Half Changed World

I promise, this is going to be my very last post about Judith Warner and Perfect Madness.  When I wrote about her articles, I said that I didn’t think she had made a convincing case between the problem she identified and her solutions, but I thought the missing links might be in her book.  Well, I’ve read the book now, and I’m pretty disappointed. 

I think Warner is making three basic arguments, of which I agree with maybe one and a half of.

The first argument is essentially psychological.  A great deal has been written already about how Warner is only writing about an extremely narrow — and privileged — slice of American society.  Well, I’m in that slice.  I’m at the tail end of the generation she’s writing about.  I live in suburban Washington DC, where Warner did most of her "research."  And while she never defines what she means by "middle- and upper-middle class," I’m probably in that too.  And even so, I found myself thinking "what the heck is she talking about?" much of the time.  In a typically overwraught paragraph, she writes:

"Our baby boomer elders often call us selfish, but in doing so they miss a larger point: that what our obsessive looking inward hides is at base a kind of despair.  A lack of faith that change can come to the outside world.  A lack of belief in our political culture or our institutions.  Our outlook is something very much akin to what cognitive behavioralists call ‘learned helplessness.’"

Oh fercripessake. 

Warner’s second argument is that there’s a severe problem of the commons, in which good health care, good schools, recreational opportunities are not generally available, but left to each family to obtain on its own.  Warner writes:

"It would be easy (and comforting too) to dismiss the pervasive parental anxiety of our time as so much media-stoked nonsense… But to parent in such a state of grace, you have to be able to believe that things will, if you let them fall into place, basically turn out all right.  And, frankly, at this point in time, in our winner-take-all-society, there is much reason to believe that they will not."

I find this an infuriating argument, because I think it’s probably true for everyone EXCEPT the upper-middle class women whom Warner is talking about.  Warner herself points out that the whole body of early brain research, which has been used to sell all sorts of crap to anxious parents, is largely based on the experiences of highly deprived children.  Perry Preschool dramatically transformed the life courses of the very poor kids who attended it; my kids — and those of Warner’s subjects — will almost certainly be fine whatever preschool we send them to or if we send them to no preschool at all.

Warner’s final claim is that American society gives mothers an artificial choice between inflexible, often more-than-full-time, work and isolating full-time motherhood.  Many women would prefer something in between.  This is essentially a version of what Joan Williams has argued about good jobs still being based on an ideal worker who either doesn’t have kids or has an at-home spouse to take care of them.   (Warner seems to ignore the fact that there are plenty of part-time jobs out there, if you don’t care about things like benefits or decent pay.  But it’s true that many of these jobs are not worth the effort for women whose husbands make as much as those of Warner’s subjects, so I’m not going to quibble.) 

My bottom line: if you’ve read the articles, don’t bother with the book.  Do read Phantom Scribbler’s Self-Evaluation Test and Angry Pregnant Lawyer’s discussion of one mom’s reaction to that NYTimes article.  (Warning: the second link isn’t work- or kid-safe.)

I don’t have the energy tonight to write a book review, so instead I’m sharing this interesting blog entry I found on how to get the most from books you read, from Rosa Say (via managementprof).  She’s specifically talking about business books (a genre I generally avoid like the plague), but I think some of the points are generally applicable.  Two suggestions jumped out at me in particular.

Say’s first recommendation is:

"As soon as you complete a book—any book, business or otherwise—find someone to share it with. When you talk about a book with another person, you retain it better, you question your own comprehension, and you gain another reader’s insights to add to and flesh out your own."

This is one of the main reasons why I try to do a book review on this blog each week.  (The other reason being that it helps me keep reading a priority in the face of my never ending to-do list.)

Say’s final recommendation, which she says she cribbed from Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life, is:

"Send the author a note or email to say thank you for sharing their knowledge with you."

This isn’t something I currently do, but I think I’m going to start.  It costs me very little — especially when I’ve already done the thinking and writing involved in one of these book reviews — and it might lead to something useful.

