I Know the Nuclear Family Is Flawed But What Else Can I Do?

Red Flags is Novara Media’s advice column for anti-capitalists. Inspired by our columnist Sophie K Rosa’s book, Radical Intimacy, Red Flags explores how capitalism fucks up our intimate lives – not just our romantic relationships, but also our friendships, home lives, family ties, and experiences of death and dying – and what we can do about it. To submit a question to Sophie, email [email protected] or, if you’d like more anonymity, fill out this form.

How can I build a more fulfilling life as a single parent? I am a single parent to my six-year-old daughter. Ever since she was very young I’ve been aware of the need to build a community around us and I’ve worked pretty hard to do this. I joined a single-parent group when she was a baby and have made friends through this, so she’s had kids of different ages to play with. I’ve been thinking about co-housing/living communally for a long time but that would mean moving away as there aren’t any communal living projects in the town where we live. My daughter is really sociable and has lots of good relationships which is great. I, however, often feel lonely as it’s just the two of us at home. When her dad visits I really enjoy the time we spend together and I miss him a lot when he leaves. I know that the nuclear family is very flawed and inadequate but I’m struggling to think of an alternative at the moment and to move on from my daughter’s dad as I still have strong feelings for him. He helps a lot when he’s here but I resent him sometimes for the freedom that he enjoys when he’s not with us. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just the idea of a monogamous partner that I miss and if this is what I really want or what I’ve been conditioned to want.

– Craving Conformity

Dear Craving Conformity,

The other day I heard someone say they wanted to have a child because they felt isolated and believed being a parent would entail stronger community. I noticed how unusual this sounded to me. Among my social groups, which I imagine mirror many leftist and queer circles, parenthood is often equated with atomisation: lost connections, insular lives, loneliness. Indeed, it is often experienced this way, too; welcoming babies does often mean mourning friendships as they were.

So it was intriguing to hear this person turn the story on its head: this person wanted to become a parent because they wanted to strengthen their community. I don’t think this person was a leftist – or at least, I don’t think they had engaged with critiques of the nuclear family, as you clearly have. We could deem their vision of parenthood-as-community naive (“Impossible under capitalism!”) – but I read it as hopeful. There are of course many cultures in which parents tend to be held by stronger community support – though in Britain, that is not many people’s experience.

You are far from alone in the loneliness you are experiencing as a parent. A study by the British Red Cross found that 43% of mothers felt lonely all the time. Unsurprisingly, research shows this loneliness is central to the prevalence of maternal depression. It is evidently difficult in our society to feel connected to a wider community, because of how our lives are organised, syphoned off from each other and split off into discrete activities (work, home, leisure). Many new parents describe the experience as radicalising for this reason: it shines a light on the sorry structures we live under.

Less discussed on the left is the psychic experience of parenting. The psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has described motherhood as “a catastrophe of identity”. I wonder how you experienced the process of becoming a parent. I wonder if you are still in the process of finding yourself amid the chaos of new human life. What do you want and need from life, now? It sounds like you have a good idea: more connection, community; possibly a romantic partner. You write that you still have strong feelings for your daughter’s father. Perhaps you do, but I also think it is pertinent that you envy him. Do you want him or do you want his freedom? What does freedom mean to you now, as a parent?

As for whether it’s “just the idea of a monogamous partner” that you miss, whether you “really want” this or have “been conditioned” to – I don’t know if it matters too much. I’m not sure what it would mean to desire anything entirely independently of our conditioning – in fact, I’m not sure it would be possible. According to some psychoanalytic theory, we don’t really want what we think we want anyway. This might feel disorientating but it could also be elucidating. If you are experiencing loneliness, it makes sense that you would desire a romantic partner – such a relationship, after all, symbolises not dying alone in our culture. We want what we want, and that’s okay – so long as we remember we might want, or be better off wanting other things. As you know, a romantic partner is not the only – or the best – route to intimacy.

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the person who wants a child in service of community. If children meant – or could mean – more community, not less, what would this look like, in your most utopian imagination? What do you think of Shulamith Firestone’s vision in The Dialectic of Sex, in which “ten or so consenting adults” agree to a licence, renewable every seven to 10 years, and raise children together? In this society, children would have autonomy over which household they lived in. Your vision might be different.

As a cat mother of two, I sometimes think about how my feline children have been raised as a radical parenting blueprint that is also grounded in the realm of the possible. The cats are in a sense my responsibility – in that I chose to take them on and am primarily in charge of providing for them (food, vet bills, arranging care when I’m away and so on). However, they have lived in a communal household for most of their lives, in which they have had strong, trusting bonds with many others, who shared the responsibility of caring for them because they truly cared for them. They have lots of people they might call parents, if only they spoke English. Even now I no longer live communally, my neighbours and I know and look out for each other’s cats.

Caring for cats is very different to caring for humans; I wonder how different life would be for the many nuclear families on my street if they collaborated on childcare as well as cat care. Nevertheless, it can be comforting to notice the cracks in capitalism. Would it be helpful to think about non-binary options for you and your child? By which I mean options other than, or in between, a nuclear family and communal living (even if you do end up pursuing one of those options).

I think your dilemma – whether to move to a communal living project or remain in your current hometown – is instructive. It counterbalances the possibilities of non-normative ways of living with the possible foreclosures of stepping away from the social structures we know, love and possibly hate. Making transformative choices necessarily opens up new potential as well as closing down (or redirecting) other paths. Such is the ambivalence of parenting. In becoming a parent, you stepped into a new, unknown life – a new relationship with yourself, with another and with the world. Can you draw upon the wisdom of this metamorphosis as you make decisions about your life going forward? As a parent might do for a child, how might you – for yourself – take account of the limitations of the world whilst allowing yourself to dream, to take risks, to make mistakes, to create a life?