All About "What Are Grown-Ups For?"

On Infantilization and its Discontents.

The summer before I turned 35, I left a career in higher education, where I was a professor and then an administrator, to write full-time. Well, really, to write part-time while being a stay-at-home mom to what was then a crew of three (now four) little boys.

Despite being a planner and a type-A personality, it turns out that I’m apparently a professional late bloomer.

I liked teaching. But I love writing. Probably because it’s everything I liked about teaching at its best — inquiry, pedagogy, reason — without the grading.

In the past two years, I have published over 100 essays, book reviews, and op-eds on a wide and growing array of topics: literature, feminism, sex, gender, parenting, Catholicism, education, government, politics, and more.

Over and over, I keep returning to one key insight: Americans today are awash in a kind of mass infantilization. On both the left and the right, we are encouraged to elevate politically and emotionally expedient narratives over reason, over truth, and ultimately over civilization itself.

As a writer, I try to find, acknowledge, explain, and illuminate the hard truths — with humility vis-a-vis the traditions and institutions on which our civilization has rested, yet unbeholden to any ideology.

I expect to post my work here at least weekly, if not more often. In the weeks and months to come, I expect to post frequently, as I will be re-posting (and in some cases updating and/or contextualizing) past pieces that best get at the core of my broad thesis: Women and men alike need to resist the personal and political infantilization on offer to all of us in different ways, and to remember what grown-ups are for.

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