In Praise of Messy Lives Read Online Free

Flanagan wrote in
Time
, “Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father in the home.” This is perhaps a little unsubtle for nice, progressive New Yorkers, and yet they think and recycle polite, modified versions of this same idea.
    To be clear, I am writing here about myself and the handful of other single mothers I know. These are specifically women who conceived children in some sort of relationship that they are no longer in, and had the baby: a tiny, arguably privileged subset of single mothers. (It is worth noting, though, that nearly four in ten babies in this country are currently born to single mothers, and a rapidly growing percentage of those mothers are adults. It’s also worth noting that 53 percent of babies born to women under thirty are now born to single mothers, so it’s arguably time to stop viewing this as an exotic, or even a minority, family configuration.)
    Someone who was trying to persuade me not to have the baby said that I should wait and have a “regular baby.” His exact words were “You could just wait and have a regular baby!” What he meant, of course, was that I should wait and have a baby in more regular circumstances. But I had seen the feet of the baby on a sonogram by this point, and while he was pacing through my living room making his point, I was thinking: This is a regular baby. His comment stayed with me, though. It evoked the word “bastard”: “something that is spurious, irregular, inferior or of questionable origin.”
    Someone said something similar to a friend of mine when she found out that she was pregnant. He said that she should wait and have a “real baby”; and someone else referred to the children her baby’s father had with his wife as his “real children.” As if her baby were unreal, a figment of her imagination, as if they could wish him away.
    Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks made while holding a glass of wine, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort, that we create a cultural climate; it’s in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent-up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to. Hawthorne called it “the alchemy of quiet malice, by which [we] can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”
    One warm spring night my friend with the unreal baby goes to a big sprawling dinner party with children running around, at the house of some friends of friends she doesn’t know very well. Toward the end of the evening the host pulls my friend aside andsays that he just wanted her to know that the baby is “always welcome in our house.” No one would ever say about a one-year-old with two married parents, “I just want you to know Finn is always welcome in our house.” Because of course why wouldn’t a one-year-old be welcome in their house? I am quite sure the man who said this sincerely felt he was being warm and hospitable and open-minded.
    A novelist I know is sitting on a sunny bench in the park with his wife and two sons. He peers into the stroller at my five-pound newborn, Leo, and says, “How did
that
happen?” He smiles radiantly: It’s a joke! But my six-year-old, Violet, is standing next to me, and I feel her stiffen because she senses something in his tone, something not quite nice. I say, “The usual way.” But I have a feeling that if I were married he would have said something more along the lines of “congratulations.”
    It’s around this time that I begin to see that
The Scarlet Letter
is in fact a fresh, modern commentary. One might be under the impression that tolerant liberal New York bears no resemblance to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s windy Puritan New England town, but one would be wrong. Our judgments are more polite, more