The post on "mother drive-bys" at Chez Miscarriage is now up to over 300 comments and still growing.  It’s funny and sad and bizarre.

I’ve gotten my share of comments about my parenting, but I’ve never taken them too seriously.  When D was a newborn, we were given two baby books:  What to Expect The First Year and The Baby Book.  These two books agree that you should use a car seat and that breastmilk is the ideal food for babies, and disagree on just about everything else.  This drove me crazy for a few weeks, and then I had the liberating insight that no matter what we did, someone would say we were doing it wrong.  So there was no point in trying to do it perfectly — we just had to do our best and accept that even so, we’d get criticized by strangers (or family) occasionally.

I think that’s the key insight that the miserable stressed-out parents Judith Warner talked to are missing — that no matter how hard you work at it, there’s no such thing as perfect parenting.   If you’re a good parent, you what you think is best, but sometimes your best just isn’t good enough, or what you thought was the best turns out in hindsight to look like a mistake.

There’s a Jewish tradition that you’re supposed to carry a slip of paper with a message in each pocket.  On one side, you carry "You were created in God’s image" and on the other side, you carry "You came from dust, and to dust you shall return."  When you get depressed you look at the first, and when you get cocky you look at the second.

I think the parenting version of this is that on one side you carry the start of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: "Relax.  You know more than you think you do," and on the other side you carry the start of Philip Larkin’s This be the verse: "They fuck you up, your mom and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do."

Today’s book is Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs, by Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers.  It’s an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) discussion of what’s wrong with all the claims that men and women are fundamentally different — at work, at home, as partners, as parents.  They take on everyone from Carol Gilligan to John Gray, and argue that the media has totally oversold the claims for gender differences, and that these beliefs about gender differences become self-fulfilling prophecies.  They quote Sarah Blaffer Hrdy — a biologist whose research is often cited in support of such claims — as saying:

"What begins as a scientist’s cautious speculation moves rapidly into a headline in USA Today and from there becomes received wisdom that directs public policy and influences girls’ career choices."

I generally agree with Barnett and Rivers’, so I’ve been trying to figure out why I can’t summon up more enthusiasm about the book.   I think there are two problems.  First, the book is mostly about what’s wrong with other people’s studies and how they’re represented in the mass media rather than presenting any new information.  There’s only so many different ways you can say "very small non-representative sample" and "generalization" and they quickly run through all of them.  The book is thus more useful as a reference to look up the flaws in a specific argument than as a book you’d want to sit down and read all the way through.

Second, I think Barnett and Rivers’ go too far in denying the reality of differences between how men and women behave.  At times I felt like they were allowing their ideological stance to blind them to the evidence in front of their noses. 

This is particularly frustrating because I don’t think their main thesis depends on such a claim.  In fact, in other parts of the book, they do make several arguments that don’t deny that there are such differences:

• The differences between men and women are the results of socialization, rather than biological differences.  (Barnett and Rivers offer counterexamples to the claim all other primates have similar gender roles to humans.)
• The differences between men and women are falsely attributed to gender, when they should be attributed to differences in power.  Powerful women behave in typically "male" ways and subordinate men behave in typically "female" ways.
• While there may be differences on average between men and women, there is more variance within each group than between groups.  In other words, the curves showing the distribution overlap significantly.  Therefore, the average difference doesn’t tell you much about the abilities or interests of any given individual of a certain gender.

I think these arguments are much more persuasive than trying to argue that there are no differences beween men and women. 

Dang, Judith Warner must have a good publicist.  She has no less than three different articles out in major publications, all based on her new book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.

Her Valentine’s Day op-ed in the New York Times asks "Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?"  She concludes that it is, and urges readers to stop making construction paper cards for their children’s classmates and to go on a real date with their spouses.  While she’s at it, she blames the family bed and extended co-sleeping for a decline in physical intimacy.

