Childcare Art Quotes

Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor – housework, childcare – relegated mainly to women. The first is seen primarily as a matter of creating and maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations. [...] This makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as women’s work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care most about – our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions – are always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.

At first she did nothing, waiting for her husband to wake, which he did not, because that wasn’t a thing he ever did. She waited longer than she usually did, waited and waited, the boy wailing while she lay as still as a corpse, patiently waiting for the day when her corpse self would miraculously be reanimated and taken into the Kingdom of the Chosen, where it would create an astonishing art installation composed of many aesthetically interesting beds. The corpse would have unlimited child-care and be able to hang out and go to show openings and drink corpse wine with the other corpses whenever it wanted, because that was heaven. That was it. She lay there as long as she could without making a sound, a movement. Her child’s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest. That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself—that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do. You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration. You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own. And upon hearing the boy’s scream, the particular pitch and slice, she saw the flame behind her closed eyes. For a moment, it quivered on unseen air, then, at once, lengthened and thinned, paused, and dropped with a whump into her chest, then deeper into her belly, setting her aflame

Where am I going with all this? I’m merely stating that it’s all right to say no. To all the young mothers out there who are beginning to feel the pressure to sign your preschooler up for soccer, basketball, or gymnastics simply because everyone else is, you have a choice. If your child shows an interest in or a talent for something, then, by all means, foster that. Encourage it. And sign him up. But if not, if your little one has no interest in soccer or basketball or gymnastics, then allow her to find her own interests and activities. Don’t feel pressured to spend precious hours of your little one's childhood sitting in a gym or at a soccer field just because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do. You have a choice. Put it in perspective. And enjoy your children's childhood, because it goes by so very quickly. Your memories remain. Make them happy ones. Be it sports or art or movies or childcare, let your child find his or her own thing. Put it in perspective. And enjoy. Stoltz, BillieJo. Afternoon Coffee: Thoughts on Motherhood, Family, Home, and All Things Cozy . Kindle Edition. Stoltz, BillieJo. Afternoon Coffee: Thoughts on Motherhood, Family, Home, and All Things Cozy . Kindle Edition.