Truthfully enough, I exclaimed that I love my new job partly because I get to be there without any children. My kids are 7 and 8. They have never been in daycare or school. I have left them with a sitter, well let's see - including family, I would say my husband and I have left our children maybe 10 times in these 8 years. We don't leave them. We love them. We like to be with them. We understand that they don't want to be left. We know, so deeply, that the day will come when they are gone from our house. We know that day will arrive with breathtaking speed. We wanted our children, we take them seriously, and we feel it is our job to care for them. It isn't anyone else's job. It is our job. It is a job that pays our most profound satisfactions and some of our deepest moments of love.

But today when I mentioned I was happy to work a few hours in the company of adults, someone turned to me and said, "I know. Why wouldn't everyone want to go back to work? Why would anyone want to be home with kids?" I hear this more often than I care to admit. And I never fail to be dumbfounded by statements like that. I had no reply. I just sat up with the mouth that lives inside my brain hanging wide open and waggling there speechless. This person doesn't know I homeschool my kids. And I am only going to be working evening hours when my kids are home with their Dad.

How has this sentiment become so normal? This is something cultural and deeper than a need for two paychecks. I am talking about a generation of parents who do not enjoy the company of their children. I have met some of these kids. I don't enjoy their company either. I dare say, no one does. But how is it possible that parenting skills have become systemically degraded enough to make this common? It is as if a generation of children are coming up who got stuck at age two. They hit two, discovered the word no, and their parents just gave up.

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And abdication of responsibility. But how does it happen? I know these parents love their children, or at least, they would say they love them. They must feel love for them. Yet they do not care to spend much time with them.

I had postpartum depression pretty bad. My girlfriend said, "fuck that, I had postpartum rage." Her honesty made me laugh at the time. But now it makes me think. Why are mothers so sad and angry? I am talking about our generation of women. We have been to college, had live-in boy friends, careers, total freedom to choose. Why do so many of us shrink from our children?

I think I might know why and it has to do with air conditioning. We live in the deep south and this summer has been so strange. It has not gotten really bone sucking hot yet. We have had hot days here and there, days in the mid 90s are hot. But the temperature falls right back into the 80s. It feels like fall. We have been able to keep our air conditioning off. I have not turned it on once.

Today was 95 but since the rest of the week is supposed to hover around 88 we decided to shut the house up mid day and suffer through. I was vacuuming, shaking rugs, sweating, and crabby as a hornet when all of a sudden some thunder rolled and a cool breeze floated by. I called the children to hurry and open all our windows and come outside to feel it. We were elated. It was so delicious it was worth the sticky prelude. And I thought to myself, as soon as you turn on the air conditioner you lose the subtlety of the weather. As soon as the air in your house chills to 78 you will bake when you open the door. Everything will feel one way, hot.

Our generation of men and women have grown so accustomed to our freedom. In fact, we were jailed in school for so long and we were desperate to be free. I think we have lost an appreciation for shades of freedom. Our free-o-stats are wonky and spending four hours or four days alone with our younger children feels one way - trapped. We are freedom junkies raising spoiled brats. How perfectly hideous.

But there is more. I think that being raised in the school system has given us a disdain for everyone younger. Including our own children. Isn't it ghastly? Remember how it works on the play ground? "You can't play with us. You are a baby."

Being trapped in a room full of X year olds, on a hall full of X year olds, in a school full of XYZ year olds has taught us to hate them. We hate X year olds. They are miserable and they suck. We could not wait to get away from schools full of them and we do not want to go back. We did our time, now we shuck our children off and send them on to do theirs. A grim and cyclical dance.

Ghastly addendum: look how we long for freedom. When we finally arrive home with our babies we panic. Almost like convicts who can't handle life on the "outside". We flee as fast as we can back to what we know: life in a corporation surrounded by people our own age.

My kids only come around once in my lifetime, and they (hopefully) won't be with me forever. I chose to have them, and I choose, freely, to make them and my family a priority in my life. This stage of life won't last forever. While it does, I've climbed on for the ride.
~David Albert, in "And the Skylark Sings with Me"