Half Changed World

I realized last night that in my discussion of Dispatches, I never talked about “Frequent Parenting Miles,” Fox’s way of tracking the extra time she spent in child care activities than her husband. She reports how she tracked them over the years (in 1/4 hour increments!) and then “cashed them in” to go to a two-week writer’s retreat.

Some of the reader reviews on Amazon seemed horrified by this concept, thinking it implies a lack of love for her children. I don’t think that, but I do think it’s a pretty lousy idea. Excuse me, ma’m, you do realize that your husband has a full-time job, and you work about 4 hours a day? Even if he spent every waking non-work moment caring for the children, you’d still win this contest. Either change the fundamentals of your life — figure out a way for him to work part-time, or hire more child care — or get over it. (This doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t have gotten to go the writer’s retreat — all of us should have a chance to do the things that make our hearts sing.)

I almost wished I could assign Fox to read Unbending Gender and Kidding Ourselves and to report back. I would have liked some acknowledgement that as long as her husband worked at a career-track academic job, it would have required significant career risk and sacrifice to cut back his hours substantially. I would have liked some recognition that the fact that her work as a writer was part-time, flexible, and unpaid almost guaranteed that she’d do more of the childcare — and not just because of her insecurities.

And I would have liked some acknowledgement that work is, well, work. Instead she writes:

“I’d never bought the argument (nor had he) that he was working as a professor ‘for us’ while my complementary part of the deal was to hold down the homefront. In our house, work was what you did for yourself while housework and childcare were what you did for the family.”

This may be true in her house, but I think it’s a dangerous argument overall. I don’t think earning money should let you off the hook for having a relationship with your children, but I also think women systematically undervalue the role of breadwinning as part of parenting. (Obviously, as a breadwinning mother, I’m a bit sensitive to the issue.) Thus, for example, it’s far more common for women to talk about their guilt at being away from their children for work than about their pride at being able to support their family. Even when men are frustrated at the conflicts they experience between the demands of work and their desire to be present for their families, I don’t hear them using the word “guilt.” (Do you? I’d be interested in other reports from the field.)

Moreover, while I’m glad that Faulkner and her husband both had work that they loved, I think that’s too high a standard for most of us. I think one of the reasons that (at least some) women are opting out of high-powered careers is that those careers were oversold as providing intellectual stimulation, respect, power, and self-actualization. As Alain de Botton wrote in the NY Times over Labor Day weekend,

“The most remarkable feature of the modern workplace has nothing to do with computers, automation or globalization. Rather, it lies in the Western world’s widely held belief that our work should make us happy.

“All societies throughout history have had work right at their center; but ours — particularly America’s — is the first to suggest that it could be something other than a punishment or penance. Ours is the first to imply that a sane human being would want to work even if he wasn’t under financial pressure to do so.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004 at 7:23 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.