A commenter on my last post drew my attention to Katie Roiphe’s new piece at Slate, about being a professor mom raising a six year old and a toddler with different fathers, neither of whom she’s currently with.
It’s an aggravating but interesting piece. For one thing, Roiphe is a distinctively gifted writer, steeped in the English literature she teaches and adept at the elegant turn of phrase.
Leaving aside my personal thoughts for now (as someone who, myself, grew up with a divorced mom and a half sibling) of how her children might feel now or later about all this, I will say that Roiphe makes a good point about how the educated class talks wild but acts sedate, and the subtle moralism (or, when you’re on the receiving end of it, apparently the not so subtle moralism) they/we use to police behavior. Her essay is in part a catalog of the ways the literati make clear to one of their own that it’s not cool to have a baby out of wedlock.
At the same time, I’d like to correct a couple misleading omissions. Roiphe writes:
It’s worth noting, though, that nearly four in 10 babies in this country are currently born to single mothers, and a rapidly growing percentage of those mothers are adults.
Actually overall it’s now more than four in ten, but it’s probably more relevant to Roiphe’s world to note how many college educated women have children outside of marriage: about six percent. Having a child without a husband is just not something that college professors like her do, much.
Roiphe also writes:
Here someone is bound to say, “Studies have shown …” But as far as I am concerned the studies can continue to show whatever they feel like showing. There are things that can’t be measured and quantified in studies, and I imagine the multitudinous varieties of family peace are among them. Not to mention what these stern studies fail to measure: which is what happens when there is anger or conflict in the home, or unhappy or airless marriages, relationships wilting or faltering, subterranean tensions, what happens when everyone is bored.
In fact there is much work on the impact of divorce and high conflict marriages and other such matters on children. The short version is that high conflict marriages are bad for kids, but only a minority of marriages that end in divorce are high conflict. Most end for other reasons, like the boredom Roiphe refers to (“it seemed to some as if I were getting away with something, as if I were not paying the usual price… [of] take-out Thai food and a video with your husband on a Saturday night”). In a national study I co-investigated some years ago, my colleague and I found that while high-conflict marriages are indeed bad for children, so-called “good” divorces are harder for children than low-conflict but unhappy marriages.
Roiphe’s made her choices; her kids have a hard-working, educated mom and with luck and grace they’ll be fine. But to other Slate readers who haven’t yet had their babies I guess my advice, as a mom married this week for 15 years, about the same age as Roiphe, well-steeped in the boredom and comfort and challenge and spark that comes with sticking with somebody for life, I’ll just say about her vision, don’t try this at home.
