Life with kids is life trivialized: you get up every day at the same time to take them to daycare or to kindergarten or to school, then you go to work, then in the evening you rush home to look after their bath, their homework, and their supper, and get them to bed. And that’s it. Every day.*1
Criminals are released on bail wearing an electronic security bracelet that allows the authorities to track them wherever they go. You, you won’t need one. Your kid will be your ankle shackles. Your traceability is assured. In the old Soviet Union, the regime allowed certain privileged people to travel to the West, but their kids stayed behind the Iron Curtain – a good way of stopping defection. Find the kid, and you find the parent. Wanted by the police? Thanks to your child, they will have no trouble finding you. In the working-class Belleville district of Paris, illegal immigrants are grabbed at the school gate when they come to get their kids.
There are husbands who vanish when they were supposed to be going out for cigarettes, prisoners who give their keepers the slip, old folks who wander off from their retirement homes. But parents who steal away from their kids without a fuss, that’s rare. It’s a good idea for a movie, but I doubt that it would ever get a subsidy from the National Cinema Centre.*2
It’s the always having to be there that makes having children so exhausting. When I had a full-time job at the same time as I had little kids, I calculated that I was working seventy hours a week. Forty hours at the office, thirty looking after my children. Three hours a night, five days a week playing mommy, plus seven hours on Saturday and the same on Sunday. Fortunately, I was able to take it a bit easy at work – otherwise I couldn’t have done it.
For some time now, overburdened parents have found a solution to this: alternating care. The child spends a week with the father, then a week with the mother. It’s a sort of half-time family. Of course, for this to work, the couple has to have already split up. But that’s just a minor detail when measured against what they are escaping from: the hell of domestic drudgery, each task more depressing than the last. Equality is the pay-off for the separated couple.
The naive will say, “Oh, but looking after children isn’t work!” Seriously? Raising kids means sticking to schedules, doing chores. It is sweat, tears, and guaranteed tedium. In Austria, women can now calculate the amount of time they’ve devoted to child-raising when they negotiate their legal age of retirement. If looking after children were agreeable and rewarding, people would do it for free, but that is not the case. Nobody wants to look after your children without financial compensation (except, of course, your own parents, who will exact some form of payment eventually, which I’ll get to later). The daycare worker, the teacher, the babysitter – they all get paid. Not very well, mind you: all the jobs connected to children are undervalued, and “child professionals” find themselves always less well paid than those who look after adults. Child psychologists: aren’t they less respected than shrinks for adults? And schoolteachers are paid less than university professors. Why? Because they have undertaken a painful and unrewarding task. The child – what a dreary subject!
*1 Éliette Abécassis, in her novel Un heureux événement (A Happy Event), describes the hell of motherhood as “sleepless nights, lost liberty, the tyranny of the daily grind, house arrest.”
*2 Even less from the European Union. The EU gives preference – I’m doing this from memory – to projects with “humanitarian impact or projecting a positive image of humanity.” Think about it. Pasolini or Fassbinder would never get a cent, naturally: they don’t make children’s films.