#michael eskin

   Q & A with Michael Eskin, author of The Wisdom of Parenthood

What, would you say, is the main or most important insight, thought, or proposition of your book?

Adoption is the truth of parenthood. This proposition is the nub of The Wisdom of Parenthood. And while it may sound counterintuitive and all too provocative, it makes perfect sense if you consider the following:

1. Since paternity and maternity do not necessarily lead to parenthood, being biologically related to our offspring cannot be an essential component of parenthood. For if it were, only biological parents could be considered parents—which is an untenable (if not absurd) proposition in view of the countless biological ‘parents’ who have abrogated or defaulted on their parenthood throughout history, and, conversely, in view of the countless biological strangers who have been de facto (if not always de jure)parents to myriads of children.

2. Thus, whatever parenthood is, it cannot be a function of biology and procreation. This doesn’t mean, of course, that parents cannot also be, and often are, biologically related to their children; it only means that it is not biological kinship that makes a parent (—just think of all the egg and sperm donors who are biologically related to children whom they will never parent). So what does make a parent?

3. What makes a parent is the irrevocable commitment to and assumption of responsibility for another human being. And this is most saliently and poignantly evidenced in  adoption—understood as a cultural/legal practice and, more importantly, as a way of living and being, as an ethic—precisely because, unlike the propagation of the species through procreation, adoption is by definition not a natural/instinctual necessity, but an act of absolute freedom, pure choice, a true gift.

It is in this sense, then, that adoption can be said to be the truth of parenthood: we first become parents in and through adopting the children we have been entrusted with—be they our own or someone else’s biological offspring. We must ever adopt the children we parent if we want to become their parents.

So, are you suggesting that biology has nothing to do with being a parent?

Yes and no. It would seem to have a lot to do with parenthood in those instances where the parents happen to be biologically related to their children and think that they love them because or insofar as their children are their “own flesh and blood.” In those instances, however, where the parents are not biologically related to their children, biology has obviously nothing whatsoever to do with parenthood. Now, if we concede that biology bears on parenthood in some instances and not in others, we must also concede that it is merely accidental to the concept and overall practice of parenthood. In other words, parenthood—even in biologically related families—is functionally independent of blood kinship, of paternity and maternity. It unfolds in a register utterly distinct from biology, instinct, and drive: Parenthood is an ethical category, it is part of what the Greeks called bios—the life world we create for ourselves; whereas paternity and maternity are part of what the Greeks called zoe—biological, physiological being, life in the purely material sense.  

1.     What inspired you to write about ‘parenthood’ as you did in The Wisdom of Parenthood?

As a father of three, I felt the need to articulate my views on what it means to be a parent to my children—to give them something that would not only allow them to better understand me as their father, but that would also be something they could turn to for inspiration and guidance should they ever choose to and be fortunate enough to become parents themselves. Laying out what I take to be the essence of parenthood—irrespective of how our children come to us, of how we become parents—was particularly important to me in light of my experience as both a biological and an adoptive parent confronted with our society’s deep-seated—if not always overtly expressed—bias in favor of biological parenthood as the only real kind parenthood.

What do you hope to accomplish with The Wisdom of Parenthood?

It is my sincere hope that my book will start a serious conversation about the very meaning and practice of parenthood and contribute to making our world a more hospitable and inclusive place for all parents and children, irrespective of how any given child may have come to its parents. For it is anachronistic, misguided, and discriminatory to hold onto the biological view of parenthood in the age of assisted reproduction, in vitro fertilization, gestational surrogacy, “third-party production,” international adoption, and the continual rise of same-sex and LGBT parenting.  

(Michael Eskin, The Wisdom of Parenthood, UWSP 2013)

Have you ever seen Don Hartman's 1949 film Holiday Affair, starring Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, Wendell Corey, and Gordon Gebert? If not, I wholeheartedly recommend that you rent and watch it, as it is contains, among other things, a most incisive, head-on treatment of the very meaning of parenthood.

Here's a brief synopsis of the relevant aspects of the plot: Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) - a war widow and mother of eight-year-old Timmy (Gordon Gebert) - has been dating Carl Davis (Wendell Corey), who is eager to marry her, for several years when she meets Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum) and quickly falls for him. In an early scene in the film, when both men happen to be in Connie's apartment at the same time one night and Carl - acting as the boy's parent-to-be - is about to discipline Timmy, Connie exclaims: "Get your hands off my boy!" - at which point Carl immediately lets go of the boy and leaves the apartment ... We next encounter Carl and Connie at a reconciliation dinner at a high-end restaurant. And it is in this key scene that the most remarkable short dialogue unfolds, after Connie, who arrives late, thanks Carl for the flowers he had sent and sits down at the table:

"Let me tell you how I feel about it," Carl says. "If we were to get married - and I hate that 'if' - Timmy can be one of two things to me: He can be your son that lives in our house, and I'll be very nice to him. Or he can be our son. In that case, I'll bawl him out and spoil him and worry about him and love him." To which Connie replies: "If we do get married, Carl, he will be our son."

