Anytime I see a group of people moving in the same direction - whether they seem to be a cohesive cohort or not - I always kind of assume I’m missing out on something. There’s always a little voice in the back of my head that second guesses my original plan and asks if I should turn around to go with them. Nine times out of ten, I don’t do it. But something about this group of people excitedly showing up to a park at 8 pm on a random weekday night with chairs and blankets and glow sticks had piqued my interest.
“Hi, can I ask — what is this?”
A man about my age, maybe a few years older, looked up from his phone. He was standing behind his child (I assume and hope), who was reaching up to take a book from the tiny library at the edge of the park.
“Oh! It’s really cool. The library partners with the observatory over the summer to do these star-gazing nights with the kids!” Star-gazing night? Obviously, I’m in. “Yeah the librarians read a few books and when it gets darker they put some telescopes out for the kids.” Psh, for the kids. I could be a kid. I wanna see some stars! “It’s really so amazing to watch them learn at this age, like they’re really understanding what a star is for the first time. Well, sorta!” Oh… yeah, that sounds really sweet. I’d love to see a kid learn about stars for the first time. “Do you have any kids?”
The question surprised me, but I’m not really sure why. It was a completely normal question to ask a 30-year-old woman standing adjacent to a children's event in the park. When I get asked if I have kids, especially from someone my age, my gut reactions range from “um how dare you, I’m a am a child” to “oh, are we still having kids these days?”
Sometimes I just feel like I’m doing something wrong by not having kids.
I was familiar with the feeling to which this man referred. Seeing a kid learn something in real-time is magical, especially if you’re the one who gets to teach them. I’ve experienced this with my nephew River in small ways, like teaching him to play the game Monster (which is literally just tag, but one person acts like a monster, and when they catch you, you turn into a monster and chase them back). He asks to play every single time I see him, and I dread the day he doesn’t ask because it’s lame now.
I haven’t wanted biological children in a long time. I remember taking a trip with my parents when I was a junior in college, driving with my mom and explaining to her, quietly: I just don’t think I ever want to be a mom. I think she was sad about that at the time. In the decade since then, she’s been on social media enough to know that the pressures and publicity of being a mother in my generation were not only unattractive but unfeasible. What she was seeing was a shift away from The Parent Is The Decider parenting to what we’d call Gentle Parenting now. “Back when I was raising you kids, we didn’t have to think about as much — we didn’t have to worry about the emotional well-being of our kids. Just getting them from point A to point B.” My therapist is already very well aware of this… take.
“No,” I smiled at the man. “No children.”
“Well, if you want to come back with some friends or something, the librarians will be out here until 9 pm.”
But I didn’t have friends to invite either. I understand he was trying to include me in a way that wouldn’t feel isolating, but he wouldn’t be able to avoid that.
I’d spent the past few days in a quiet pain. When you hear earth-shatteringly bad news with no one around you to grieve with, you have two options: rage-post your feelings on social media while doom-scrolling, or escape into the woods with no cell service. I’d done both and didn’t feel any better. I was fucking lonely in a new way, but I was becoming familiar with it.
There were about two dozen kids all gathering on blankets with their flashlights and parents, getting cozy for a story from the librarians. It was a perfect evening, clear and warm. Towards one end of the park, staffers from the Observatory were setting up tiny telescopes. At the other end, tables with crafts and glowsticks and stickers were laid out for the kids to grab at with excitement. Parents chatted with other parents, kids snuggled up to each other under blankets, and a few young, childless couples sat around the edges - maybe having a “practice being a parent” night.
And there it was, smacking me in the face with tiny glowstick bracelets: I was jealous of these parents. At a time when my fear of getting pregnant is at its all-time high, sitting alone in a parking lot after making soup and smoking weed, I was jealous of these parents.
When I ask people why they chose to have kids, one variation on a theme I hear most often is: because I don’t want to be alone [when I’m old, when I’m sick, when I’m going through life’s inevitable stresses.]. Never mind that *I* always have to justify to anyone why I don’t want children, the reasons for having kids seemed pretty selfish. Because you want to guarantee someone will take care of you? A promise that they have absolutely no say in? And yet I’m the selfish one for not wanting to take care of another living thing.
