As I said to her when we were both anxious and stressed on the first day of class, “what I am doing is flinging you into the deep end of an Olympic sized pool. It’s going to be awful. You’re going to feel like you’re drowning. You’re going to splutter and struggle and panic. But, because you do know how to swim, it’s going to be ok.” Or words to that effect, in many variations.

And, what I expected indeed came to pass. She was horrified by the amount of work. Heh heh heh. She was shocked to find that when she didn’t study, she couldn’t pass. None of it, or not very much of it, could be blamed on me. I was as helpful as possible, but in the end, she had to do the work and had to learn the material.

Part of the learning curve has been figuring out when she can study without interruption. She’s tried the evenings. She’s tried the afternoons. Finally she discovered that if she gets up at 6am and goes by herself into the dining room, she can do all her work before anyone else, save her father, is even up. No longer does she have to make decisions about whether to study or whether to play, she has already studied.

“It’s perfect” she keeps saying. Which is great, because her expectations of happiness are so significantly lowered, and her understanding of the kind of work that’s required for success has so increased, that she thinks that waking up really early and doing math is “perfect”. In some sense, I have arrived. I’ve done all I can do as a mother and I’m popping open the champagne. If I’ve prayed for anything….well, this is one of the things that I’ve prayed for.

Like so many, including myself, she is bewitched by the idea that if she could just arrive at the perfect arrangement of her time, all her troubles would go away. If I can just cram this task into this slot, then all the other tasks will miraculously fall into order and perfection. The liberal thinks that Utopia can be reached through the narrowing and managing of ideas (and how ironic is that), whereas I always believe (wrongly) that if I just develop the perfect schedule, and acquire the perfect handbag (but that’s another subject for another day), I will have attained to some better, happier plane.

The reason I’m circling around this is because the NYT has discovered, yet again, that the modern family is stressed. This is as novel and surprising as the Swedes discovering that if you put one foot in front of the other more swiftly, you’ll get where you are going faster. ‘What are we gonna do?’ all the researchers and social scientists are wailing. With men and women both working there’s not enough time, there’s not enough of anything. The baby needs more time, and the work needs more time, and the individual person needs more time. Let’s have paid leave for both partners when the baby comes. And better, more free, after school care. Also, let’s have the men recognize that they’re not pulling their weight with the housework. Here’s a terrible problem, let’s rearrange the time and the money and that will fix it and then we’ll all be happy.

But see, as I try to tell myself every day, it’s not the time and the money. Even when I eliminate all the stress from my life and have the perfect schedule, I’m still not happy because I’m the problem. Me, I’m the one that makes utopia impossible. And you. Not just me. Each individual is the problem. Systems can alleviate some stress and produce a temporary happiness and relief, but they are as a fleeting shadow. As soon as Elphine has to face a new class schedule, the perfect dream that she has now will be shattered. And the only reason she thinks it’s a perfect dream is because it’s better than what she had before. If you’re in rotten pain and stress and then one of the pains goes away, you believe yourself to be thrillingly happy.

The only way that the modern family can be relieved of its stress, I think, is for the modern family to hideously and tragically lower its expectations. You can’t have both people work full time and keep house and enjoy your baby. You’re not God. You’re not omnipresent. You can juggle it, you can make it work, but you can’t live a stress free happy life. I understand that nobody wants to do this, and that it’s not understood to be the American way, but without the concept of personal sacrifice, without lowering of the expectations of what everyone thinks should be happening to them, happiness isn’t going to overflow and transform the American family and landscape. Difficult choices have to be made. Do you want more money? More time with baby? More time for yourself?

Interestingly, in the NYT article, white college educated people registered the most stress. Other ethnicities are poorer, and are working hard, but the great burden of stress is being born by the white middle class. But isn’t it us, in the white, bourgeois, college educated, American insanity who have been come to believe that we can have it all? That the baby and the job and the ego of the man will not conflict? That it is only an arrangement of time and money that is the problem? You can’t tell me that an African American single mother is not stressed, but, unhappily, her expectations are generally so low, she is happy if she gets to put her feet up in the evening for a few minutes. The system doesn’t particularly help her, but she’s not expecting it to. Whereas the woman with her masters degree and her husband and baby in tow is exhausted both by the work, and by the insanity of trying to juggle all the components.

As the world becomes poorer, narrower, and more violent I think happiness is actually on the horizon. As the money and opportunity dry up, so will all the expectations of happiness, at which point, Joy might begin to creep in.