The second story is the cover article in Newsweek, entitled Mommy Madness.  In this Warner describes a generation of miserable mothers, driven to desperation by their own high expectations and lack of societal support:

"Life was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs—and children—were demanding. And the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally." 

Warner then tries to tie this in to an argument that we need societal supports for parenting — tax incentives to promote family-friendly work, high quality day care for both full-time working parents and as occasional relief for at-home parents, more opportunities for part-time work.  I generally think these are good things, but it’s not clear how they’re going to solve the problems of the women featured in the article, who can’t sleep at night because they’re worried about the preschool party they’re organizing.  What they need is to get a grip. 

As Jody at Raising WEG points out, this cult of the hyper-parent is very much a middle-class privilege, and far from the universal state.  Most parents are plenty busy just from doing the basics — earning a living, keeping their kids clean and fed and the homework done — not from participating in a million afterschool activities or distressing store-bought pies to look homemade.

As I see it, the middle-class stress of extreme parenting is driven by several factors:

First, as Warner correctly points out, there’s been a decay of the parenting "commons."   Organized sports with registration, and schedules and fees have replaced pick-up games.  You can’t count on the local public school being good unless you deliberately pick a place to live based on the schools. 

Second, as being an at-home parent has become a deliberate choice rather than the default position, some at-home parents feel the need to justify their decision by giving their kids every bit of attention and stimulation possible.  This is how they prove that they’re not wasting their expensive educations.

Third, some working parents feel the need to justify their decision by making sure their kids aren’t suffering at all from their absence.  They try to cram as much attention and activities into the weekends and evenings as an at-home parent might do all week, and give up sleep instead. 

And finally, as Laura points out, there’s a natural tendency to measure what’s appropriate by looking at the people around you.  Moreover, the standard of comparison is usually the "best" of those around you, not the average.  So it just takes one family having a magician at their kid’s party for everyone in their social circle to start wondering whether they should be having a puppet show.  And the expectations creep up as each family joins in. (My personal act of resistance against this madness is to respond "YOU DON’T NEED A GOODY BAG" every time someone posts on the DC Urban Moms list asking what items are good for a goody bag for a 3-year-olds party.)

Third article is from Elle, and it mostly emphasizes the differences between American and French attitudes towards parenting.  It’s by far the most interesting of the three articles, making the point that the whole culture of intense parenting is a uniquely American phenomenon.  Warner concludes that the problem is an ideology that is so widespread that it’s hardly ever questioned:

"[It] tell us that we are the luckiest women in the world, with the most wealth, the most choices. It says we have the know-how to make “informed decisions” that will guarantee our children’s success. It tells us that if we choose badly, our children will fall prey to countless dangers—from insecure attachment to drugs to a third-rate college. And if our children do stray from the right path, we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame. To point fingers at society is to shirk “personal responsibility.”"

I’m intrigued enough to put Warner’s book on hold at the library.  I’ll report back when I’ve read it.  I’m wondering if there’s not an overlap with some of the arguments that Schwartz makes in The Paradox of Choice.

Since I haven’t had time to read this week, I’m going to cheat a bit and talk about a book I read years ago, Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, as well as to riff off Laura and Mel‘s   recent posts about money.

Robin and Dominguez’s argument is that by the time you add in all the real costs of working — taxes, commuting costs, business wardrobes, the meals we buy out because we don’t have time to cook, the toys we buy ourselves as rewards for getting through frustrating times — your true wages are quite low.  They advocate for cutting expenses and saving until you can live off the interest from your savings — which they call Financial Independence.

I have issues with many of their specific recommendations, but the basic point that money is a medium for exchanging "life energy" for goods and services, and that you should know where that life energy is going, has stuck with me for years.  Interestingly, the first time I did their exercise of tracking every cent you spend, I decided I wasn’t spending ENOUGH money on books.  (This was before the advent of the online library catalog, and the ability to put holds on books from home.  I’d say that 90% of my reading is from the library these days.)

