My Postmodern Family

The nuclear family never appealed to me. Even when I was a kid, turning into a teen, imagining my adult future, the mom and dad and two kid household wasn't something I dreamed of. For a long time I assumed I'd get married and have kids, because that's just what you do. The message about choice I got as a young woman in a conservative town was after getting married and having kids: to work or not to work. Presumably I'd go to college (something my parents never actively encouraged) and work for at least a little while, then also presumably I'd leave the workforce for at least a little while to raise my kids. Only then did my ability to choose my future begin: I could choose to be a stay at home mom, like mine was, or I could choose to return to my chosen field.

Our family: Chloe at the center.

My first two boyfriends were insistent that I be a stay at home mom. It's better for the kids, after all, if a parent raises them, and naturally women are better caretakers than men so it just makes sense for the mom to stay home. Sure, they would have to work long hours to make that happen but it'd be so worth it, you know? Me, home with a couple little screaming poop machines all day long, rarely seeing my husband, being a nice, dutiful little housewife.

I noped out of that even then, to my boyfriends' frustrations. While they romanticized traditional gender roles, also having grown up in a conservative town (interestingly, one had the very traditional nuclear family and one did not, yet they both idealized it), I feared it. Maybe I'd have kids but I would not under any circumstances leave work for longer than necessary. I told one of them that if they wanted a stay at home parent household they were welcome to stay home. He laughed. The man raising the children was that ridiculous.

It was in between those two boyfriends that I first realized that the choice I had wasn't to work or not after kids, but whether to have kids at all. Or even whether to get married. It just never occurred to me, and was certainly never presented as a choice. We say "when you have kids", not "if you have kids," like a person's future children are inevitable.

This is frustrating and needs to change, but what's bothering me now is the prevalence of the traditional family at work. And somehow both the parents and the non-parents feel slighted.

People can understand cats and dogs as "part of the family" but anything else isn't as acceptable.

First, the parents. The pandemic has revealed just how hard it is to be a parent in America. Back in the 1940s when the term "nuclear family" first appeared, women had only just entered the workforce. Working women were supposed to be temporary, just to support the economy during WWII when so many men were absent. But some of them liked working. A lot, actually. And for a bit the economy still needed the labor of women so they were allowed to continue earning an income. Women never really went back home. Not fully. Though I'd be willing to bet (I didn't research this) that a lot of women worked part time for a few decades. After all, the household chores and childrearing still needed to happen, and our war hero men were certainly not going to do it. This mentality is, sadly, still prevalent today, as is the myth that women are better caretakers (hopefully my previous boyfriends have unlearned this) and are better suited to raising children in the home.

By the time women entered the workforce in large numbers, the 40-hour work-week was standard. It was even law! An eight hour day resulted in more productive workers, more workers for round-the-clock schedules, maximum productivity, and low unemployment. But the 40-hour work-week wasn't designed because it benefitted the worker, it was designed because it benefitted the employer. If you run a 24-hour operation and had two sets of employees working 12-hour shifts, they'd burn out between the 8 and 10 hour mark, and you'd be paying for the other 2-4 hours but not getting the same level of production. But if you hired three sets of employees working 8-hour shifts, you're still paying for 24 hours of labor but getting so much more out of those workers. It was just math. Employers didn't care who was taking care of the dishes or the kids, they just wanted production. I'm not sure where the "8 hours for labor, 8 hours for sleep, and 8 hours for leisure" saying came from, since your (unpaid) lunch break, commute time, overtime, and prep comes from either leisure or sleep.

The pandemic opened a lot of eyes to the unsustainable nature of our current labor setup. I won't go into the hardships that parents have had these last two years except to summarize that parents lost their external support but still had to keep up their jobs. In a global pandemic and period of increased anxiety and tension. No wonder so many people left their jobs.

The ones that stayed feel at a disadvantage to non-parents. Us non-parents can veg on the couch or sleep more or take additional risks for old pleasures like vacations and eating at restaurants because we don't have little unvaccinated creatures with still-growing immune systems to worry about. We can sleep through the night, probably. We don't have to juggle virtual classes and mommy can you open this and sibling fights and where did your pants go get out I'm on camera and can I go play outside while working at the same level as before the pandemic. It's fully justified, I don't know how parents have any sanity (I mean, I wonder that in general but the last two years have validated my childfree-ness in a way I never thought possible).

Most people have a hard time understanding rats as pets.

But now, the non-parents, who also feel slighted. The struggles of parents are so obvious. Parents are shouting about them, bringing up their pain at every opportunity because if they don't they will burst. Some might legitimately explode. Before, comedians made jokes about stay at home moms (something something it can't be that hard of a job if you can do it in your pajamas) but no one is making those jokes now. Even for women who aren't also working. 

