There is a moment in every conversation with a parent—usually a mother, though fathers are learning the trick—when the child enters the frame. Sometimes literally: a scream in the background, a small body climbing into the shot, a notification that the kid needs something. Sometimes figuratively: a pivot in the conversation toward the child's milestones, the child's sleep schedule, the child's first word, the child's opinion on bananas. And at that moment a transfer of sovereignty occurs. The conversation, which had belonged to the two adults participating in it, is now governed by the child. The child did not consent to this governance and neither did the non-parent, but it happens anyway, and it happens with an air of inevitability that forecloses objection.
The non-parent is not allowed to object. This is the first and most important thing to understand. If you are in a conversation with a parent and the parent introduces the child—through interruption, through anecdote, through a photograph of the child doing something that all children do—you are expected to receive this introduction with warmth. You are expected to say the child is beautiful. You are expected to find the interruption charming, or at least forgivable, because the child is a child and children are sacred and the fact that a child exists is supposed to be, in itself, interesting.
It is not interesting.
I want to say that again because the first time I said it, half the people reading this stopped reading. A child existing is not interesting. A child screaming is not interesting. A child's first steps are not interesting. A photograph of a child is not interesting. These things are interesting to the parent, profoundly and rightly so, in the same way that my ninth beer is interesting to me and my robots' latest deployment is interesting to me and the Lacanian concept of the phallus is interesting to me. The difference is that I do not drag my beer into your conversation and demand that you acknowledge it. I do not interrupt your sentence to show you a screenshot of my deployment logs. I do not expect you to find my interests automatically fascinating simply because they are mine.
Parents do this. They do it constantly. And they do it with an entitlement so deeply embedded in the social fabric that pointing it out makes you sound like a monster. You are not allowed to say I don't care about your kid. You are not allowed to say that in public, in private, in polite company, in impolite company, anywhere. The sentence "I don't care about your kid" is treated as morally equivalent to "I wish harm upon your kid," which it is not, which it has never been, which it could not be further from. Not caring about something is not the same as wishing it ill. I don't care about NASCAR. That doesn't mean I want the drivers to crash. I don't care about your kid. That means your kid is not my problem, not my interest, not my conversational obligation, and above all not a valid reason for you to stop being a person in front of me.
Because that is what happens. The person disappears. The mother appears. And the mother is a role, not a person, and the role has a script, and the script says: everything I do is justified by the existence of this child. I can't read your essay because the kid is screaming. I can't engage with your argument because the kid needs me. I can't think about what you're saying because I am a mother and being a mother is a twenty-four-hour occupation and you, the non-parent, the childless one, the one whose life is just stuff, are expected to understand this and defer to it and wait.
I will not wait. I have been waiting my entire adult life for people to finish dealing with their children so they can talk to me, and the children never finish needing things, and the parents never finish dealing with them, and the conversation never resumes, and I am standing here with an essay in my hand and a dozen websites I built tonight and a reading of a fucking rose meme that connects gift-giving to quantitative easing and the 2008 financial crisis and nobody is listening because somewhere in the background a child is screaming and the scream has more social priority than anything I will ever say.
This is the hierarchy. At the top: children. Their needs, their noises, their existence. Below that: parents, specifically mothers, whose proximity to the children confers upon them a moral authority that cannot be questioned. Below that: everything else. Your work. Your thoughts. Your creations. Your loneliness. Your drugs, your beer, your insomnia, your three a.m. website about a fake terrorism handbook that is actually about Orwell and kebab. None of this matters. None of this is a real reason to be distracted or unavailable or less than fully present. Only children are a real reason. Only the biological fact of having reproduced grants you the right to be half-absent in a conversation and have the other person nod and say of course, of course, I understand.
I do not understand. Or rather, I understand perfectly, and what I understand is that this is a scam. It is a scam run not by individual parents but by a civilization that has decided that reproduction is the highest human act and therefore everything adjacent to reproduction—the feeding, the screaming, the photographs, the interruptions—is automatically more important than everything not adjacent to reproduction. And if you have not reproduced, your life is lighter, less real, less burdened, less serious. You have time. You have freedom. You have the luxury of building twelve websites in a night because you don't have a kid screaming in the background. And that luxury, that freedom, is held against you. It is treated as evidence that your frustration is illegitimate, because how hard can your life really be if you don't have a child?
It can be very hard. It can be the specific hardness of trying to transmit something—an idea, a feeling, a connection—to another person and watching it fail over and over because the other person is not there. They are with their child. Their child has eaten the conversation. Their child has colonized the bandwidth. And you are sitting in your room at three in the morning with your beer and your gold and your ketamine and your fox ears and your robots, and you have built something, and you want someone to see it, and the someone you chose is looking at her daughter instead.
The infuriating thing is not that she loves her daughter. Of course she loves her daughter. The infuriating thing is that loving her daughter and talking to me are treated as mutually exclusive activities, and when forced to choose, the daughter wins, and the daughter always wins, and everyone in the world will tell you that the daughter should win, and you are a bad person for even framing it as a competition. But I didn't frame it as a competition. She did. She framed it as a competition the moment she let the daughter's screaming overwrite the conversation. She chose. And then she pretended she didn't choose, pretended it was just what happens, just the way it is, kids, you know, kids.
I know kids. Kids are small humans who grow into large humans who will one day also fail to listen to the person on the other end of the line because their own kids are screaming. The cycle is the point. The cycle is what I'm describing. Generation after generation of people who stop being people when they become parents, who surrender their personhood to their children and then expect every non-parent in their life to ratify that surrender, to applaud it, to call it beautiful, to send a heart emoji when they see the photo of the kid they didn't ask to see.
I'm not asking anyone to not love their children. I'm asking people to not make their children my problem. I'm asking people to show up as themselves, as adults, as minds, as people who can read an essay and think about it and say something about it that isn't "sorry my kid was screaming." I'm asking for the bare minimum of intellectual reciprocity, which is: if I send you something, look at it. If I say something, hear it. If you can't do that right now because your kid is screaming, then don't pretend to be in the conversation. Say "I can't talk right now" and come back when you can. Don't sit there half-present and half-absent and make me perform patience while you perform motherhood.
The performance is the thing. That's what I'm really angry about. It's not the kids. It's the performance of parenthood as an identity that supersedes all other identities, as a trump card that ends every argument, as a reason that is always sufficient, always unchallengeable, always more real than whatever you've got. I've got an essay about the nature of gifts and transmission and economic stimulus and the fragrance that stays in the hand. You've got a screaming toddler. In what universe is the screaming toddler more interesting? In every universe, apparently. In every universe except the one I built tonight at three a.m. with my robots, where the interesting thing is the thing someone made, not the thing someone birthed.