What strikes me as truly noteworthy about this brief exchange is Carl's intuitive understanding of the specific love animating parenthood as one born of the decision to wholly commit oneself and assume full responsibility for another human being. In other words, and contrary to common belief, what Carl's words signify is that the love we take to be a defining feature of parenthood - the love beyond the vagaries of emotion, the love that doesn't run dry and that we don't fall out of one day - is a function rather than condition, of our fundamental commitment and fidelity to our children.

  so much depends

upon

a small dotted

-i-

beside the Book        

the Mac

the Pod and

the Phone

...for it was made for you!

                                                                                             For J.-P.S.

(Julien David, Philosophical Fragments of a Contemporary Life [UWSP, 2008], p. 60)

No contemporary writer I know of stages the question of parenthood with such originality and perspicacity as J. M. Coetzee in his most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus. Throughout the novel, a distinction is made between "real" parenthood and "true" parenthood. "Real" parenthood designates the merely biological fact of being "engendered" and needing "a mother's womb to come into the world." "What the child needs from then on," however, "is love and care" - to be "care[d] about and care[d] for and take[n] care of," all of which is not a function of biological kinship, bespeaking, rather, what the novel categorically demarcates as "true" parenthood. Harking back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous dictum that we are all "born, so to speak, twice - born into existence and born into life, born human beings and born men," The Childhood of Jesus reminds us that in order to become our parents' "true" children and, concomitantly, in order for our parents to become our "true" parents, we must, paradoxically, ever again be "born to [them]."

"Surely there is such a thing as overvaluing the biological," the novel's main character says in what to me is one of the novel's philosophical key scenes.

I recently watched Paul Weitz’s 2013 feature film Admission, in which Princeton undergraduate admissions officer Portia Nathan develops parental feelings for one of her applicants—whom she experiences no special bond with when she first meets him in person early on in the film—after being told that he is the son she had borne and given up for adoption in college. That, toward the end of the movie, the applicant turns out not to be her biological son after all doubly underscores the power of language to induce belief and create ‘reality’: For we don’t love our children because they share our DNA—even though we often think we do; we love them insofar as they are ours, which can, but doesn’t have to, be premised on biological ties. While it is true, then, that we often consider our children ours because we (think) we know or believe that they are our biological offspring, what makes them truly ours, what makes us actually and truly love them as ours is not biology at all (otherwise all sperm and egg donors would necessarily love all the children they contribute to bringing into the world) but our infinite commitment to and responsibility for them. Our love for our children is born of our responsibility for them and not the other way around. 

Few authors have staged the question of parenthood, parental love and responsibility with such poignancy and incisiveness as Edith Wharton in her 1922 novella The Old Maid, which is set in mid-19th-century New York. Here's a brief summary of the plot:  Tina is raised by two cousins, Charlotte and wealthy Delia, one of whom, Charlotte, is her biological mother - a fact kept from Tina and the world at large throughout the novella, since she had been born out of wedlock. Following the example of Delia's two biological children, Tina, who is officially known to have been abandoned and taken in by Charlotte as a toddler, grows up calling Delia "Mamma" and Charlotte "Aunt Chatty." Toward the end of the novella, Delia adopts Tina in order to confer upon her her good name and status, thus enabling her to enter into an advantageous marriage and lead a comfortable and successful life. "I have always thought of you as my Mamma," Tina tells Delia, "and now, you dearest, you really are" ... Charlotte, however, who has been chafing under the necessity to keep her real relationship with Tina secret, experiences her daughter's adoption, which she agrees to with her child's best interest in mind, as a loss: "I have no rights, either before the law or in the heart of my child," she despairingly utters to Delia. It is at this point that Wharton's probing imagination allows us to ponder the very depths of what it means to be a parent and love one's child: "Can't we just go on loving her together?" Delia asks Charlotte, suggesting that parenthood is not about official (legal, biological) status so much as about doing and being a certain way (not to mention the reality created by the fact of being thought of or called a parent).  "Which of us is her mother?" Charlotte asks on the eve of her daughter's wedding, thereby underscoring the notion that parenthood is not an ontological given but an ethical task.

"Philosophical thinking is slow, and in this very slowness its healing power lies hidden. Just as the one-sided consumption of fast food will cause long-lasting physical damage to the body, so the one-sided consumption of fast thought will cause permanent emotional and mental damage. Philosophy is a time-tested intellectual discipline that, so long as it hews to lived life, ought to be an essential component of a Slow Thought diet."