Inviting Interruptions
Our own adventures in childcare and chronos time
This Thursday, I’ll share highlights from your discussion of the limits of consent culture. And I have a profile in Breaking Ground of an intergenerational project where retired nuns and single mothers in college will live together.
It’s an exciting week for our family, as the country debates childcare subsidy policy, and our daughter begins three-day-a-week Montessori. Alexi and I had no childcare during the pandemic, and we’ve only both been away from her for short periods (about an hour) while our parents visited and we took a walk.
I’ll return to some of the discussion about childcare policy in future newsletters, but today, I’m thinking about an essay I found via Anne Helen Petersen’s substack, “What It Was Like Growing Up on a Commune,” by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.
One of the passages that stuck out to me is below:
But whether or not you’re living on a commune, community interdependence requires us to give up our stubborn belief in the myth that we have complete autonomy over how we spend our time.
Neoliberal family life has turned the very idea of accountability to others into a dreadful burden. We associate having to check in or do favors for others as a kind of systems failure. If you’re looking to optimize your schedule for maximum efficiency, having to pause and account for someone else’s pace and needs—someone who isn’t even related to you!—throws a spanner in the works. At a certain point, though, we owe it to ourselves to ask what rewards we’re reaping from having optimized our nuclear families. For what?
Outside childcare will make us more accessible to others, but not in the way we were available to Beatrice. Our obligations to others are scheduled on our calendars with emails or texts to prepare. For the most part, people don’t drop in and depend on us.
A lot of the childcare discussion seems to be about freeing parents to return to chronos, clock time, rather than be in kairos—God’s time—the time that is utterly attentive to the work or needs at hand, not a larger schedule. I wrote a little bit about the in-breaking of kairos into chronos for the Institute for Family Studies.
Even after we welcomed Beatrice, I found myself on involuntary kairos time, since she entered the world through an unexpected c-section. Anything I did, even something as seemingly simple as getting into or out of the hospital bed, took my full attention. I was forced to give everything its needed time—no option to shortchange or squeeze it.
My recovery came as others entered kairos through me: my husband, my mom, and many others leaving aside their schedules to come and act at the opportune time to care for me. It was a good way to begin because parenthood will always involve moments we can’t plan for and dependence on others. So will all the rest of the parts of our lives, but those exits from chronos won’t always be embodied as beautifully as our new limits are: given life in our daughter.
I’m glad politicians are making proposals to support parents, but I hope to see proposals that aren’t about letting parents act as freely as non-parents. I’d rather give non-parents more flexibility to be depended on, the way parents are.
> How do you make yourself available to interruptions?
When I call a friend or SKYPE with my dad, I try to make it so there's at least an hour free before I -have- to do anything. (My dad and I hit a new record a few weeks back, Skype'ing for 2 hours straight!) When I called a friend this past week, I got another good idea from what SHE was doing - taking a walk outdoors while talking to me!
Though if someone's thinking, "If I had to that kind of 'space' in my schedule, I would never call friends!" - well, that has been a problem! And also many worries about lost opportunities... "What if I try to call A, but she doesn't answer? She might return my call - and I'll want to keep the line open, so I can't call B." (didn't have any kind of "call waiting" feature)
> Do you have someone whose chronos time you can interrupt?
When I was a college freshman, one morning I was flipping out, sad and worried because I had a crush on a guy (and that wasn't going to work out), which made me I incredibly distracted and had utterly failed to finish the HW set that was due that day.
I went to a friend's room, and sat on her couch and cried. She listened to me, encouraged me most strongly, prayed with me & for me. And then there was the offer: "If you are ever feeling overwhelmed or worried, you can always come find me, even if it's 2am and you have to wake me up-- (pauses, realizing that will affect her roommate Michelle) Yes, even if it's 2am, I know it will be okay with Michelle. You can come talk to me."
During those four years, I didn't take her up on the exact offer, (but once I pulled her out of the Bible Study we both attend to talk about urgent guy problems!) our friendship was still marked by it. Fast forward to about 3 years after college. She and I are both married, and by then I think she had 1 baby. I am incredibly lonely living in Vancouver BC, and she is on the East Coast. One evening, about 11pm or midnight, I am flipping out, so I call her (thinking it's 3 hrs time difference, so about 8 or 9pm for her). We talk for an hour or two. At the end of the call (and no sooner) she gently lets me know what time it is there. I am shocked (in my day job, I regularly use a map of time zones to decide when to make calls) and she says she figured out that I didn't know how late it was and it is okay. <3 She speaks in a way that lets me know it TRULY is okay - and would have been okay even if I'd known how late it was. (Later, though, I thought to myself, "It's me finally taking up the offer she made freshman year! Semi-accidentally!")
More recently, when the lockdowns began, my sister & two other friends said things that had the message, "If you need help, I will help you." (when there were worries about shortages of material goods) I treasured in my heart the thought that, "IF there's an emergency, they are the people I will call for help."
It's weird how these promises we speak - or write in an email or text - can shape things.
Any sort of close family relationship, in my view, invokes kairos, especially between spouses, parent and child, or adult child and elderly parent.
The commune experiment is a bit too out there, in my view. The notion of kairos in that context would seem intrusive. But I can see how it might work.