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On one of Ezra Klein’s recent podcasts, Kathryn Schulz remarked on the difference between what our grandparents complained about, what our parents complained about, what we complain about. I hit pause and thought a minute. My grandmother’s tongue was razor-sharp, but she did more criticizing than complaining. There is, trust me, a subtle difference. Her position remained superior; she was not looking to change anything about her life, thank you very much. Never mind that a woman who loathed children had seven of them, all the while drawing no apparent pleasure from the company of her husband. Never mind that she was probably really smart but never had a chance to test her mind on anything more bridge and the Reader’s Digest “Increase Your Word Power,” so she padded around all day in her housecoat, brainstorming at least three ways to use the day’s word. That, she informed me, “is how you make a word your own.”
My mother complained only about being widowed. The sort of woman who is made to love and care for others, she was desperately lonely. As for the rest of it—the procession of boring secretarial jobs she had to take to keep us afloat, the way she wound up burdened with the care of every elderly relative because she was the unmarried sibling, the absence of a college degree that would have let her work with children, her favorite humans—she never complained. Nor did she ever push to find something she might enjoy more. For her, and the generations before her, passive fatalism was both a burden and a relief.
Now here I am, lucky to be deeply happy in both love and work—and complaining all the time. About the way the country is being run, how we are superheating the planet, my allergies (never worse), late-stage capitalism, mosquitoes, lawless deportations, the ice cream truck that plays the same song all summer nonstop….
Women in my generation were raised to have a voice, though still a modulated and deferential one. Our life was a project, not a set of givens, obligations, and rules. We were free to complain, and we were expected to collage whatever dream resonated with us. The accomplishments that resulted were stunning. But sacrifices still had to be made, preferences swallowed for a larger good, and this sometimes came as a shock. Sticking it out, whether in a job or a marriage, grew harder and harder. Moods became problematic, symptoms of some inner distress that required years of therapy. Unhappiness of any sort meant that we had failed, our project was a disaster, we had to scrap it and start over.
My mother and grandmother stayed within the bounds of their given lives. They never once considered moving to another place or making any radical change at all. But generation by generation, the options increased, and so did the willingness to enlarge that given world. My grandmother’s friends were all just like her; my mom was drawn to people of all sorts. My grandmother was Catholic cradle to grave; my mom left the church.
I left, too, and explored all sorts of traditions. I moved to another state, and lately, I would consider another country. Andrew and I agonized for years over whether to have a child, often exclaiming, “If only somebody would just leave a baby on the doorstep!” With the responsibility of choice removed, we would have gladly cradled that infant.
Living freely and intentionally is hard work. Every little decision winds up visible in the mosaic. You have to somehow keep balance and proportion, knowing when to complain and when to commit. You cannot just sit there and let life serve you up each day’s experience. You are responsible for your response.
My mother never used half her talents, nor did my grandmother. They did not blame themselves for this, nor should they have; they were simply following the unimaginative script they had been given. Because I had more options, I felt duty-bound to pursue a job that would match my skills and quit whenever I made the wrong choice. If I had been unhappy in my marriage, I would have felt duty-bound to leave. This is what exasperated so many women about Hillary Clinton’s choice to stick it out: it felt like an old-school betrayal of the new code. But many couples have gone to the other extreme, leaving whenever a need felt urgent and went unmet. Or they have widened the dyad to polyamory, bringing in more players the way we put a few more options in our Amazon cart, because surely one of them will be what we need.
The country itself is confused about freedom. Maybe we overdosed on it. All things were supposed to be possible, attainable, and customizable to our particular preferences. The inevitable dissonance made us cranky, and now we all want crackdowns on anything that scares us. We just have different crackdown lists.
Did we forget how soul-killing it can be to restrict freedom, narrowing people’s options until they are afraid, or do not feel entitled, to complain? Did we also forgot how much work it is to be free, how democracy is not a given but a project?
Liberty is what this country promised, not unchecked freedom. Liberation is what women (and anyone else who was not a White able-bodied heterosexual male) fought to attain. Liberty protects our rights and limits government’s (or society’s) power to restrict them—as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. You cannot take a big, diverse nation and give freedom only to, say, the White people, or the Christians, or the left.
The point of this nation was that we were all at liberty to choose how we wanted to live—not to crack down on those who disagreed. The founders never promised a self-interested freedom that ignores its consequences for others, whether through contagion, coercion, suppression, pollution, or a plundering of common resources. When we are at liberty, we are responsible for one another. “Freedom,” unrestrained, quickly turns selfish and capricious. Destructive and chaotic, it winds up welcoming tyranny—which was supposed to be its opposite.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
