Image via WikipediaMy grandmother, greatgrandmother and greatgrandfather all died within a span of two years, in that order. A few years later my grandfather one morning left home without telling anyone to become a sadhu in the holy places of India for the rest of his days.
My greatgrandfather had been the Founding Father of the family. His had been a rags to riches story. He was not born a landlord. But he worked hard and, ably helped by my greatgrandmother, saved well to end up with more land than anyone else in the village.
I was a few years from finishing high school far away - overnight bus ride - in the capital city when the deaths happened. They each happened when I was home for vacation. I would be home three times a year.
I did not realize at the time but over the years I realized as I do today that those deaths were like there was an umbrella over the family's head, and suddenly that umbrella vanished. My father acutely felt their absences for long years. He likely still does.
I am supposed to be working on a few blog posts (To Iran, With Love (1)) for two of my favorite people in the tech community - Fred Wilson and Brad Feld - but I find my ways to procrastinate. I found myself on my Tumblr dashboard instead. Mostly I reblog, that is what I do on Tumblr. The editor in me comes out. So - hint, hint - I am a very good person to follow on Tumblr. Following me is like following 90 people minus the pain. And these 90 people are mostly active members of the tech community. So. Follow me, like Al Pacino says right before the best scene in my favorite movie Heat.
I came across an interesting post by KirkLove, on parenting. No, I don't know him, although he is a New Yorker. You are not supposed to know people on Tumblr. I personally know very few of the 90 plus people I follow on Tumblr.
But then I have never been a parent myself, although I grew up in a large, extended family environment - at the peak, I think perhaps four couples under one roof in a big house - and saw a l-o-t of parenting happen. That makes me an authority of sorts, I think. And that is not even counting the regular larger extended family get togethers - festivals, three day weddings - when you would have much noise and kids running all over the place.
Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. ........ five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” ...... . “I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.” ...... especially true in middle- and upper-income families, which are far more apt than their working-class counterparts to see their children as projects to be perfected. (Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two. ...... “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” ....... According to Changing Rhythms of American Family Life—a compendium of data porn about time use and family statistics .......all parents spend more time today with their children than they did in 1975, including mothers, in spite of the great rush of women into the American workforce. ...... the abundance of choices—whether to have kids, when, how many—may be one of the reasons parents are less happy. ...... parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care ..... “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.” ...... When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. ....... There was this idea we had about how things were supposed to be: The family should be dot dot dot, the man should be dot dot dot the woman should be dot dot dot.” ....... This is another brutal reality about children: They expose the gulf between our fantasies about family and its spikier realities. ....... One of the reasons I love being with my wife is because I love the family we have.” ....... the war zone of adolescence ..... “Teenagers can be casually brutal.” ...... is the amount of time married parents spend alone together each week: Nine hours today versus twelve in 1975. ...... They were exhausted and staring at the television.” ..... Children may provide unrivaled moments of joy. But they also provide unrivaled moments of frustration, tedium, anxiety, heartbreak. ...... the study sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of its participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated, and how much despair they were in (as opposed to how much stress they were under): Do you not feel like eating? Do you feel like you can’t shake the blues? Do you feel lonely? Like you can’t get going? Parents, who live in a clamorous, perpetual-forward-motion machine almost all of the time, seemed to have different answers than their childless cohorts. ......... The least depressed parents are those whose underage children are in the house, and the most are those whose aren’t. ..... Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you’re spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They’re robbed of something that gives purpose and reward. ..... Not one told him of regretting having children, but ten told him they regretted not having a family.
Thoughts? Parenting is work. Relationship is work. Marriage is work. You might as well skip out on the relationship too and go straight to watching more TV.
I once read about an article in some kind of an anthropology journal that suggested some cultures in Africa deal with adolescence way better than the US society does. There is something called emotional infrastructure.
Image via WikipediaMy grandmother, greatgrandmother and greatgrandfather all died within a span of two years, in that order. A few years later my grandfather one morning left home without telling anyone to become a sadhu in the holy places of India for the rest of his days. 