But we're about to start our third year of the pandemic and pretty much everyone is over it. We're tired of masks, tired of restrictions, tired of being judged for going out, tired of being judged for staying in, tired of hearing about how tired everyone is. So the plan is currently to pretend it's over. We never stopped working at full capacity, we just had to do it from our kitchen tables or couches or bedroom dresser or laundry machine (or you were a teacher or healthcare worker or "essential worker" and had to risk your health every single day). It's too much to start a third year of acute awareness of these very obvious problems, so we're just going to sweep our problems under the rug.

And non-parents, who have been keeping up when our parent colleagues had sick kids or zoom lessons or needed a mental health day (for those who are lucky enough to have compassionate employers), our struggles are not as obvious. We've been too afraid to voice them because we know we don't have it as bad as the parents and we don't want to look like ungrateful assholes for saying we're also tired and burned out. However, in this soon to be third year of the pandemic, our struggles haven't gone away, either. We've picked up the slack and kept our mouths shut, and any time parents are given the understanding and compassion that they fully deserve we wonder if our efforts will ever be recognized. 

Maybe it wouldn't have been important to recognize our efforts if the pandemic was over in a year. We were so ready to pitch in and help because of the blindingly obvious horrors of being a pandemic parent, but we are burned out. We are exhausted. We are over it. And we're feeling slighted.

My kids.

When both parents and non-parents are feeling like our employers give preferential treatment to the other group, the problem is with employers. Parents should be given the additional understanding and compassion, but when non-parents are working extra hard they should also be rewarded. Or at least acknowledged. Where I'm working, we're still operating under the pandemic structure for performance evaluations, which makes it extremely difficult to get any sort of raise or promotion. But how long are we going to operate like this? How long will "due to the pandemic" be the excuse for leadership to continue not recognizing effort?

It's also making me realize how atypical my family is. Along with saying "when you have kids", we also say "start a family" when we're trying to have a kid. When we say family we really mean nuclear family: one mom, one dad, and at least one biological kid. Americans are starting to be more accepting of same sex families, blended families, extended families, mixed-race families, and other non-traditional family structures. But they all have kids. "Family" still means a parent figure and at least one child. It does not mean, for most, husband and wife. Which is a pretty significant bummer when I think about it.

I started my family almost 9 years ago when husband and I moved in together. I considered us a sort of blended family: him and his dog, me and my cat, then we got our bunnies. Our family became more official when we got married. But since we're never having children, some people will never see us as a family. I've been thinking of my family more lately. All my babies have four legs and hair all over. They are all old, and we've already lost some. When Argo's cancer diagnosis was terminal, I told husband that this would be the most difficult thing we ever go through together. And it was. It will be more difficult than losing parents, friends, siblings, and any future pets. Last year our old bun Gandalf died suddenly, as did one of our rats. One rat is not doing well at all and Chloe has gotten a couple of worrying diagnoses recently. We know our time with all of them is very limited.

I feel like I shouldn't talk about this, especially not at work. Most of my colleagues who have pets also have children, and once you have biological children you don't see your pets as your babies anymore. And only one other person on my larger team has more pets than I do. My direct supervisor has neither pets nor kids (nor partner) and kind of doesn't understand them. (Side note: He mentioned wanting to get a cat but is "kind of worried about taking care of it that much". He also shared with me that a friend can't go on vacations or go out anymore because their dog is old and, having been in that situation, I wanted to yell at him... Also, this was mid-pandemic so vacationing and going out shouldn't really be the fun metric you judge your friends by, but things have returned to normal for him.) I do my best to schedule vet appointments and other life necessities for late in the afternoon when he won't notice I'm not online because I feel... atypical. Not understood. My family isn't taken seriously. I even recently got the "you're next for maternity leave" half joke for the first time in a really long time.

We take family portraits at the holidays just like other families.

It's not just having pets instead of kids. Sometimes I forget that even though we're in a traditional heterosexual marriage, being interracial still has implications. Even in our very liberal little neighborhood (in a purple-ish city in a blue state). We live a pretty white life. I don't notice, and sometimes choose to ignore, looks in public. When we do step into Black spaces I feel welcome but a little like I'm intruding. There are online meet up groups for Black people (runners, artists, etc.) and for women, but what about mixed race couples? If husband wanted to join a Black runners group, for example, I wouldn't feel comfortable joining even if I was welcomed, just like he wouldn't join a women's running group.

So between my interracial marriage and my childfree-ness, I've been noticing how different my family is. I had to Google what the opposite of nuclear family is and "postmodern" was my answer. It includes childless couples, unmarried parents, extended and blended families, and anyone who considered themselves part of a family, regardless of blood or marriage. I guess if my availability and effort as a non-parent is going to be taken for granted, it might be nice to have the family I do have recognized.