Kim Brooks: Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of frie...

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.

Kim Brooks

never me worry spring

I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

Kim Brooks

reading history art school

'Did our parents really let us do that?' is a game my friends and I sometimes play. We remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds.

Kim Brooks

alone parents game friends

In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.

Kim Brooks

parents child family children

We're contemptuous of 'distracted' working mothers. We're contemptuous of 'selfish' rich mothers. We're contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don't need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don't have to look very hard to see the common denominator.

Kim Brooks

look you selfish work

I have no choice but to admit that, for a while, I was a casual viewer of 'American Idol.' By 'casual viewer,' I mean I watched every episode aired between 2004 and 2007.

Kim Brooks

american choice admit casual

I wonder if all love affairs, all marriages, all lifelong partnerships, aren't in some ways a turning away from the world.

Kim Brooks

partnerships wonder love world

All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.

Kim Brooks

adversity pain sun children

I love my husband. I love my family.

Kim Brooks

i-love family husband love

I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.

Kim Brooks

without restaurant formal work

I'm sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I'd had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn't necessarily very good.

Kim Brooks

good my-own easy education

A lot of my friends aren't parents. I find this culture of all-consuming motherhood so oppressive. Not that I don't like to talk about my kids, but if I'm socializing, I don't want to talk about Montessori versus Waldorf.

Kim Brooks

parents friends motherhood culture

I grew up in a time when I could play and bike in the neighborhood, largely because my parents assumed that if I ever needed help, I could ask a nearby adult.

Kim Brooks

parents bike play time

Virginia, like most states, has few guidelines about how closely parents are expected to supervise their children. As a result, I was charged not with leaving my son in the car, but with the misdemeanor of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Kim Brooks

parents car children son

This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.

Kim Brooks

feel shame women flaws

We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.

Kim Brooks

live now country children

As a teenager, I'd longed to get my driver's license so I could get away from my parents. Then I'd longed to go to college to get away from the people I'd called my friends.

Kim Brooks

parents friends college people

In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others' inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.

Kim Brooks

feel energy people way

People don't think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.

Kim Brooks

alone think children people

In spring 2011, I was arrested for allowing my son, then 4, to wait in a car with the windows open for a few minutes.

Kim Brooks

wait car spring son

Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of friends that seemed so adequate, so fulfilling. Marriage cements these inward movements. Children draw partners closer, but they can also draw you further away from the friends and lives you once knew.