Half Changed World

I can’t believe how fast the holidays are coming up.  Is it really possible that Thanksgiving is coming up next week?  For the first time in my life, I’m going to be cooking the Thanksgiving meal.  I’m actually looking forward to it; I like to cook, but don’t do it much these days because of time constraints. I just wish we didn’t have quite so much cleaning to do before the house was in a condition to receive guests.  But cooking and cleaning both are preferable to facing the NJ Turnpike Thanksgiving week.

Hanukah comes really early this year.  (The Jewish holidays operate on a lunar calendar, which means that they move back and forth in the solar calendar — next year Hanukah won’t start until December 25, and there’s one year coming up when it doesn’t fall until January.)  This means I have to get my act together soon, but also that the rest of December will be relatively low-stress.  I bought a ticket today from one of my coworkers for an opportunity to do after-hours shopping at a local mall this weekend.  It supports NOVAM, which is a good cause, and if I can get all my shopping wrapped up, I’ll be thrilled.  Plus, I’d like to get myself some clothes before my annual "no setting foot in a mall between Thanksgiving and New Years" resolution takes effect.

The early Hanukah also spreads the orgy of gift-giving out a bit, as my in-laws will still give us Christmas presents.  It’s lots of fun to shop for my older son, as he’s at the age when he’s absolutely thrilled by anything you wrap up, whether it’s a t-shirt, a book, or a toy.  I have no idea what to get for the baby, who doesn’t need anything, but his brother will be horrified if he doesn’t have something to unwrap too.

I started reading Spin Sisters, by Myrna Blyth, last week, thinking it would be one of my Tuesday book reviews.  It’s not going to be, because I feel a moral compulsion to actually read all the books I review; it’s sufficiently poorly written and repetitive that I’m not willing to slog all the way through it.  The funny thing is that, in spite of the gratuitous slaps at liberalism, I agree with Blyth’s thesis that the main goal of most "women’s magazines" is to make their advertisers happy.  She’s got some zingers about the concept of stress — especially the kind of stress that isn’t caused by major external events like illness or job loss, but just by overextension to too many activities and/or feeling like you need to live up to an unattainable standard (think Martha Stewart).  She does raise an interesting question about cause and effect — do people feel more stressed about the holidays now that it’s the conventional wisdom that they’re stressful?

My favorite anti-holiday stress book is Unplug the Christmas Machine, by Jo Robinson (and no, you don’t have to celebrate Christmas to find it useful).  It’s not terribly complicated, but it talks you step by step through the process of figuring out what parts of the holiday experience are really important to you, and making those the priorities, while letting everything else slide. It’s out of print, but there seem to be plenty of used copies floating around.

On one of my lists recently, someone asked what was the parenting book that you couldn’t live without.  Lots of people suggested books with advice about getting your baby to sleep, or what to feed them, or how to talk to them.  My choice was Operating Instructions, by Anne Lamott.  It’s not an advice book, but just a memoir, in journal format of her first year of parenting following an unplanned pregnancy.

I picked this book because I truly think it kept me sane as a new parent.  Because it reassured me that it was perfectly normal to feel tired, overwhelmed, frustrated, and inadequate, and that none of these things made me a bad mother. And it did so without being whiny and made me laugh out loud more times than I could could count, as well as cry.

Lamott also manages to talk about all this without ever losing sight of the wonder and magic of parenting.  Many books that attempt to show the "dark side" of parenting — Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions come to mind — make you wonder why anyone would ever willingly choose to have children.  The joys of parenting shine through Operating Instructions.  I actually gave it to my husband to read when we were discussing whether to have children — I figured it would be a good sign if it didn’t scare him off.

One of my recurring themes on this blog is the question: "Where are the fathers?"  Sam’s father is totally absent from Operating Instructions. Lamott writes "The baby’s father was dramatically less excited than I was to find out I was pregnant, so much so that I have not seen or heard from him in months and don’t expect to ever again" but she is never dismissive of the role of fathers.  In a haunting passage, she imagines Sam talking with the child of friends of hers, who was born without a left arm, and comparing the holes in each of their lives.  A few years ago, Lamott wrote on Salon about how Sam’s father is now part of his life, which is lovely to hear.