Different cultures view motherhood and family and community wildly differently, but from my white Christian upbringing — a culture that continues to force its domination regardless of support or value — it seemed most parents were creating their own micro-communities in the absence of something grander and more integral to society at large. Creating a family presented a way to retain control of a community, to impose your values onto a group of people, to be the only one deciding what everyone in that micro-community must contribute.
White, Christian, patriarchal American society encourages nuclear family structures to reinforce the idea that your community is your immediate family, and fuck everyone else. Blood is thicker than water. Nowhere is that more pronounced than in the modern American suburb.
Suburbs really exploded after World War II, with the GI Bill subsidizing homeownership for veterans but nowhere to put them all. Even without GI Bill subsidies, Levittown1 - the shining example of suburban bliss - kept prices low by offering extremely standard homes that could be easily and cheaply produced. These havens became all the more appealing in the wake of Civil Rights protests and riots in major American cities, allowing white families to abandon the “communities” they were once a part of in favor of a quieter, less complicated community: the community of your family, in the suburbs.
Even though I’d spent my elementary school years in a suburb and had really fond memories of my childhood, it’s not hard to find deeply isolating flaws in this design. For starters, they were built with the assumption that you drive into the city to work and drive home to your suburb to sleep. This separated you from any community you could also find in colleagues or other people in your office building, making these Others unimportant to you beyond discrete transactions. This would prove to be useful when Americans found themselves in meaningless, unimportant jobs that do not serve a common, communal good. Cars truly are the ultimate escape, aren’t they?
Beyond the “side effects” of suburban sprawl, there were (and still are) very deliberate practices in place designed to organize the Other into explicit categories of race and class. Redlining2 proved an incredibly successful way to divide people into discrete communities with access to vastly different services, codifying our differences into tangible value. When I think about why I’m envious of the Boomers who try to explain why I’m so lucky to live in a van, I’m reminded again and again that home ownership and value is still the most prominent and “accessible” way to build wealth in America. It’s not an accident that Black families in America own about 15% of the wealth of white families3 — the value assigned to homes in white neighborhoods versus Black neighborhoods is a specific design.
By separating families from The Communal Good - with diverse, complicated structures of compromising and learning from one another - white families were able to insulate themselves from critique because everyone around them believed in the same few beliefs. Their wants were met, but not their needs. This is not unlike how I feel about the Pacific Northwest, but that’s a rant for another time.
The families at this library event were mostly white, which checks out for a city that is 77% white itself. I didn’t feel at home in places where there were predominately white people - again, saving my PNW rant for later - even if most of those other white people agreed with me politically or otherwise. Community is messy, which is probably why people with privilege and a weak backbone tend to opt out. I see it in the white liberals threatening to leave the United States after Roe was overturned, and I see it in myself now, isolating in a van.
The concept of suburbs has spawned an even more banal horror: the subdivision. These tiny, totally insular cul-de-sacs of identical white houses all smushed together on half-acre lots, often guarded by a single entry point, maybe with a gate code. There are no services in a subdivision - no gas stations or convenience stores or any other venue to interact with someone other than your immediate neighbor - just a lightly gated community full of people that you didn’t even have to get to know.
This is what I see the most popping up in every city in America. The last time I visited my adolescent home, I couldn’t find it by memory because there were too many goddamn subdivisions entirely surrounding it. In Flagstaff, they were popping up on the west side of the city, expanding further into the Coconino National Forest. These are often the communities both causing and most affected by increased wildfires, in the “exurbs.”4
I was laying low in Flagstaff for a few days on my way back east. Truth be told, I’d spent a shitton of money on gas over the past two months in California and I figured, it couldn’t hurt to wait until payday to start driving again. Plus, Flagstaff - unlike hundreds of miles before and after it on Route 66 - was notably not the desert, and that was reason enough to take a reprieve.
I didn’t know anything about Flagstaff really, given the only other time I’d ever been here was for about 24 hours, spent entirely at a GreenTree Inn right off the highway on what was technically a second date. (Dating while living in a vehicle is complicated enough, but two people living in their vehicles? Hard not to end up in a few sketchy situations from time to time.)
