Consumerism

So they reach adolescence, and society gets a bad case of acne; the Youth Culture of the 60's. They reach adulthood, find out they have to work for a living, and Yippie turns to Yuppie.

Now they've all discovered breeding, and the shock waves are being felt from the maternity wards to the psychiatrist's couch. The psychiatrists' couches are busy because modern baby boomers are having a tough time throwing themselves into a successful career and family with equal measures of customary gusto.

When baby boomers have babies themselves, they discover that children, unlike jogging, racquetball, and other trivial pursuits, aren't as easily abandoned as a pair of $60 running shoes.

In fact, children require a lifetime of commitment, and, unlike most other baby-boom pursuits, return few immediate tangible rewards. Now and then, children stimulate in their jaded parents the recognition that life itself is gratifying enough. But we're the recognition that life itself is gratifying enough. But we're all so busy running ahead that we rarely have time for such vague, existential stuff.

As a card-carrying baby boomer, it turns out I'm dealing with my two kids the way I've dealt with everything else in my life -- me first, justifications and rationalizations to follow. And so they will.

The Busy Dad-Syndrome

First, let me say there is nothing new about the conflict between career and kids. I suspect that every guy reading this remembers a dad who wasn't around as often as he should have been. We heard he was pulling down late duty at the office, or he had to go to a meeting, or to some exotic, faraway place like Toronto. Dad was a busy guy. He worked all the time.

It wasn't until we got old enough to be dads ourselves, after our mothers got a snootful of screwdrivers at some family function, that we learned Dad's absences often had as much to do with his propensity for sport as for work. But when we were six, it was enough to know that dads were rare and precious, and to be coveted.

Of course, when he was around, Dad was not always worth the wait. How many of us had dads who would drop the 5:15 martini for a session of catch or electric train? How many had dads who would give us a swell new game for Christmas: Parcheesi or Steeplechase, and then offer to play it with us "someday", even though we would stand there, clutching our wonderful new thing, all tousled hair and young boy smell, eyes beseeching a boon from the whimsical god of paternity?

Mom, of course, was around all the time. That was before the era of female emancipation. But Mom was in the same boat as us. She had to haggle for time. And when the old boy got home, he would just as soon go golfing with the boys, and he was no more likely to take her along than us.

He was slippery, the old man. And the broken promises grew like piles of oily rags in the basements of our minds. "Next weekend" became his two favourite words. But no matter how tortured or dejected we became, we were never disillusioned. We kept coming back for more. Because we knew that those 11 minutes a week when we were actually, gloriously, the sole thing on his mind (not counting the times we were in trouble, which came to more than 11 minutes) were the best 11 minutes in the whole universe.

So I made a vow. When I got to be a dad, I'd have a lot more than 11 minutes a week for my very best boy. And now that I am a dad, I've kept it. My kids get as many as 13 minutes. Each.

The six-year old boy with the tousled hair and the boy smell, standing there with the Parcheesi game, looks enough like me to remind me of that poignant ache. He's bad enough. But complicating the situation is a four-year old girl who has the habit of wrapping her skinny little arms around her dad and pleading for him to stay home from work for the morning.

There's something terribly wrong about the way we live that we even have to make the choice. But we make it every day, and willingly, sometimes eagerly, abandon our children to the nursery school, the day care, the baby-sitter, and finally, to themselves.

Do We Dislike Kids?

As Germaine Greer says in her newest polemic, Sex and Destiny, we in the West simply do not like kids. The birthrate is falling, and the kids we do have are born into a hostile world to the idea that children are an asset, a blessing, fun to have around. We men have always known what to do when asked to choose between children and ourselves; now women, as they stride purposefully into the marketplace, power-dressed to the nines, are beginning to find that self-realization, North American style, doesn't mix with nurturing a family.

"The individuals whom we have painstakingly inducted into child-free society and established there, with a life-style centred entirely upon achievement and self-gratification, have now to disrupt the pattern," says Germaine about the mere decision to have a child. "The sacrifice is enough, and they are to expect no reward or recompense. If the management of childbearing in our society had actually been intended to maximize stress, it could have hardly succeeded better. The child bearers embark upon their struggle alone; the rest of us wash our hands of them."

