Two weeks after our ~wedding and two months into my second trimester, we moved into a new home, spacious, light-filled, somewhere we could see our family in. A friend came to see us and, surrounded by cardboard boxes, our conversation inevitably converged on childrearing. He told us that a mutual friend’s philosophy was, in short, throw money at the problem—pay caretakers to attend to the needs of their future children, whenever possible—and asked our opinion. Aside from the reality that we can’t afford a wholesale export of childcare responsibilities, we grasped at a sense that something essential would be lost.
In How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen notes that outsourcing domestic work prevents us from developing “the skill to develop skills,” to be able to solve complicated problems independently, to have the confidence to confront hard and unfamiliar things. Parenthood is complex and multidimensional, full of unexpected grooves and ridges. The parent-child relationship is a feedback loop, one in which the child shapes the parent as much as the parent shapes the child—a mutually-actuated evolution of self. What do we miss in our own growth when we choose not to take the “bad” with the good, when we selectively extract the sleepless nights and the spit-up stains and the “poop or chocolate” moments? It is the entire process of childrearing, more than physical discomforts or mommy-and-me classes, that is inescapably transformative and, hopefully, enriching.
There is a connection that runs deeper than bloodlines, that is neither limited nor inherent to families, but instead comes from “the time you waste” on someone. I love-hate to excerpt from The Little Prince, yet it still resonates beautifully:
But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
“Time wasted” on someone is time dedicated to them. My biggest friendships have developed because of the time we’ve dedicated to each other—the time spent doing nothing as much as the time spent in vulnerability, the time spent in disagreement as much as the time spent in resonance, all of it, the shallow as much as the intimate. That time translates into attention, and, over time, alchemizes into devotion.
Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.