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‘Freedom’ and the Disintegration of the Family
Chatting to my nanny the other day, she mentioned that she had been invited by one of her old employers to the wedding of a child she once took care of.
“That’s wonderful!” I said enthusiastically.
“Time goes by so fast!” she replied “and Cécile tells me she is getting a divorce. So there were two pieces of news in one message.”
“That is too bad,” I respond.
“She is happy about it. She feels free. Maybe it’s a good thing.”
Free? She feels free? I told my nanny I don’t think that kind of “freedom” is very positive, for Cécile, for her children and future grandchildren. Free … to do what exactly?
This particular vision of divorce is a particular bugbear of mine. I was particularly alarmed to see how my nanny had drunk the Kool-aid so easily.
We share her salary with another family, 1800€ after taxes for 4 days/week. She’s legally employed and has five weeks of vacation and medical care, public school for her eight-year-old daughter. I also convinced her to start the French citizenship process so she and her daughter are now French-Senegalese. She lives with the little girl’s father but isn’t married to him and he’s a shadowy figure in that she doesn’t refer much to him. He takes care of the little girl often and works too. They live in a minuscule public housing apartment in a largely white area, which she clings to because she (correctly and poignantly) wants her daughter educated with “white kids” and not in one of Paris’ “diverse” suburbs.
One of the families we shared my nanny with picked up sticks unexpectedly (and rudely, but that’s another story) and moved out to a more “diverse” suburb because they were lefties who wanted “diversity” and the “real world.” My nanny, a Senagalese immigrant whose path to France hasn’t been easy, was horrified and used to call me to complain about the delinquents hanging around the park in their new neighborhood.
If my nanny and her child’s father stay together and she stays away from the poison our culture pumps into people about “freedom”, that little girl has a good chance to be healthily middle class. On her own, my nanny would not be “free”, which means what for a 45-year-old mother of a nine-year-old girl with her salary and responsibilities? Clubbing? Barhopping? Relaxing with a cocktail on a lounge chair on a beach? And to be honest, I don’t see her fantasy of “freedom” as more delusional and absurd than that of the other divorced lawyers and HR managers living in fancy Haussmanian apartments around us. What crazy and exciting things is my nanny’s old employer Cécile going to get up to with her new “freedom?” Besides making Christmas really awkward for the rest of her family and casting a shadow over her son’s wedding?
For example, we now share our nanny with a “famille recomposée” (the politically correct French for “fusion family”) consisting of a lawyer and her son from a previous relationship, her rather taciturn new companion and their new daughter. The son is nine and has a slightly bedraggled, forlorn look and he’s not super well-behaved or well-mannered (I am always a bit wary that he’s going to break something), but I feel sorry for him. His mother is marrying her new boyfriend. She’s very pretty, loves traveling, comes from southern France. She previously employed my nanny for her son, when she was with the young Robert Redford lookalike that is his father, and that’s how we all came together. I don’t think the nanny perceives what I perceive, and I am not wrong.
The cut is never clean. When Robert Redford had to be taken home from the hospital, he had no one else to help him but his ex-companion. She is not “free.” He is not “free.”
My nanny loves the new co-mom in the “garde” and I think she sees her as glamorous. I do not, nor do I think the co-mom sees herself, deep inside, as glamorous, and I think there is unhappiness there, but my nanny doesn’t see it. And of course, in our new age of Self-Realization, we aren’t allowed to say some families are better than others or to suggest that responsibility should take priority over self-realization.
This past winter my nanny confided in me about her own child’s father, complaining about how he’s too tired to go out over the weekend, doesn’t help around the house.
I tried to be appropriate in my responses, but I really tried to make her believe in her relationship and see the value in sustaining it.
I believe in marriage. I don’t think divorce is “freedom.” I think separation is particularly disastrous for people like her, and her daughter, who have a tenuous grasp on the middle class, albeit with a lot of help from the public support. Her daughter is attached to her papa.
My husband and I do family stuff on the weekend and once we were invited to a Saturday night party that was quite an obligation for us. So we very exceptionally asked the nanny to babysit that night and she very exceptionally came, because she was delighted that hubby and I were finally “getting out.” We went to said party and counted the minutes until we could come home again. She was almost disappointed that we were so boring.
