A response to Canadian Mike

and a primer to my understanding of The Dawn of Everything

Canadian Mike,

Thank you for your response to my email regarding my name. I didn’t think you would read it, but I am saddened to learn that you have a similar trauma around your birth—your mother’s Christmas re-telling of the story of her grief when the ultrasound technician pointed out your penis really hit a nerve. As Phillip Larkin put into verse, family fucks you up. I know my own family did, and that was one of the reasons why I left them.

Do you ever feel vertigo to think that we used to be younger, drunk most nights, and now we’re parents? I can’t recall exactly, but I feel like you’re one of those guys who always wanted to be a dad. And now you are one! And you’re a husband, but that doesn’t surprise me.

Most of my life, I was apathetic about parenthood. The only time I felt strongly that I might want kids was after I taught in that Korean Kindergarten for two years. Yet when I was living out of a backpack in Colombia and Ecuador, any desire I had for children dissipated. I wanted the freedom that I was feeling then to last forever. I told one boy in those long nights of freedom that what I really wanted to be was a step mom. Amazingly, not long after I returned to the States, that’s what I became. And more.

Look, when I went off about food systems, I was not well. I was really struggling with the responsibilities of being forced into a care giving role after [redacted] as well as the immense pressure I was feeling in my job during the pandemic. And then I read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow with some other FMWs.

Reading it, I felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes. It was the same feeling I experienced when I was first exposed to the ideas of feminism, specifically the phrase, “the personal is political”. I know that there is controversy over the authors’ interpretations of the cultural power arrangements based on the archaeological remains and historical records that they examine, but I don’t think that invalidates their main arguments.

I never thought deeply about what makes a state or a government. I knew that jail was bad yet was willing to risk it for the right adventure, taxes were inevitable and dealing with any government-run bureaucracy will entail interminable waiting. I also knew that I had to save for my own retirement and take care of myself, because I am an American, where at least I know I’m free.

I have, though, thought a lot about group dynamics and I’ve often struggled to find balance within my social affiliations; of how much time I was willing to give those people to have relationships with them; of how constrained I felt in most social groups, hesitant to disagree, or to leave, or to even say to these groups—friends, co-workers, writing groups, book clubs, supper clubs—“This isn’t working for me. I want to change this.”

In a book that has the academic goal of overturning the existing system of classification of societies and social groups of the soft sciences, arguing that its currently a binary disguised as a spectrum of complexity, I found a truth, a political thing that was personal. The Davids (Graeber and Wengrow) proposed that all group arrangements constrain at least one of three “original freedoms”: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey; and the freedom to create new or transform existing relationships.

And here it was: this had been my anxiety in all those social groups! All those times that I was a big jerk, doing an Irish exit at a bar or a noraebang, I was just exercising my freedom to move—or on the interpersonal level, leave. When you all accused me of being sassy about splitting the bill when I barely drank any of the five bottles of beer and no soju, I was just exercising my freedom to disobey—but because we were all equals—to disagree. All those times you thought I was being excessively confrontational about the discussion of my sex life? Just me trying to transform our relationship into one in which my sex life was not a topic that you could bring up—but yes, I could.

CM, I see you now taking one of your big theatrical gulps, your tell that some statement I had made triggered feelings of revulsion that you would overcome because of our friendship; that action, coupled with the reflexive gesture of pressing your hands down on your knees—I see you girding yourself for some Auxie bullshit—“buckle up for this nonsense”—but I also remember that this tell never stopped me from sharing my view, that you would in fact stay with me wherever I took the bullshit. Stay with me here, Mike, just like you used to.

These three freedoms were revelatory to me. I looked back on my life, a life that I had previously considered of limited accomplishments—no prestigious degrees, publications, renown, talent or even beauty—and saw now a history of a woman who had numerous opportunities to live these freedoms. The moves from San Diego to the East Coast, to Denver, to Korea—all that freedom of movement! The verbal altercations with roommates about what was actually too loud or when we couldn’t have a party—freedom of opinion! The roommates who became best friends who became frenemies who became people who I never texted back—freedom of social transformation. So much freedom. And such an asshole: me.

In my interpretation of their ideas, the Davids argue that group arrangements constrain these freedoms; the question is in what ways are members willing to have them constrained. The ways in which societies constrain freedoms becomes their basis for classification. But that’s a topic for another email—or a beer shared on a hot summer night in a backyard.

There is one thing that they underscore: “Sacrifice is the shadow lurking behind the concept of civilization: the sacrifice of our three basic freedoms, and of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach” (432). And here, too, I was learning this intimately in my marriage when I had to become a caretaker.

Some people are willing and grateful recipients of care, no matter how shoddily given. My husband was not. I will spare you the gory details of our difficulties; suffice to say I sacrificed my freedom to leave for the hope of a transformed future relationship.

But in this morass of caretaking, I started to connect all the other ways that people who serve as caretakers give to others that can never be reciprocated. And I thought of all the people who were unwilling to constrain their freedoms during the pandemic—the freedom to move—at the expense of so many lives. I questioned if we truly lived in a civilization or if we are just a landmass of assholes constrained only by our economic means.

There’s more that I learned from The Davids and Dawn of Everything, that I would share with you, because as a parent of a toddler you don’t have much time to read for leisure. But I look at us, the descendants of a long line of European jerkasses who’ve exercised their freedom to move all over the world and in doing so destroyed so many other ways of being, and how you and I have settled into caretaking without chafing too much at the things we sacrificed--I am hopeful for the rest of us whites ruining the world.

X

PS: I wonder, too, if reading DoE while navigating being a caretaker and a full-time participant in the workforce, I didn’t find in some of their interpretations of archaeological evidence an echo of the utopia that I’m looking for.