In spring 2011, I was arrested for allowing my son, then 4, to wait in a car with the windows open for a few minutes.
— Kim Brooks
Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of friends that seemed so adequate, so fulfilling. Marriage cements these inward movements. Children draw partners closer, but they can also draw you further away from the friends and lives you once knew.
We're contemptuous of 'distracted' working mothers. We're contemptuous of 'selfish' rich mothers. We're contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don't need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don't have to look very hard to see the common denominator.
This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.
'Did our parents really let us do that?' is a game my friends and I sometimes play. We remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds.
People don't think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.
In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others' inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.
In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.
Virginia, like most states, has few guidelines about how closely parents are expected to supervise their children. As a result, I was charged not with leaving my son in the car, but with the misdemeanor of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
I wonder if all love affairs, all marriages, all lifelong partnerships, aren't in some ways a turning away from the world.
As a teenager, I'd longed to get my driver's license so I could get away from my parents. Then I'd longed to go to college to get away from the people I'd called my friends.
We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.
I grew up in a time when I could play and bike in the neighborhood, largely because my parents assumed that if I ever needed help, I could ask a nearby adult.
