parenting under capitalism
4 february 2017
It's been just over a year since S has been born and two months since I passed my driving exam and signed up for Communauto, a car-sharing service in Montreal on the same day. All I want to do is drive places and hold the Communauto car keys in one hand as I stop for things like a cappuccino on the way to wherever I am going because I can do that now; yes, it takes time but not the same kind of time as taking a bus especially because it is winter and it is cold. All I want to do is online shop for unaffordable slow fashion baby gear that looks better within the curated instagram frame than it does in your hands after you spent your student loan payment for the month on something that your child will outgrow before you have a chance to take the photos you want as memories anyway. You justify it without any reason other than you really want two more kids (so they can wear it, too) even though you are 35 and already crushed by parenthood financially, emotionally and physically.
I have always been so dignified to live within my means. Ever since having a baby and having little sustained time to do things like read the books I already own, work on my dissertation, watch films, participate in political organizing, or bike around the city with friends, I clutch my phone and stare at the lives of instagram moms wondering how I can make my life like theirs. Except I don’t want their lives, I (think I) want their aesthetic artifice as ~reality~.
I don’t need to drive as much as I do but it’s been recently made available to me and it makes me happy. Happiness always comes with a cost. What a stupid aphorism—the best things in life are free. Maybe my son’s smile doesn’t cost anything directly, but the conditions to make him smile, or rather the conditions to make me feel good enough to make him smile are economic. Or maybe when living in capitalism you always-already assume a cost to everything.
The best position to be in is to not think about money at all, as if it exists as a background to experience and the ongoingness of life. As if it doesn’t exist at all.