An old friend of mine wrote to me a year or two ago to tell me her news after a long pause in our friendship. My news was – drum roll! – I am a right-winger! Hers was: “Daniel and I are divorcing.” We corresponded a bit more. Their three daughters (prepubescent) “had a hard time at first,” but were “being brave” and my friend was planning a vacation without those pesky kids with her new boyfriend, some Romanian dude. I never wrote back, basically ending the friendship, but the selfishness I perceived, the shortsightedness, immaturity, carelessness really appalled me and yes, I judged.
So when my nanny complained about Marianne’s father and talked about this phantom “freedom” that has so bewitched our culture, I told my nanny the most important thing for her daughter is her papa. Not vacations, not ballet lessons, not a big apartment. The papa. That is the key to the little girl doing all the things her mother dreams of for her.
My nanny, on her own, would not be “free.” It would be a catastrophe. Why can’t we say this?
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Great Post.
It has to be said, so tell your nanny. She may tell her friends. But it has to be said without apology and without debate. Papa needs to be the home. And mama and papa need to be married for their children to be healthy.
I did say most of that. This working from home thing post-lockdown has given me ample time to redpill her :)
I believe in marriage too, but it’s often considered “superfluous” here. It’s very sad, and as I explained, so destructive for people at the bottom of the ladder.
Excellent post. I continue to be amazed at all the baby boomers who had to go see psychiatrists for years on end because they didn’t get a pony for their birthday or whatever. However, they can get divorced and the kids will work through it (‘had a hard time at first”) and there will be no damage. When children are born they are born through the love of the parents. So when you tell a child you are no longer in love with each other, don’t they sort of disappear or are ‘unborn’ if you will? All the reassurance that dad and mom still love you can’t do away with that feeling I think. No wonder so many kids think that they are the cause of their parent’s divorce. Without marriage being viewed as a sacrament and acknowledgment of the sacrifices that have to be made for each other and the children, there is little in society to keep people together. Or to have them marry in the first place. Best wishes on helping your nanny.
Thank you! I agree so strongly. Divorces break my heart. My most deeply ”reactionary” prejudice is against divorced people. That said I know that not everyone has the same situation. And weirdly the two mothers after mine that I admire most are single mothers. But I suppose the key to my own inconsistency on this is that their mothering was characterized by self-abnegation: no career and no dating in either case, both 100 percent devoted only to the children. One started dating & remarried after her twins graduated from college. The other also has two daughters: one married to a great guy with two sons and the other has a steady relationship and a job.
Our former cleaning woman (we moved) had a nice daughter from a previous relationship (they didn’t marry). She then married a bad guy and had a son. Abusive guy favored his kid over her daughter. She’s now divorcing him. Divorce or effective divorce is not good for the kids.
It is depressing to talk to twenty-somethings and hear them express terror about marriage. Loss of fun, inevitability of betrayal and pain, so instead one should opt for often lengthy yet weirdly-conditioned cohabitation arrangements… People who study such things tell me that Boomer selfishness and high divorce rates traumatized the next generation.
My wife and I were blessed to have lots of friends who also had lots of kids. Not much brooding about missing out on the dating scene. Lots of support and joy.
There seems to be an especially concerted effort to encourage women to be selfish as if equality is all about emulating some caricature of the opposite sex, the least honorable, most selfish guys. Autonomy, promiscuity, loneliness within a crowd and no lasting ties seems like a self-evidently poor choice for trying to achieve lasting happiness.
I guess we forget that giving bad advice to women is the world’s oldest profession, invented by the snake in the Garden of Eden. Never works out well, does it?
Love this. But frankly, any story that starts out with any reference to a nanny, or housekeeper, or whatever, I just can’t relate. I own a 3-bedroom home, free and clear. But 1800€ is more than my monthly income. My middle-to-upper-middle-class parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters… not one of them ever had a nanny, or a housekeeper. Although they could have afforded to.
A colleague and her bf drove me home once. He was more and more late to pick up his kids and was becoming quite tense because there was so much traffic. She clearly couldn’t care less (they weren’t her kids). I thought the whole thing was pathetic.