After I left Flagstaff last time, a massive wildfire took over the city and surrounding Coconino National Forest5. This fire had burned over 19,000 acres of forest back in April, and the lack of forest meant the monsoons moving in would have nothing to absorb the excess water, leading to flooding. This exact intersection of needing more housing and protecting the environment is where too many of us take a side rather than recognize a much more complicated mix of policy solutions.
I wondered how these parents justified having children at a time when the world was on fire and/or flooding. That’s not meant to be a judgment as much as a genuine question: how do you explain wildfires, floods, and other, constant natural disasters to your children?
Did I not want kids because I truly never wanted to? Or because the thought of having to raise a child in the world now felt so impossible and unnecessarily cruel?
I walked around downtown Flagstaff to try and get a feel for what it’d be like to live here, and to get out of my head a bit. This is hard to do when you always feel like you’re on vacation. I wandered into a vintage shop to poke around the costumes and fun accessories. An older woman was at the counter on the phone with her insurance company asking about flood insurance. “We’ve never had it before living here, but, you know, sounds like it might be time.”
When she was off the phone, she hollered into the dressing room: “those are real acid wash jeans, they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore!” I love a good, real vintage find. Even if they look like every other pair of jeans this color, I knew they were real. This woman probably already knew that about me, that’s why I was here in her shop.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked as I brought the jeans to the counter.
“Oh, about 30 years at this point. I bounced around a lot.”
“Where are you from originally?” - I like asking this question when I’m assessing a new place to live. I find it fascinating how far people do or don’t travel to find a new community of their own choosing.
“North Carolina,” she said a little sheepishly.
“No way! Me too!”
“Really?! Whereabouts?”
“The Raleigh area.” This was an easy defense to not have to explain to a stranger that I’m technically from a suburb. We ask the question where are you from to establish some sort of relationship, a common background, a community. “But I haven’t lived there in years.”
Sometimes when people ask this question, I tell them I’m from DC. That feels much more correct given I’d lived there for a whole decade as opposed to a place I left the second I had a chance to. But every once in a while, I found it advantageous, even exciting, to tell someone I’m from Raleigh.
“I’m from Charlotte, but haven’t lived there in a long time. Most of the family is still back there.”
“Do you miss it?”
“God, no. I mean, I miss my family, but this is my home now.”
There it was. The separation of family and community. The acknowledgment that your family isn’t always the only community you have, even if that’s what we’re told and expected to believe.
“I like it here,” I told her, “but it’s tough to be alone during a time like this.”
This was my way of testing the waters with her. Would she know I’m referring to Roe? If so, would she respond well to that sentiment? I just needed someone to share some grief with; even better to find an elder who had seen and lived through fighting for Roe the first time around. That’s not something I had in my own family.
“I know,” she said solemnly. “It really does feel like dark times.”
We shared that kind of soft smile you offer to a stranger passing on the street. It wasn’t really a smile at all, of course, it was a facial expression meant to convey yeah, I know.
“I’m actually making my way back to DC now. I lived there for a decade before the van and I’m feeling called to be with my community again.”
“They need bodies right now. If you’re able, they need you.” She spoke of protesting the way I’d only heard men speak of war. But it felt encouraging, like it was something I could actually, physically do.
We spoke for a bit longer. I paid for my vintage acid-washed jeans and gave her a final smile. “Thank you for being here,” I told her. I didn’t really know what else to say. But I think she knew what I meant.
She smiled at me and said, “give ‘em hell.”
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/levittown-america-prototypical-suburb-history-cities
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm
https://grist.org/climate-energy/how-suburban-sprawl-makes-wildfires-more-deadly/
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-wildfires/2022/04/29/tunnel-fire-containment-jumps-89-over-19-000-acres-charred/9581136002/
I grew up in the west coast version of Levittown - the San Fernando Valley, the quintessential Los Angeles suburb, home of movie and television stars, rock stars, movie and media production hands, an entire industry devoted to bringing America and the world a fictionalized view of that world as shiny and new as a glossy coat of white paint.
Now I'm living in the PNW, so I'm curious about this one line: "This is not unlike how I feel about the Pacific Northwest, but that’s a rant for another time." - which your brought up twice. Reading on to find out.