Greer, for all her stridency, is not telling us anything we haven't seen with our own eyes, but Sex and Destiny puts the whole dirty secret out for public view. She contrasts our child-hostile world to many places on earth where kids are still thought of as the strength of the family, not bloody inconveniences. Today in Canada, children are confined to McDonald's, Saturday-afternoon matinees, amusement parks, and schools. Before we had our children, I hadn't had a conversation with a kid since I was one. Occasionally, I'd run into one in the supermarket or on the street, but wherever I went, the environment had been carefully scrubbed of kids. That's okay until you have children; but when you have time, you descend into the subculture and become lost along with them.

I don't want this to read as nothing but a lament. Because one of the things you discover is that the subculture is as much fun as it was when you were a kid, I get to go to summer fairs and skating rinks, see all the Walt Disney movies over again, and watch Sesame Street, which they didn't have when I was a kid. Sesame Street alone makes being a kid worth it.

Now and then I get a sneaky feeling that at this level, life is more meaningful and fun than it is at the level of busy executive and concerned citizen. But it's a feeling that strikes only in the depths of the weekend, while I'm lounging on the river bank with my best boy after a bike ride and a soda. By Sunday afternoon, the adrenalin begins to pump in anticipation of tomorrow and the titanic struggle to get ahead, and the poor little things are reduced to tiny shadows of annoyance, inconsequential things that must be put to bed.

Management vs. Kids

There is no place more incompatible with children than one's place of work, especially if you see advancement as Something You'd Like to Go For. Those dewy-eyed, cowed devotees to their families must rush home every day at precisely 5 p.m. leaving the store to those of us who are prepared to toll on into the night for the greater glory of the firm and ourselves. It doesn't matter what the business, the cardinal rule is invariably the same. You must be prepared to put your job before God, Queen, Country, and above all, family.

Family is viewed by management, no matter how enlightened, as a personality flaw. Management is only reflecting the Germaine Greer contention that the whole of society views breeding as something faintly Third-World and unhygienic; and unless you're willing to go along ... you're dogmeat career-wise. Look at Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer. To hang on to one snotty-nosed five-year old, he had to abandon his job as a big time art director at a major New York agency, and go "back to the board" at another, smaller concern, where it was tacitly understood that he would remain until he could get over this obsession with his kid.

The poor sap taught to achieve since he was a little kid is faced with the prospect of turning his back on everything he loves: to attain the respect of his peers, job satisfaction, and a big enough salary to keep his family in the manner to which he thinks they are accustomed.

He looks at the inside postal workers of the world with disdain and a little pity. He has vice-presidents to conquer, and nothing, nobody, is going to stand in the way. Now and then, he feels a little guilty, but that's a guilt that can be easily assuaged by the occasional ball game or bedtime story.

So far, this could be Gary Cooper's dilemma in The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit. But there are a few twists and turns that bring this story into the 1980's. For instance, the emancipation of women.

At least, that's what it's called. Although virtually any man can testify that working your ass off for 50 years is hardly emancipation. But we hardly have a right to speak on the matter. Women have to cross the road to get to the other side, so they're abandoning the nest in unprecedented numbers in pursuit of the same kinds of objectives I referred to above.

Female emancipation sets off a chain of events. Men can no longer depend on free home care for their children, and as we're not about to pick up the slack, we grumble, dig a little deeper, and pay professionals to look after our children, although many of them are professionals only in that they take money. No one, at this point, is really sure what a childcare professional is. They're busy finding out, and they're finding out on our kids.

Mashed Food and Duckies

Equally catastrophic is what it does to the relationship. For one thing, more and more wives are inclined to put off child rearing until their careers are well underway. Which means that you're likely to be too old to be a young father, and she's even less capable of coping with the lost sleep, the stretch marks, and the descent into the subculture. She and her sisters have fought the good fight for more than 100 years, only to be stuck back in a world littered with baby faeces, mashed food and duckies.

