For centuries, the passage of time was something you noticed by the work you’d done, the changing seasons, the position of the sun. Then along came clocks, and time became standardized; we began to count it. Since then, time has often been thought of as a currency: It’s ours, we can spend, waste, or invest it; we can keep it to ourselves or give it away—and it can be taken from us.
But since our second child arrived, that metaphor has increasingly struck me as misguided. Although I can quite often choose how I spend my time—where I focus my attention at a given moment, where I go or who I’m with—at least as often, I have no say in it at all. That’s because two unpredictable factors—small children—have burrowed their way into my life, and in all their innocence have dictated to me how I spend my time. Their wishes, their pace, and their need for repetition largely determine what we do with our time as a family and how I feel about it.
In her book Valuing Children, the American economist Nancy Folbre proposes that we conceive of the relationship between parents and children not in terms of the “investments” that parents make in their offspring but of the “commitments” they have made to them. I read this one Friday afternoon in the university library; my partner’s home with the children so I can stay until closing time.
And though such a concept seems blindingly obvious to me, at the same time it sounds pleasantly refreshing. I suppose it’s because the work of economists and sociologists and evolutionary biologists often strikes me as so calculating. The work of those, I mean, who analyze the relationship between parental time investments and “child outcomes” as if they were talking about production processes, or as if the family were a factory. In goes time, and out come IQs and other test scores. Or who describe the time you spend on your children as a parent as an “opportunity cost.” After all, you could have done something else with that time: made money, for instance.
In light of that view of parents and children, Folbre’s proposal is not only refreshing; it’s almost radical. A commitment, she writes, is a promise that remains binding, even when the expected “return on investment” remains absent. In contrast with an investment, moreover, a commitment brings with it moral duties—duties that you can’t just dispose of if the “results” are disappointing.
In the moments when time ceases to be “mine”—when it no longer feels like an individual possession or a currency—it takes on, for me at least, the nature of that kind of commitment. When I perceive time in that way, I no longer need to be grudging or possessive, no longer need to feel like I’m coming up short.
Instead, we’re defined by the way we’re bound to one another, a collective, entangled and interdependent.
In such moments, I see our relationship as one based on the promise I’ve made, before they were even with us, and without fully understanding what it meant, that this is our time.