Free It Runs in the Family by Frida Berrigan

far, I have mostly done my work during Seamus’s naps, or on walks, or while Seamus has been engrossed in the serious work of being a baby—moving blocks from one place to another, pulling books off the shelves, pulling all of his pants out of the drawer, playing with the Velcro on his diaper until it fails and he is diaper-free.
    But there are times when that doesn’t work and I can’t just say that the baby ate my homework. Nevertheless, we can’t pay $143 a week for daycare so that I can be a good board member at the War Resisters League.
    There are lots of options out there that don’t require $143 a week. Patrick and I both played in babysitting cooperatives when we were little, where parents took turns watching each other’s kids. We are doing a date night kid pile with two other couples. One family hosts and the two other couples drop off kids and have a few hours of grown-up time. The kids love the critical-mass playtime and the hosting parents just roll with the chaos for a few hours, dreaming about the two dates they are earning in the process. It is the beginning of creating something new, free, and community-building.

    Back when I lived in Brooklyn, I commuted to work on my bike. Once I passed my mid-twenties, I spent a lot of that time imagining how little my life would change when I had a baby. I was living in Red Hook, a neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying but still quite poor. I imagined myself riding the same route, the same bike, with a baby somehow safely stacked on top. I was already carrying a lot of stuff with me—work clothes, gym clothes, books, lunch. I could cram diapers, fresh outfits, toys, and all the other things that a baby needs into my overflowing panniers. As I cycled and imagined, I saw toddlers and little kids riding with their parents, mostly European-style in front, mostly with their dads.
    Sitting in my office, typing away, answering calls, I would imagine where I would put the baby bassinet and bouncy chair. I worked in SoHo for the Arms and Security Initiative at the time, a progressive think tank where I did research, writing, and resource development about military issues. My office was just my boss and me. In my imagination, my future infant would sleep in the bassinet, and then I would nurse him or her, and then they would play in the bouncy chair while I came up with new ways to argue for a common-sense foreign policy in which the use of force was a last resort. “Perfect,” I thought. “Totally doable.”
    At the time I was living in a series of dingy, neglected, periodically rat-infested apartments with a partner who worked incredibly long hours during the week and large portions of every weekend, and who was constitutionally unsuited for—and adamantly uninterested in—fatherhood. We struggled financially despite having good incomes. Despite all of this, I saw a baby fitting seamlessly into our lives. It wasn’t that I wanted to “have it all” in an ambitious, striving kind of way. It was that I assumed that I could have a child—children even—without my life changing at all.
    At some level, it is not so strange that I should think kids could seamlessly integrate with my life. That is how my parents dealt with the surprise of children. Pack the bottle and keep on going to meetings, demonstrations, and to the courthouse. All our family photos from our early years are pictures snapped at demonstrations. There are no portraits taken against fall foliage backdrops at Sears, there are no photographs where we all cozy up near the Christmas tree with mugs of steaming cocoa in ironically awful seasonal sweaters. We did not go to Disney World or water parks or the zoo or baseball games or on vacation. The Berrigans didn’t do stuff like that. We resisted.
    Here is how my birth was announced in my parents’ book The Time’s Discipline :
Throughout Lent of that year, [we] mounted a series of direct actions connecting the war in Indochina with North America’s