A few years ago, when my cousin—I’m going to call her Betty Dunlap—was pregnant with her daughter, she got a phone call from the State Department of Human Services. After very few preliminaries, they asked her if she would be interested in fostering the daughter of Betty Dunlap. “But I am Betty Dunlap,” she told them. “And I haven’t had my daughter yet.” It took awhile for the picture to come into focus. It turns out that we have a second or third (or fourth?) cousin, unknown to us, also named Betty Dunlap, and this woman had several children who were all in foster care. She was also pregnant and about to have a baby girl, and she would not be allowed to keep the child (the reasons were not fully explained). And so they had contacted my cousin, Betty Dunlap, to ask if she might foster Betty Dunlap’s daughter, and longterm, whether she might adopt her, since they believed the baby would never return to her mother. “I thought about it a lot,” my cousin told me. She wanted to say yes, but she kept getting stuck on the question: am I ready to have two newborns at once, having never raised a child before? In the end, she decided that she was not, but she still thinks about the other Betty Dunlap’s daughter as she raises her own.
When she told me this story, I felt a shiver creep up my spine, and I laughed uncomfortably and loudly. What really separated my cousin from this other homonymous second/third cousin of ours and set them on their parallel but widely different courses? I couldn’t shake that feeling of alternate realities, where you have two options and somehow you take both: The Robert Frost poem, except the narrator splits in two and walks the road less traveled by, and the other one too. Usually you can’t see what happened to the other you—but here was a small glimpse. I also kept thinking about these baby girls. One was born to a Betty Dunlap who would love her directly, spend lots of time touching her skin, washing and feeding her, fretting over her needs. The other mother was not allowed to do the same, and we cannot know more than that. These two babies entered the world, but without the same structural support to build from. Their lives will be vastly different. It’s not to the credit or discredit of these babies. They were just born, both to women named Betty Dunlap, and now they have to go about making a life. Who deserves admiration for being born into comfort? Who deserves scorn and trouble for being born otherwise? Privilege, money, power, and love are often arbitrary. Our value systems can be autocratic and cruel.
Unexpected things will bring this story from the depths to the surface of my mind, most recently the news that President Biden, as part of the “American Rescue Plan,” is pushing for a monthly payment to parents to help cover the basic costs of raising children. There are lots of particularities, but the basic idea is that the IRS gives parents a credit up to $3,600 a year (depending on the child’s age and the parent’s income) for each child 17 or under, dispersed as a monthly payment starting in July and running through 2021. Known as the “child tax credits,” these monthly payments acknowledge that every parent has a mountain of costs associated with their child, and if we as a society want to function, we are much better off helping with the basics so no one is left with nothing. It’s a small step in the right direction, and one I hope stays for the longterm. Some people have described it as our first real exploration of what a Universal Basic Income program could do. My friends in Germany have told me they have permanent programs like this, which create a level of security and ease every month. They know they will be able to afford books, shoes, the small things that always add up. “It’s wonderful to live in a place where childhood is celebrated,” one told me, after she moved from Boston to Berlin, implying a mountain of sadness during her time in Boston, and more to these payments than mere money.
What if the unknown Betty Dunlap had a little more ease? Again, I do not know! But I want to live in a country where we care about our kids enough that we give their parents a foundation of support. Another example of a program that will benefit everyone but is targeted at parents and kids is Universal Pre-K, which Multnomah County voters funded in our last election cycle. (Sarah Mirk made an amazing comic describing how the bill was created and passed. It’s an excellent primer on how to get a bill on the ballot if that’s something you’re interested in learning about.) If these programs work collectively, it means fewer instances where stand-out individuals, say my cousin, are asked to do something that feels Herculean. If and when we have these programs, we must stay diligent that they serve real people, not generalized ideas of them. Why would we want anything less than multiple layers of support?
Such a difficult topic. Some might find it "socialism" -- the "S" word. Here we acknowledge the "luck of the draw. " Let's just call it "humanity."