I haven’t tracked every cent in a while, but the recent exercise of tracking our groceries made me confident that there’s not a whole lot of slack in our budget.  Travel is really my one expensive hobby, and we haven’t been doing much of that lately.

I make more money than I ever thought I would.  But I also didn’t expect to be the sole wage earner in my family.  A major factor that made it possible is that we were extremely lucky in our timing in buying a house; we couldn’t afford our house on one income if we were first-time homeowners today.  If my primary goal was not to have to work, we could move somewhere outside of a major urban center and live off our equity for a while. 

I’ve been job hunting, and most of the jobs that appeal to me pay significantly less than I currently make.  I’ve done a rough budget and figured out how low I think I can go without having an ongoing negative cash flow, but that doesn’t help with the emotional issues.  If I get a job that I love, I don’t think I’ll regret the money, but I’m afraid that if a job turns out not to be what I hoped, I’ll think "well, I could have been unhappy at work but making 30% more."

Today’s book is a light-hearted guide to parenting infants and toddlers, How Not To Be A Perfect Mother, by Libby Purves.  It’s a slim paperback, and I’ve been reading it on the metro to and from work, and getting lots of looks because it keeps making me laugh out loud.

Purves understands the key truths of child-rearing, which are:

• No advice works for everyone; kids are all different.
• Whatever you do, someone will think (and probably tell you) you’re doing it wrong.  So you might as well do it the way you want to.
• Don’t take yourself too seriously.

The specific advice in the book isn’t really the point (although it’s generally sensible).  What’s wonderful is Purves’ calm perspective — her confidence that neither the stains on your child’s clothing nor your fervent desire that he’d just go somewhere else for a few minutes so you can finish the chapter make you any less of a good mother.  Perhaps my favorite suggestion is the game of crawling on mommy (or "mummy" as Purves writes) as an activity:

"It has survived, with the first child, well beyond the first birthday, since he can now pretend I am a wrecked locomotive, and go round tapping my wheels with a foam-rubber hammer.  The baby pretends I am a horse.  I, meanwhile, can pretend that I am on a beach in Corfu.  All three of us are happy."

The book isn’t perfect — fathers are viewed as very welcome assistants, but not much more, and the comments about car seats are sorely out of date (the book was first published in 1986) — but it’s a lot of fun.

I wish I could say the same about two other books I’ve picked up that were clearly sold to the publishers as short self-depricating humor about imperfect moms, but both of them were total wastes.  The problem with If all else fails, lower your expections, by Susan Murphy, is that it wasn’t funny.  The targets were obvious, the strokes broad.  But it was better than Confessions of a Slacker Mom by Muffy Mead-Ferro, which was plain out annoying.  Mead-Ferro pretends to be "confessing," but she seems smugly convinced that she is actually a perfect mom, far superior to those who buy lots of toys or gadgets, or try to childproof their houses.  She’s the Andy Rooney of parenting, meeting all modern inventions with a scornful statement to the effect that "my mother didn’t have that on the Wyoming prarie and I turned out ok."  She even mentions a childhood friend whose arm was blown off in a dynamite accident but who "went on to live a scandalously great life."  Oh, and she’s not funny either.  Stick with Purves.

Today’s book is Alice Munro’s new collection of stories, Runaway. 

As Jonathan Franzen commented in the NY Times Book Review, short stories are almost impossible to review.  Synopses of their plots just don’t do them justice.  So, his review (which appeared in the coveted front page spot) boils down to "Short stories are notoriously underrated. Alice Munro is a master of the art. This is a fabulous collection; trust me and go read it." 

So, what can I say about this book, other than "trust me and go read it"?

Unlike Helen Simpson’s Getting a Life (which Franzen also praises highly, and I discussed here), I didn’t see myself in any of Munro’s characters.  I didn’t find myself saying "ah, yes, that’s how it is; she captures exactly how that feels."  But her characters aren’t exotic creatures either, but ordinary Canadian women.