Operating Instructions isn’t an advice book — the joke in the title is, of course, that babies don’t come with manuals — but it does have some good advice.  The most important advice she gives is that it’s ok, even good, to ask for help.  Married or single, young or old, parenting is just too big a job to do without help.  And that help might take the form of someone cooking you a meal, or it might just mean that someone takes a walk with you and the baby and gets you out of the messy house for 15 minutes.

Today’s book review (back in its regular Tuesday slot) is Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, by Sandra Steingraber.

At its heart, this book is a passionate plea for environmental action, focused on the effects of persistent pollutants on developing fetuses and nursing infants.  Steingraber is an ecologist, but one who can discuss scientific studies in layperson’s terms. She describes example after example of chemicals that are polluting our environment — lead, methyl mercury, dioxins, PCBs, pesticides — and how they affect children’s developing bodies and brains.  Fetuses are particularly vulnerable to these chemicals in part because of the wonderous precision of fetal development (Steingrabber describes how the toxic drug thalidomide caused different deformations depending on exactly which days of development the mother took it) and in part because the human body is unable to discard many of these poisons once consumed.  This means that the developing fetus is exposed to the cumulative burden of all the toxins the mother has breathed or eaten in her lifetime, not just those experienced during pregnancy.

Steingraber acknowledges that the evidence of damage is strongest for very high levels of pollutants — which are, fortunately, rarely experienced — and that less is known about the effects of the more common lower levels; however, she argues for the precautionary principle, which holds that when potential damage is irreversible, you shouldn’t wait for conclusive scientific evidence.  She points to the inconsistency between how we treat exposure to alcohol — telling expectant mothers that no level of alcohol consumption is acceptable — and how we treat exposure to toxins such as lead and mercury.  She is passionate that we should not put all the burden on pregnant women — telling them not to eat many species of fish, for example — but should instead clean up the world.

Interwoven into this environmental discussion is Steingraber’s discussion of her own pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing experience with her daughter, the Faith of the title.  She talks about the environment around her — from the woods of the midwestern college where she is a visiting professor, to her Somerville, MA, apartment, to the isolated Alaskan villages she visits — and how her body is her daughter’s environment.  The months of her pregnancy are the organizing structure for the book, providing a forward thrust to the narrative and leavening the otherwise deeply depressing material.  This is a really difficult trick to pull off — in writing this blog I’ve discovered just how hard it is to move smoothly from global trends and statistics to individual experiences — but for most of the book Steingraber makes it seem natural.

While this book was recommended to me by a pregnant friend, I think it might well have given me a panic attack if I had read it while pregnant myself.  But, overall, I’d definitely recommend it.  I learned a lot about both fetal development and the environment, but I also enjoyed the time spent in Steingraber’s company.

I haven’t gotten totally confused by the end of daylight savings time — I know it’s not Tuesday. But I don’t think I’m likely to have time for a book review on Election Day. So, special this week, we have "Tuesday Book Review, now on Sunday!"

The book is She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, by Jennifer Finley Boylan. It’s a memoir of her life as a maile-to-female transsexual, her attempts to overcome the feeling that she was supposed to be female and of the incredibly loving response of her wife and friends to her transition.

This is not a book I would have picked up just from browsing the bookstore shelves, but a friend recommended it, and I’m so glad she did. It’s very well written — Boylan has written several novels — and a touching love story.

I admit, when Boylan tries to describe why she needed to make the transition, I still feel like I’m blind and she’s trying to describe color to me. She writes about, as a young man, asking women what it felt like to have breasts, and how baffled they were by the question. I share that bafflement. She’s clearly proud of how much she looks feminine, her skills at dressing and wearing makeup, but there are lots of genetic women who don’t look feminine and even as teenagers weren’t especially concerned with their appearance. But any argument I can make, she has already raised, which is disarming.