The rates of abuse are higher for children not biologically related to the caretakers, but as Jordan Peterson discusses, the child from the previous relationship is really just an obstacle to its parent’s new partner. Imagine what that does psychologically to a child.
The 1800 is divided by two families and is a good price compared to American or UK prices for daycare, let alone a nanny who works in your home. I work outside the home, and this, like it or not, is a fact of life in large cities. I mentioned that because while I think she has a decent living wage (based on France’s SMIC, or minimum wage, around 10€/hr) , it’s not enough for living large if she were “free” on her own. That’s why I mentioned the numbers.
I think the same could be said of someone in your family who decided to divorce. It represents an incredible impoverishment financially, and let’s not get started on the emotional repercussions for everyone involved.
My dad once told me that our culture doesn’t celebrate the traits that make a good dad. Actually I think that our culture no longer celebrates motherhood either. I was a lefty when I was pregnant with my first (I say this all the time – apologies all round, folks) and if I had to do it all over I might have stayed home. Not because I think have missed something, because I actually don’t work very intensely, just enough to have colleagues and a little working life, and I feel very confident about my kids (the francophone nanny didn’t teach them English, which they speak fluently so my presence is there), but just to “give the finger” to our mass culture and to be ornery!
Meanwhile the message I am giving my daughters is Babies, Families, Husbands. After that find a job/skill/competence that doesn’t infringe on your family. And I am running truly against the grain. But my kids are prepared to live against the grain because every night we have to de-program them about “the destruction of the planet” which they harp about at public school. And we tell them they can’t repeat Mom and Dad’s dinner conversation about Trump otherwise no one will speak to us. So my kids are totally prepared for a Pravda Soviet-style intellectual life.
Another thing I notice which is lost as religion decreases is humbleness. Why be terrified of marriage? Because you might marry “beneath you” and find your vertiginous upward trajectory as Batwoman/Supermodel/Sheryl Sanburg hampered by some dork? Same goes for men. Everyone is taught nothing is too good for them and they are bound for the stars. When life is really about simple things: your morning routine on a Tuesday in February. Evoking Jordan Peterson: very few people have “Careers”. The vast majority work for money to live doing things that other people don’t want to do. Even if you have A Fulfilling Professional Life, one day you put your stuff in a box and go home and they all forget about you, unless you’re like… the Pope or William Buckley or Mick Jagger or something. People are no longer taught that they will probably be normal and ordinary, if they are lucky.
By the way, the post isn’t about the nanny. The Nanny is a proxy for telling larger story. The Relevance of what we have to say is in inverse proportion to the amount of money we have? What is this? The Guardian? Socialist Worker’s Daily? My husband’s dad is a retired plumber and he studied to become an actuary and yes we employ a nanny, with another family (the lawyer mom’s mother is a nurse by the way). And my nanny’s daughter could be a minister in France if her mother plays her cards right, which is the point of my story.
Interesting post. I was thinking a lot about divorce this week. Early last week, I met with a couple of my Brothers from church for lunch. During some great conversation, the topic of guilt came up. I mentioned I definitely don’t believe in wallowing in guilt but that it has served me pretty well so I don’t have as negative an opinion of it as they were talking and I get quite annoyed with the whole “don’t live with regret” type of sayings. I had many examples but told them about my divorce. I’ve been remarried for a long time. We have a near perfect life and I’m very happy with it but I still have regrets. My son from my first marriage is doing pretty well but I can clearly see how some things from our divorce has affected him in a negative way.
Later in the week, I reconnected with an old Army buddy. We hadn’t spoken in over 20 years. We were stationed together during the time I was divorcing. We were very close and close enough to even start a business together knowing we would eventually be stationed in different places. Him and his wife were also going through some difficult times then. Something happened with us and he stopped talking to me, for good reason. Every so often, I’d try to find him on social media so I could apologize but he had no social media presence. But I heard a while back him and his wife were still together and had other children. When he finally did pop up on LinkedIn we reconnected. He told me that they did indeed have three more children ranging from 8-16 other than the one son I knew but that they had gotten divorced a few years ago. He seemed happy about it and said it was long overdue. I didn’t know what to say. I have no idea what the details of the past 20 years were but I felt very sad to hear the news.