After reading Runaway, I found myself looking at people walking down the street or riding in the metro, and wondering about what choices they had made in their lives that brought them to this moment.  Munro’s stories are about people making small choices that have momentous consequences, or as Franzen puts it "moments of fateful, irrevocable, dramatic action."  Except that they don’t look like moments of dramatic action: one woman gets off a bus; another woman excuses herself from talking to a boring stranger on a train; a third sits in a car while her boyfriend’s brother buys a bottle of liquor from a bootlegger. 

I get Granta because it was free with my subscription to Salon.com, but I rarely have the time to read it.  But the theme of the latest issue is Mothers, so I put it in my bag to read on my commute.   I’ve now read it cover to cover, and it’s left me somewhat stunned.

The issue is exclusively about Mothers as seen by their sons, or daughters, or sons-in-law, rather than about the experience of being a mother. (There’s one essay by Alexandra Fuller about her experience of being pregnant and post-partum in Zambia, but even that one isn’t really about her as a mother.)  And the Mothers in the stories and memoirs seem right out of a book of archetypes — the idealized recipient of worshipful love, or the evil ogress manipulating her children, the housewife whom the children underestimated or the self-centered career woman.  The writing is powerful, but the images are painful.

A very different vision of motherhood is offered by a coffeetable book I bought while I was pregnant with D., Jewish Mothers, by Paula Wolfson, with photographs by Lloyd Wolf.  I bought it in part because it was at a reading organized by people I knew, but also because I wanted to study the pictures to see if I could find myself in them, if these were women I could imagine myself becoming, if there was an alternative to becoming the punchline to a bad joke.

Tomorrow is D’s fourth birthday.  Today is the fourth anniversary of the day I spent in a hospital room, watching it get light and then dark again.  After four years, I’m comfortable and generally confident in my role as his (and his brother’s) mommy, more or less adjusted to being a mother.  But I’m still not ready to be The Mother, and I don’t think I ever will be.

Today’s book review is of What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank.  It came out this summer, to generally positive reviews, but not a whole lot of attention, then seemed to top every Democrat’s reading list after the election.

Frank explores how Kansas, once a center of Populist revolt against oppressive economic elites, has in recent years come to be dominated by a form of Republicanism defined by revolt against cultural elites.  Democrats are almost entirely absent from Frank’s story — he argues that the battle in Kansas is between Conservative and Moderate Republicans.  He discusses the ways in which those who are the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism describe themselves as "just folks" like the victims of modern capitalism, in contrast to liberals, atheists, intellectuals, feminists, etc. and harness outrage against those groups into a political movement.

It’s an interesting book and I enjoyed reading it.  But ultimately, I felt like I was left hanging; Frank describes what has happened in Kansas — a story both funny and sad — but doesn’t really answer the why part of it.  One chapter ends with the image of an angry mob, storming the statehouse, chanting "we are here — to cut your taxes."  It’s a great line, but I still don’t have a clue why the pro-life anti-gay Christian movement is passionately opposed to taxes. 

In the conclusion, Frank suggests that Democrats are — at least on economic issues — all but indistinguishable from Moderate Republicans.  And with the all-but-disappearance of labor unions, there’s no one to keep economic issues on the table.  Lower- and middle-income Americans therefore vote against their class interests on a regular basis.

It makes a lot of sense.  And yet, a quick look at the exit polls from the last election indicates that there’s still a linear relationship between how much money you have and how likely you are to vote Republican.  Kansas is a lot more Republican than the country as a whole, but the relationship holds true there, too.  So, implicit behind Frank’s argument is a claim that there ought to be an even stronger correlation between income and voting patterns. 

I’m not enough of a political historian to know if that’s ever been the case — I do know that for almost a hundred years, leftists have been lamenting the lack of class consciousness among American workers.