The inherent isolation of the American Dream

I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that I decided to write a book on loneliness during a period in my life in which I keep trying and failing and trying and failing to become a parent. 

The experience of infertility is lonely in all sorts of ways: there’s the weird silence around sex and reproduction; there’s the constant dehumanization of the healthcare system; there’s the feeling that you’re missing out on some fundamental human experience for reasons you and your doctors don’t really understand and can’t totally control despite the apparent promises of reproductive technology; and there’s the regular experience of being on the outside of the conversation when your friends start discussing daycare logistics. I’ve never longed to talk about daycare but still, somehow, it stings.

But when I first started this project, what I had in mind wasn’t the loneliness of infertility but the loneliness of success and the American Dream. I was thinking about the trajectory of my own life, which, in so many ways, has embodied the American ideals of success that I inherited from my parents and they inherited from theirs. I come from a long line of farmers on one side and coal miners on the other but somehow I became someone who found herself at the TED Conference walking right past Al Gore one April afternoon. Is there a more American version of success than standing in a room full of tech bros and self-made millionaires and high-profile academics and a famously failed presidential candidate, all while drinking free macchiatos and eating cricket protein bars and carrying a branded tote bag at a conference that costs $10,000 a head?

(In case you’re curious, my response to suddenly finding myself within ten feet of Al Gore was to immediately burst into uncontrollable laughter. And, no, I could never imagine nor justify spending $10K on a conference, but I was, very generously, offered a free spot. And, yes, now I use my ten-thousand-dollar tote bag for errands and dog walks.) 

What I’m trying to say is that my culture told me what success looked like, I followed the instructions as closely as I could, and, thanks to a lot of luck and privilege, it worked. If they were here to see it, I’m certain my grandfathers would find much of my life unrecognizable. 

The thing about the American Dream is that our visions for success are so rarely social or collaborative or communal. When I quit my teaching job to write full time, I felt like the captain of my own ship. I was living the life every writer is supposed to want, only to discover that that life felt extraordinarily small. Yes, I was the captain, but I was also the only person on my ship. 

My days were structured by an ongoing set of impossible calculations. Every decision—every day off, every new project, every cookie at the coffee shop—had to be run through a cost-benefit matrix that assessed its potential impact on my writing career and my bank account. (I could, for example, justify the cookie purchase if it meant I could work two more hours without getting so hungry I had to spring for the expensive sandwich.) I loved having time to write—like sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G loved it—but I hated being the boss, the overworked employee, and the uncompromising accountant. 

I felt competitive and small minded, overly attentive to the number of people who liked my Instagram posts. I daydreamed about overlong meetings and awkward conversations by the photocopier. I wanted to work toward something other than having a nice list of publications on my website. How had I designed a life in pursuit of creative freedom without sensing the scarcity and isolation at its core? 

When I thought about having a a kid, I could only see how hard it would be. The demands of parenthood would make my low-earning, time-consuming job impossible to justify. But when I pictured my future without a child in it, that life also felt small. Ralph Waldo Emerson said to dare to live the life you dreamed for yourself, but what if that dream conflicts with the realities of late-stage capitalism?

It took a while to understand that the problem of the American dream and the problem of parenthood were, in fact, the same problem. Both were shaped by scarcity (of care and collaboration, of money and time), both aspired to a miserable standard of self-sufficiency. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a parent, it was that I didn’t want the version of parenthood that was on offer—the one where you’re expected to actively mold your children into the right kind of person who gets into the right kind of school so they can get the right kind of job one day; where you have to put your name on a daycare waitlist the day you get a positive pregnancy test; where having a life that occasionally feels like yours (especially if you’re a woman) is contingent on earning enough money to pay a stranger to occupy your small human for a several hours each week. I’ll never understand why people insist on shaming women for not having babies quickly enough when the preconditions of modern motherhood are so totally bleak. 

I felt no more suited to making a productive, self-sufficient, goal-driven nuclear family than I was to being a freelance writer. I wanted a life that felt expansive and flexible and full of love. I wanted a lot more people on my ship.

I’ve spent a lot of time researching critiques of the nuclear family (if you’re interested, this is a good place to start) so I know there are lots of ways to make a life. And I know plenty of people who are living good, full, happy lives in families shaped by divorce, remarriage, adoption, coparenting, extended kin networks, and caretaking from friends and neighbors. Yet somehow, despite all this knowledge, I’m stuck on the family it appears I can’t have: the two parent biological family. 

Last month Mark and I did our second round of IVF, almost a year after the first one, thanks to the pandemic. And, despite new tests and procedures, even a new doctor, we got the same results as the first: no viable embryos. 

The embryos form, cells start dividing, but then, after a few days, they stop. This time one lonely embryo kept growing for six whole days. For a week it seemed possible that maybe, miraculously, this one would be okay. Maybe we’d have this one shot. But, when they sent it off for genetic testing, it was declared abnormal due to missing genes. 

I was suspicious of the nuclear family and now, officially, I can’t have one. It is a biological impossibility. On good days, I think about this problem as an opening, a chance to imagine some bigger possibilities for what love looks like in our lives. On all the other days, though, it’s hard to sit with.

It is easy to critique the belief that independence and self-sufficiency is the route to satisfaction and success. It is harder to actually live a life that rejects that idea.

Infertility has always felt like a problem that was ours to solve alone. Even when you arrive at this particular moment where becoming a parent requires involving other people—either through adoption or sperm/embryo donation—the system itself funnels you away from others and toward anonymity. For example, it’s much easier, faster, and cheaper to get sperm donated from a stranger than it is from someone you know. (Unless, of course, you DIY it.) The implicit message seems to be that you shouldn’t unnecessarily entangle your life with others’. Questioning this message makes me wonder if I am the one who doesn’t get it.

I have been thinking, too, about the loneliness of grief, how it disorients you. Whatever path you were taking through the world now appears thorny and overgrown. I cannot tell, despite all my best efforts, if my response to this overgrowth is outsized or totally reasonable. 

It’s hard to calibrate your own sadness when nothing tangible has been lost, when the thing you can’t have is something you weren’t even sure you wanted. There is only the sense that what once seemed possible no longer does. And, put that way, haven’t I just written a definition for what it means to live a human life?

Lately I’ve been reading and finding comfort in Mia Birdsong’s How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. She has so many smart things to say about sustaining connection in the face of modern capitalism that my highlighter quite literally ran out of ink. Take this passage: “Creating relationships and connection outside the arrangements that our current culture presents to us can be exciting and liberating. We get to be creative, coming up with new ways to understand our connections to others and new ways of connecting. We get to throw out what we’ve learned to want and discover what we actually want and need. We get to uncover ways of belonging and loving that we didn’t see before.”

I want this to be true. Intellectually I believe it is, though I can’t quite see what it means for me yet. 

There are about a hundred other highlighted passages I could include, but you should just read the book. Thank you to my friend Juliet who recommended this book to me months ago when I started this newsletter and apologies that I’m just now getting around to reading it when it obviously could not be more up my street. So much of what I’ve written here crystallized while reading the first chapter.

To close I will say that it took me about six weeks to write this letter. I’ve worried that my feelings are too big and messy to get right on the page. I’ve been afraid—am afraid still—that someone will pity me, or worse: they will see all the bigger problems in the world and wonder why I am so hung up on this one. But I am always telling my students to resist the urge to set themselves at a tidy remove in their work, to avoid polishing every emotion down to a dull sheen. Isn’t that kind of writing just another empty house built on the illusion of self-sufficiency? I’m not sure of the answer to this question, if I’m honest. But today I’m telling myself that it’s yes.

Yours,

Mandy