Family

"Why do I feel like I got hit by a bus?” I ask my husband first thing upon opening my eyes. “Because we have a two-year-old — and we’re eighty,” he says. “I was told kids keep you young,” I say to no one. My husband is already gone, making coffee. We aren’t eighty, but there are days that it feels like it. In 2022, for the first time ever, the median age of a first-time mother in the United States hit the ripe old age of thirty. I was forty-three when I had my daughter and, let me tell you, there is a reason we are biologically wired to have kids in our youth. Having kids is a young person’s game. You’re made aware of this the minute you get pregnant if you’re over the age of thirty-five.

The tradwife smiles as she feeds her sourdough starter, wearing a long dress and a baby and wrangling the occasional toddler underfoot. She beams at her husband as he comes in from a long day on the ranch, or from the hedge-fund trenches. She makes salt-dough modeling clay for the little ones, whether her stove is from Lowe’s or La Cornue. The Cut describes her Instagram account as both “dangerous” and “stupid.” CNN experts lament that too many girls are turning to her as a “Band-Aid with ideological cover,” and fret about the sourdough-starter-to-White-Supremacy pipeline. Tradwives, both self-identified and smacked with admiring or hostile labels, are the latest cultural phenomenon in media crosshairs.

While most Americans kick off the holiday season with warm cider and festive sweaters, denizens of the commentariat have a more insufferable tradition. Each year, in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, columnists everywhere bombard readers with condescending guides to fighting with “difficult” (read: Republican) relatives over the dinner table. Most of us simply roll our eyes or lampoon these unbearable screeds, while others call for civility. Writing for this publication earlier this month, Mary Katharine Ham made a refreshingly reasonable “case against the Thanksgiving dinner fight.” This is partially right.

The table at which I sit to write this column is more than 400 years old — and yet brand new. A few years ago, when a mammoth oak fell in my parents’ woods, we profited from the generosity of friends with chainsaws and access to a lumber mill and kiln who were just as determined as we were not to see this venerable specimen go to waste. My parents consulted with yet another party keenly concerned with preservation — a local, family-owned, custom furniture builder of “heirloom-quality.” It seems like a quaint concept, in this fast-forward world, where news stories and trends mirror the lifespan of an avocado — ripe one second and useless the next — to acquire and keep things with a mind for future generations.

As we come upon the treacherous holiday season before a presidential election, there will be plenty of people in media who tell you it is your moral responsibility to ruin food and fellowship with political confrontations. Armed with the emotional IQ of one of those idiots tossing perfectly good soup on the Mona Lisa — an ineffectual waste of vittles and dignity — these columnists insist that you must not let Aunt Margie’s incorrect opinions stand, lest democracy die in the darkness of her benighted worldview. You must serve countervailing takes as hot as the mashed potatoes, no matter the cost to family comity. It doesn’t have to be this way. There was a time, not too long ago, when we didn’t have to turn every breaking of bread into a struggle session.

Alexandria, Virginia I entered summer with the following list of tasks: convert the shed into an office; discard several tons of debris from the storage room; assemble that Amish treehouse that’s been sitting in the yard; chop down the ash tree. A gust of wind took down the crabapple tree right before the Memorial Day barbecue. On the guest list: my younger brother, who moonlights as an unlicensed contractor; my wife’s cousin who built his own home; and Terry Schilling, who constructed a luxury treehouse. A normal man would have leaned on such a guest list to get the work done for him. A writer self-conscious about his manliness would make a show of chopping the tree up with the dull blade of a cheap chainsaw.

My niece was seven or eight years old when she called to invite me to a school event. “It’s Mother-and-Daughter Day at my school!” she exclaimed, adding that I had to be there because she and her twin sister wanted to show me their classroom and meet their friends.  I thanked her for including me but added that I’m not her mommy; I’m her auntie.  “But you’re like a mommy,” my niece said, with a tilt in her voice as if I didn’t understand what was immensely obvious to her. “Auntie! You have to come,” she pleaded. I was there with bells on.  I’m fortunate that my nephew and nieces have always lived nearby, and that my sister-in-law and brother have generously embraced my participation in their children’s lives whenever possible.

Last July, Albert and Anthony Saniger filed a lawsuit against a high-end California fertility clinic after their dreams of having a second boy were destroyed when their surrogate gave birth to a baby daughter. After already choosing male names and Gmail accounts for their future son, the couple had explicitly made clear that no female embryos were to be transferred into the body of their surrogate, who had experienced two failed cycles of in vitro fertilization before a successful pregnancy in 2020. To add to the trauma of being forced to live with a healthy baby girl instead of a male, the Sanigers were now forced to spend “staggering” amounts of money raising the two boys they wanted and a girl, all bought via costly fertility clinic services.

Nick Cannon is the ultimate baby daddy. How could he not be? The Masked Singer and Wild ’n’ Out host is rich, handsome and has somehow gotten six very hot women pregnant, resulting in twelve — count them, twelve — children. He talks about each of them with nothing but respect and, as far as Cockburn is aware, the women have nothing bad to say about him.  Cannon has transcended the outmoded notion of the nuclear family — and is setting out an alternative high standard for the modern American father. I mean, he made two babies with Mariah Carey at her peak. He is also, in tandem with Elon Musk, solving the problem of plunging Western fertility rates. So Cockburn was surprised to find out that the forty-two-year-old rapper doesn’t pay child support.

As I approach my daughter’s first birthday this month, I’m reflecting on what it’s been like to become a mom so late in the game — and the thousands of lessons I’ve learned. A lot of people have carried me through pregnancy and the first year: my husband, for one, has been a rock. His mother and stepfather. My aunt and uncle. They’ve all shown up for us in ways we didn’t even know we would need, with home-cooked meals when I was in the newborn bubble, with baby care so we could work or sleep or unwind. However, nothing has carried me quite like the groupchat a friend started in my first trimester. This friend had her second child on the way and realized three of us were pregnant all within months of one another, so she started the chat.