The uncomplicated tradness beguiles

A little thinker for the family table...

Thank you Kyle for including Deez Links in his New Yorker column on online recommendation culture! Thank you The Face for quoting Deez Links in this story about queueing for stuff lol. Also if you are around in NY for December 5, I’ll be at this Limousine Reading at Berry Park if you want to hang out… ok see you after Thanksgiving xoxo

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The post-election piece of writing that has stuck with me the most in recent weeks comes from The Cut’s parenting newsletter written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton. In We Can’t Let Family Life Become a Political Pawn, Jezer-Morton lays out how the sociopolitical divide in America is so clearly manifesting in (or perhaps even originally arising from?) the dominant narratives we use to talk about family life.

That is, while both liberal and conservative nuclear units worship a kind of “family self-reliance,” per Jezer-Morton, liberals tend to follow a script of “competitive advantage seeking” (think expensive Montessori schooling, “gentle parenting,” professional success) while conservatives use one based on “values,” “tradition” and hazy nostalgia. And one of these modes is clearly winning the PR contest:

One of the reasons I resent the tradwife and Mormon moms of Instagram is that they have all but monopolized social-media storytelling about happy families. With the help of J.D. Vance, the concept of domesticity has been pressed into the service of a hateful pronatalist agenda. It feels like they’ve appropriated the entire narrative of family life and left us with nothing but the distinguished Doctors Oster and Becky and memes about being tired.

Reading this gave me a prickle of relief, actually, because Jezer-Morton totally nailed this pervading dread that I’ve been feeling lately whenever I consider, as a 31-year-old unmarried woman, the long-prophesied Next Life Stage where I may or may not start a family of my own. Like many straight, educated, affluent, and supposedly progressive women of my millennial cohort, I’ve spent most of my adulthood hard-wiring into myself the expectation that marriage could and should be this ultra-egalitarian, emotionally fulfilling soulmateship—one that makes plenty of room for two creatively-satisfying careers, not to mention a nice, stylish home, of course—and then reconciling that vision with what appears to be the actual lived reality made abundantly clear by divorced friends, open marriage memoirists, viral tweets, Miranda July, a million studies about who actually does the “shared” housework, the discourse at large, etc.