Dave Eggers

On oldest children

This week, I left Brooklyn. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to spend a month with my natal family, or leave my girlfriend in New York, or contribute to the spread of coronavirus by traveling. But I couldn’t see a way around it. My sister’s program gave my mom a choice: Move C into my mom’s house, or not see her for the duration of the pandemic. C needs 24/7 care, more than a single person can do even without a full-time job, which my mom is still lucky to have.

“I can’t do it without you,” my mom told me. So I went home.

A week before I left, I bought my ticket, cried my tears, described my bad dreams to my girlfriend. Jade drove me to JFK, empty as a hangar, where I went through TSA with just two other people. The agents were relaxed, their masks dangling on their chests like bibs. The one who searched my backpack told me to look at his hands. “Watch me put on clean gloves,” he instructed, touching their powdered outsides with his bare fingers as he stretched them over his fingers. It seemed that no one had taught him about cross-contamination. He touched my laptop, my water bottle, the tupperware enclosing half a honeycrisp.

Now I’m in Northern California, a few hours north of Sacramento. The tail-end of spring is my favorite season here. The flowers have started to get heavy, but the roses are still pink and white and orange. The jasmine still tumbles and the kudzu still looms. The almond orchards buzz and creep, mint and alfalfa and kelly green, the crusted manure lined up in perfect parallels in the dust. If you enter an orchard at twilight, you can see each individual filigree on each almond (pronounced amund, with an Okie twang) against the blowsy sunset, the black boughs. It smells like dust and water and perfume.

I was afraid to come home. But now that I’m here, it feels like I never left. For the next month, I’m staying in the house I lived in as a high schooler, with the same people, though we’re all fourteen years older. As I was making dinner last night (while simultaneously folding laundry, sweeping, checking my emails, and helping my sister turn on the subtitles), an old feeling registered, one I don’t often experience anymore. My hands were doing things seamlessly, calmly, and that’s how the rest of me felt—smooth and secure in the tedium, in a place where you don’t have to think. Where everyone around you is looking to you for help or approval or an answer, and all you have to do is make a decision. I was disturbed by how natural it felt, and saddened to realize that I’d missed it.

Therapy and mindfulness and transition are supposed to unfuck the bad habits that I go to “oldest daughter” Twitter to watch people vent about; my friend S, a fellow oldest-daughter-turned-dad, calls the self-harming behaviors these habits become “the masochism of caretaking.” Too many children—not always the oldest and not always daughters—are put to domestic work for which they’re not emotionally or physically prepared or supported. It’s not like, “Let’s introduce them to mutual communal support,” but like, “Someone needs to make sure the babies are clean, fed, and not taken by CPS and you’re the second-oldest person in the room.” (This can come with a healthy measure of, “I also need a dad and a therapist and someone to shit-talk my ex with and they’re already up to speed on all that bullshit and if they have a problem with it I can simply punish them.”)

Like, I know that being here will likely cause setbacks in my ~therapeutic journey~ to a place where I don’t locate my self-esteem based on how much I can do for other people. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel good to be in charge of a household, both practically speaking (my better moments), or emotionally speaking, with the weight of my barely kettled anger (my worse moments). It feels good to do something because other people need me to do it, especially when it’s not reciprocated. That feels safe, doesn’t it? To be the martyr. To be disregarded by a crowd of adult children while being the only one who truly understands the sacrifice being made. To be the one who doesn’t need anything, because everyone else has demonstrated the primacy of their own needs. Who is stronger than the person who doesn’t need anything? It’s another fantasy, of course. File it under: where masochists come from (although all the sadists I play with have this same caretaking compulsion).

My damage about “oldest daughter” complex aside, here in my mom’s house, I don’t have time for much that doesn’t involve making sure someone else is cleaned, fed, listened to. I brought a book with me and it’s sitting on the kitchen table, dogeared at the same place it was when I got off the plane.

If I can’t read now, I can’t imagine how I found time to read during high school, but I did. I explored the library at what I thought was random, strolling the shelves and judging books by their covers. It wasn’t a great system, but I found Alice Walker, Jean Paul Sartre, and Gabriel García Márquez that way. I also found a book that was too new to be in the white male canon I wouldn’t learn to question until college, although it would have fit in perfectly: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

Genius is about Eggers himself, who left college at 21 to take care of his 8-year-old brother when his parents died within months of each other. I devoured it, in awe of the prose. Because it was different than anything that I, at 15 or 16, had ever read before. It was humorous, self-involved, ironic, and—because it was fictionish memoir at the beginning of the genre’s 21st c. explosion—so raw and real it seemed elevated.

What’s more, I related to Eggers, a young man who overhauled his life to make his little brother’s possible. It felt a little like seeing my own high school experience—which, including puberty, is not a whole lot different from what I’m doing now—and what I expected from my life right there on the page. This is not to dismiss or diminish the incredible responsibility of raising a child at 21, but lots of people do it, including my mom. I grew up knowing that I would be caring for my parents’ children until I left home, and that I would return to do it again whenever I was needed. Eggers just didn’t have the advantage of seeing his responsibility coming.

We know that women are expected to sacrifice themselves for their families. If the societal distribution of labor wasn’t sexist, things would be different, but it is, which is why seeing a man doing a version of what I did and would have been expected to do felt exceptional to me. More than Eggers’ prose, seeing a boy like me, in one respect, anyway, validated my responsibilities, made them less lonely and more human.

A few years later, when I was working as an in-home care provider for disabled adults, I rarely encountered male coworkers. Care work is a feminized skill and woman-dominated profession, and while I met or heard about enough male predators that I was just fine with that, I also met a few kind, caring men who were exceptional at what they did. I was a little bit awestruck by their existence, and early on even felt the uneasy suspicion that something was wrong—perverted, even—with a straight man who could be gentle. I was used to the straight male fantasy of care in which the bluff is never called; in which the promised sacrifices will never be demanded: of raped women who need violent, extrajudicial vengeance and kidnapped children whose safe return must be drenched in bloodshed.

Genius presented an alternative gender of sorts. I didn’t have the capacity for a consciously desired masculinity that wasn’t the kind modeled for me by my dad or Wyatt Earp or Liam Neeson. But if it was true that there were guys who had unfair caretaking demands placed on them—and who then, wonder of wonders, rose to the occasion—then maybe being needed like this was more noble than I knew. Of course, the nobility of the women caretakers in my life, from my mom and step-mom to the coworkers I would later have at in-home care, women who left their own children for days at a time to provide around-the-clock nursing and companionship at minimum wage to strangers, didn’t have quite the same gravity.

I can’t imagine the same book authored by a woman having the impact that Genius did. It was a best-seller and a Pulitzer finalist, and launched a very successful career. A white man making a sacrifice for his family, for a child that wasn’t his biological creation, when he should be out having fun and fucking chicks? Unheard of. Women and queer people are expected to take care of their families; I think a lot about 20th c. depictions of gay men (á la Manuel Puig) as stand-ins for old maids, men living with and caring for aging mothers who tolerate their unspeakable essence. Conversely, Eggers hasn’t been pigeonholed by his book-length XO Jane “It Happened To Me.” He sold his trauma and it paid dividends. The McSweeney’s machine wouldn’t be the same without it.

I have a lot of opinions about that, but I don’t have the time to get into it no. I have to be up early tomorrow to make pancakes for the girls.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.