If the 20-year old male is disinclined to cope with this stuff, the 30 and 35-year old males are even less inclined. We're right in the middle of the race for vice-president, and while we'll go to the Lamaze classes and attend the blessed event, there's no way we're going to take on the added burden of looking after the fruit of our loins.

This can lead to disenchantment on the part of the wife.

And, although you hate to say it, wives lose some of their allure when they get pregnant. Not necessarily because they walk and look like plastic inflatable penguins, but because they've become somebody's mother, somebody else's mother.

It's a phenomenon that psychologists have already well documented. Men are more likely to fool around after their first child is born than at any time other than their mid-life crisis. Your partner and lover turns into a baby maintenance specialist, and all that stuff she used to tolerate - working late at the office, getting up early to run, golfing on the weekends - that's over now, as you're expected to at least dabble in the arts of diaper changing, feeding, and kootchie-kooing.

It's the kind of behaviour that can turn a guy right off, and more than one formerly faithful husband goes looking for that pre-infant allure someplace else, leaving mom at home with the apple of their eye. But who do they think we are anyway? It's us or them.

I thought I might be able to get through this without mentioning the word "yuppie" once. But I find that here is a perfect place for it.

The Yuppie couple believes the secret to life is buying quality. Not ordinary quality, but exotic quality. Yuppies have children the same way they have cars, the smart way.

In this respect, Yuppie is just a new word for fool. Because the Yuppie will find out that children cannot be solved like other consumer dilemmas. It doesn't matter how many books you read, or how much money you have, or what kind of baby car seat you buy, or what Montessori school you send them to, children are not like all the other commodities they encounter. Children, unlike contentment, cannot be bought. Children are the Yuppie Achilles heel. They disturb the unruffled calm. They shatter the illusion of competency. Children are the worm of guilt in the apple of complacency.

Not that they get any thanks for it. Yuppie children are certainly better dressed than the offspring of ordinary schmos. They look healthier. They know how to read when they're four. They play with creative, non-sexist, attention-grabbing toys. But they're not any more loved or respected. Abandoned by both Mommy and Daddy, the average Canadian kid is becoming more and more a creature of TV, of the toys he plays with, his little pals, and society at large. They're not Our kids any more, they're theirs. When we have them, which is rare in itself, we let them slip away.

I can see the signs, day after day. My boy will sit with the only adult friend he has who will talk to him for hours - his Speak and Spell - learning to spell frantically so the machine will tell him nice things such as: You are Correct. Perfect Score.

My daughter would like to know just about everything, and is not above asking all the questions, all day long. How are teddy bears made? How do you make windows? Who is the Sandman? I don't have time for these questions, so I buy her another Barbie Doll, even though I swore I'd never get one of those things. After I buy her off, it's the feeling of complacency that wells up inside like flatulence that disturbs me the most.

Who do I blame? Myself? Poor vessel that I am, I'm not capable of making such bold choices in isolation from my peers. The fundamentalists blame feminism for the breakdown of the family, but as Germaine acidly points out, no room was made for children long before the feminists got into the act. Feminism, like Yuppiedom, is just another inappropriate response to the puzzle of misery in the midst of plenty.

I suppose I could blame Rene Descartes, who's been held responsible for the illusion that we are rational beings the moment he uttered the phrase, "I think, therefore I am." Poor Rene.

I usually end up blaming my kids. For being too noisy, for getting up and going to bed at the wrong times. For wanting me to be with them. For wanting me to love them at least as much as I love myself. For being alive.

At least I count myself more fortunate than those sad mortals who are still trying to decide if children fit into their life-style. The answer is, of course not, dummy. But have them anyway. They're our last link, to Mother Earth. If you don't have them, the state will have to go into the business of having kids. As the state does most everything for us now, childbearing is a natural extension. People spawned in stainless-steel wombs are not likely to get involved in hand-wringing about anything.

Oh Brave New World, indeed