Before I became a parent, I got a lot of advice that I forgot the moment I met our child. One nugget that lingered, however, was an observation from a friend who said, knowingly and ominously, that I was about to feel things I’ve never felt before.
This was true, of course. When I look at our daughter I feel an unfamiliar peace. I feel affection for the person I was eight weeks ago, worrying about entirely the wrong things. I feel self-conscious for all the parenthood cliches I have started to embody. I feel sadness for our dog, now a second-class occupant of a house she used to rule with queenly authority.
I feel also indifference, bordering on aggression, toward other people’s opinions, which they nonetheless feel entitled to share — about how and where our baby was born, about when and where she’s sleeping, about the parenting books we’re reading or not reading, about the access we’re granting or not granting, about the school she might attend years from now.
Mostly, though, I feel immense relief that the Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance approves of our life choices.
OK, not really that part.
They keep changing what it means to be a “real” American. First you just had to live somewhere besides New York or San Francisco. Easy enough. But now, apparently, you also have to procreate.
So, lucky us, we happened to have our daughter during a summer when parenthood itself has become a political signifier, and we have landed on the supposedly nobler side of what is somehow now a culture-war issue. Welcome to Earth, kiddo. Things are pretty dumb at the moment.
Vance, a proven job creator in the field of opposition research, has been generating heat for an old interview in which he described Democrats as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made.”
He has promoted the idea that people who have kids are superior to those who do not, saying in a 2021 speech that non-parents had “no physical commitment to the future of this country.” Parents, he argues, deserve more of a voice in how the country is run than those who, for whatever reason, are childless.
Incentivizing parenthood is a common idea that Vance, naturally, is advocating in the most off-putting manner imaginable. Why just propose a child tax credit, for instance, when you could also shame people who either cannot have children or don’t want them?
And why wouldn’t people want to have kids? (He asked, fondly recalling quaint concepts such as disposable income, free time, restful sleep, surplus space, event attendance, travel, uncluttered rooms, restaurant meals, loud music and conversations with other adults about literally anything besides children.)
Parenthood is not a step taken easily or, by definition, rationally. A future parent does not have enough experience to make an informed decision about something so transformative, and the process of trying to inform oneself can be maddening.
Even before this became a topic in the election cycle, a heated cultural argument was unfolding about kids — not actual kids, but the idea of them. Hyper-fertile “tradwives” do big business on social media, while a growing pro-natalist movement warns of social collapse due to falling birth rates.
Meanwhile, provocative new books such as “What Are Children For?” (by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman) and “Begetting” (by Mara van der Lugt) wrestle with deep moral questions about what it means to bring a person, without their consent, into a world growing ever hotter and more resource-depleted.
These talking points quickly become irrelevant, however, when there is an actual screaming baby in your arms who is notably disinterested in the list of pros and cons that might have preceded her arrival.
She also does not seem to have feelings about whether her existence makes me any more of a citizen than I was before, or wiser about anything besides my own limitations. Asked whether she felt comfortable in her new role as my physical commitment to the future of America, she loudly befouled her diaper, which I think was the correct response.