Anyway, I know very well that “freedom” gained after a divorce was by far the worst time of my life. I hate that so many give up way too easily on their marriage. I also don’t like that the Sacrament/institution of marriage is viewed as so unimportant nowadays. I literally trace just about every serious problem we have today to a breakdown of the family.
Chris Hutchinson (View Comment
Thank you so much for responding so honestly. I hope I didn’t sound too goody-goody. I just think society should treat divorce as a “bad thing,” a “tragedy” or even bad luck. It’s when we spin it so it’s somehow a good thing (“freedom”) that I get mad, and that’s why I wrote the post. I think it’s an achievement that your son is doing pretty well. So many don’t do well.
I don’t know what it is to be in a bad relationship. I know it’s all more complicated than a superficial glance, but I think a good start would be some honesty, acknowledging that divorce is a bad thing.
My co-mother who shares our nanny for instance. Unhappy relationship. She is very pretty, still young enough to start over and have another child. So all’s fair in love and war, right? Except her son is not doing well. I just saw him last week, flagrantly, silently, indifferently disobeying her, glued to the iPad while she impotently demanded he put it down. So yes, she had a chance for happiness and grabbed for it. Fine. But at what cost? There is a cost. Must we lie and say that there isn’t ?
The left has been treating abortion the same way.
Divorce too should be safe, legal and rare. I remember once a co-worker telling me that she was frequently beaten by her husband, and would have to wear sunglasses at work for her black eyes, and cover her bruises with make-up, for twenty years. It took that long for him to come to his senses, and i think sober up, and stop beating her. I said, So you stuck it out and it finally stopped. And she said, Yeah, but it was twenty years.
Yes, my mother and I were abused by my father so I see a place for it. Eleven years was plenty long enough. I was fortunate to then have a close to perfect family situation after my step dad came in the picture. There’s no doubt it was for the best in our situation but I can look back now and see divorce still had some drastic effects on me. I was just reminded a few days ago about a religious doctrine I wrote when I was a teenager (https://www.facebook.com/chrishutch13/posts/10158052604477946). I remember one of my big issues was how to treat divorce. I viewed it as a positive and it distorted my thinking when I ran into my own marital difficulties. I didn’t have much incentive to fight for my marriage, at least not in a way that wasn’t selfish and self-centered. It also distorted my views on religion because how could God want my mom to stay in that situation? Anyway, while I can accept the rare divorce, we have certainly gotten to a point in much of Western society where a divorce isn’t all that different than a high school break up. It’s sad.
Like divorce, I know there can be some exceptions but I also think the huge increase of never-marrieds going from 9% 50 years ago to 35% today has some terrible consequences for society. The post I linked above that reminded me of some of my teenage writings was actually about egotism. I strongly believe marriage and the family unit not only offers kids lots of great things, it also forces adults to live a life that’s not only about ourselves. Service, selflessness, commitment, humility are all learned. It’s quite a remarkable institution. Those things are getting less and less as the family disintegrates to the detriment of society, in my opinion.
I agree with you 100%!
This reminds me… I think everyone has heard about the French birthrate declining. Well, over the last few years, the number of childless people – men, women, all colors etc – that I have met on the floor of the building where I work is astounding.
Which brings me to a big new societal taboo: you can’t express pity or regret about someone being childless, even if that person isn’t there to hear.
I agree. I made a comment to my colleagues about an older (50+) divorced woman on my floor. She had changed her hair and put on different makeup. She looked great and seemed more cheerful. I suggested Sophie had met someone. I was directly accused of sexism. What’s so great about being a 50 yr old divorcee with one 1 grown child living in Canada? Has loneliness been abolished?
This is for another post, but the irony & negativity with which WOMEN (not men, obv) talk about their husbands & the way people complain about their kids. We saw it in lockdown humor. It’s downright unfashionable to openly adore your family. So I do & pass for a right wing fossile in my office. This is huge and I see and hear it everywhere. One colleague said she didn’t want to be locked down with her husband and two little boys (ages 2 & 4).
Also I support divorce certainly in the case of abuse. It’s more than necessary: it’s a duty to remove oneself and certainly the kids form the situation. Is it cynical or under informed of me to assume that this is rarely the reason for divorce these days?
Probably no more than understanding that abortions are rarely due to actual health issues.