Life rationing
I sat on the grass across from a man who looked like the
perfect American. Dark blond hair, light eyes, and shorts that were faded just
so, as if there was some professional industrial process behind their fade. His
maroon shorts were paired with a bright green T shirt. He could have been
pulled from a catalog marketing expensive casual clothing. His English was
unaccented. There was only one thing that set him apart from the people I
assume to be upper middle class white people. The people I sometimes assume are
all off at a champagne party when I’m struggling to figure out how to pay my
rent… He wore the red square of Strike
Debt. We pulled out a book to discuss how it managed to kick up a good deal
of resentment in me. Soon we had landed on one of my hot button issues with the
dominant culture. Motherhood. The holy sainted motherhood of white American
women. The motherhood they feel so entitled to. The motherhood that has them so
doped up they start claiming it’s tougher to be a mother than a coal miner or a
trauma surgeon as they play with Popsicle sticks at 3 in the afternoon. The
motherhood that has them hiring an army of black and brown women to pamper and
love their children, while those women’s children are an invisible question not
asked. For me it’s as far away as a fairy tale in a land made of magic. Yet
it’s so close I hear them condescend me every year. Every year some woman I
know not even bright enough to enter university or be gainfully employed tells
me how I simply don’t understand anything because I haven’t had children. I
point out that I’ve delivered babies and saved children’s lives, sometimes they
point out that I don’t have a husband, which some claim is “just as hard as
going to medical school, even harder.” I’m still waiting for medical school to
buy me jewelry and sleep with me, because so far all I got was a bunch of
student loans I sometimes skip meals over, enough stress to hang myself, half a
career, endless condescension from my some of my less enlightened peers, and a
whole lot of people who think I’m a nurse.
I try to explain why separating out this kind of
mythological-for-me motherhood, the kind that exists separately from the need
for work for survival, is so offensive. I ask about this guy’s parenthood experiences.
He says something I never expected. “I can’t afford kids.” I ask further. “It
was my kids or my education at some point.”
I still wonder exactly how old this guy was. Was he my age
or did some generational shift happen in the last 5 years? Some seismic shift
in the understanding of education which threw children into the cliff it
created as the political landscape ripped apart. Was education now understood
to be part of the quarterly capitalist machine which was now so efficient even
men could no longer afford to have children until some imaginary time at which
they might have accrued enough resources to pretend to have their own natural
children via technology? I wondered if the kid knew the possible trajectories
he was laying out for himself. Maybe he would get sick of his wife for a reason
he couldn’t quite name, but probably would be related to her no longer looking like
20 year old fashion models whose images percolate everywhere to induce
consumerism. He would find another woman. He could be past 50, and finally
“ready” although unable to have non-pharmaceutical sex, or produce many sperm.
In all probability the narrative of ‘technology to the rescue’ would obscure a
much darker one. One about exploitation of the poor for their gonads. One about
simply not caring about other people even as their bodies would now care for
him. Not just their hands, but their ovaries and uteruses, their very material
of life-giving itself. One in which his newly found “need” to reproduce would
be weighted higher than the needs of any young poor person’s. One in which he
would live two or three lives, while poorer, usually nonwhite people would live
half of one.
I remember the first time I heard about second lives. I was
talking to my soon to be divorced from me never was a real husband anyways
disaster of a spouse in Israel. As we worked on documentation for the legality
of our relationship he explained why he supposedly hated marriage. How all the bourgeois
couples living in Tivon were all in crisis. It always went the same way:
something happened and then they divorced, and then she got the kids and he
moved on to his “second life”. New
woman, new set of kids, and repeat. I wondered how often there is the added
banal cliché that he runs away with the nanny or the maid, which is really
extremely civilized compared to the Americas where he might rape the nanny or
the maid, then deny any relation to some “half breed” children.
In the mainstream American culture what is just emerging, as
some kind of science fiction novel idea about the future, is a hypothetical
world in which the rich get two lives and the poor get one. In reality this
trend has already been surpassed. Statisticians who make life tables, forensic
accountants who look at tax structures, and everyone in public health know all
about it. Even without a miracle fountain of youth drug, a man living on the
Upper East side can expect to live more than twice as long as a man living a
few miles away in the South Bronx or in Detroit. Even filtering out the alarming
number of men killed by violence or even due to infant mortality rates among
the worst in the world, the poor just live much shorter lives. Tragically the
only thing they receive more of is years spent suffering through debilitation
or even downright disability.
Although they have more time on their hands the rich don’t
always catch on to the full picture about these structural differences in life
patterns. They keep claiming they are the victims. They had to work so hard.
They had to pay so much for reproductive services, taxes, schools…the list is
as infinite as their money. What in other societies becomes a uniting force- a
force by which all people empathetically understand ourselves as children and
parents becomes in ours a dividing and divided one. Some chasm is created, a
deep divide into which my new friend wearing the red square has fallen, but can
be rescued from by gender, race and class privilege. So who is throwing him the
rope and more importantly is it us? Is it the army of caretakers? The black
women pushing white babies in expensive strollers in neighborhoods they can’t
afford to live in while their own children remain in circumstances unknown or
perhaps unborn? The single women physicians who give and give extra hours to
their patients as we have no spouses or children? The few or many humans
reduced to bodies who allow themselves to be reduced to mere tools for his
every need and whim from clean floors to catered food? What role do we play in
deciding that if he wants it he deserves three lives, scooped out of our own?
No comments:
Post a Comment