Boylan writes that she felt she was supposed to be a woman even as a child, but thought that everyone would reject her if she made the transition. So he lives as a man, and marries and has children. And in spite of his loving family, and his successful career, and hobbies he loves, he eventually decides that being a man isn’t something he can live with, and so makes the transition to living as a woman. And the tragedy of it is that having waited so long, his decision affects — and hurts — more people than it would have if he had done it at 25. And the blessing of it is that her wife and children and mother and colleagues and friends respond with love and acceptance. (Her sister cuts off contact.)

There’s one passage from the book that struck me as the heart of the story. It’s after James (later Jenny) has visited a therapist, who tells him that he’s a transsexual and encourages him to live as a woman, noting that it will be easier as he’s young and unmarried. But that’s not what he wants:

"I wanted to learn how to accept who I wasn’t.

"What I felt was, beling a man might be the second best life I can life, but the best life I can live will mean only loss and grief. So what I wanted was to learn how to be happy with this second best life… I still believed that it was a life full of blessings. People can’t have everything they want, I thought. it is your fate to accept a life being someone other than yourself.

"I don’t think this is so crazy, even now. If I could have pulled this off, I would have."

I don’t understand how a life as rich and full of blessings as Boylan describes her life pre-transtion could be unbearable, even if it is "second best," but I’m totally convinced by her writing that she found it so, that she would not have put herself and her loved ones through the difficulty of her transition unless she found it impossible to continue otherwise. I do wonder about what would have happened to Boylan if he had been born 100 years earlier. If he lived at a time when transsexuality wasn’t generally recognized and sex change operations were an impossibility, would he have drunk himself to death while insisting that he was happy? Or would he have been happy, living his life as a man?

For today’s book review, I’m looking at two guides for stay-at-home dads. One is The Stay-at-Home Dad Handbook, a new book by Peter Baylies, the founder of the At-Home Dad Network; the other is Stay-at-Home Dads: The Essential Guide to Creating a New Family by Libby Gill, which came out a few years ago.

Although the two books cover similar overall territory (making connections with other at-home parents, housekeeping, suriving on one income), there’s an interesting difference between their tones. Gill is somewhat breathless about the trend of at-home fathers, writing things like: "But they’re also pioneers, exploring the frontiers of a family option that’s always been there but is now catching on like wildfire." Her book is aimed at both at-home-dads and their wives, and focuses a lot on the decision to have a father as a full-time parent. Baylies is much more matter of fact about whole thing; he assumes that his readers have already decided to be stay-at-home dads, and simply offers advice to make the journey smoother. Gill argues that most families with an at-home parent make that choice because they think they can do a better job than a paid child care provider; Baylies assumes that they do it because it’s rewarding, even fun.

The most useful part of Gill’s book was the lists of questions for husbands and wives to discuss. In addition to being married to an at-home-dad, she’s a career coach, and it shows. She does a good job of identifying some of the hidden minefields that can show up for what she calls "SAHD/WM" families (the "WM" is for "working mother") and I like to call "reverse traditional" families, especially with regard to money issues, but also about differences in parenting styles.

My favorite part of Baylies’ book is the multitude of real at-home-dads whose story and advice he shares. Whereas Gill’s examples always seem to be made-up composites, Baylies’ book feels like he’s invited you over for lunch with some friends, and everyone’s chatting about their experiences. A good bit of the advice that he offers could just as easily go in a book for stay-at-home mothers — but how many fathers would feel comfortable reading it? My one quibble is that many of his examples seem more suited to parents of older children than those caring for infants and toddlers.

Both books go through a standard calculation arguing how the second income often gets so consumed by taxes, child care, and other related expenses that it hardly increases the resources available to the family. I always find these short-sighted, in that they only look at a point in time, not at the impacts on future earning potential, retirement benefits, etc.

One interesting aspect of the discussion of how to save money in the Baylies book is the inclusion of the money that can be saved by doing major home maintenance, repairs, and improvement yourself. This reminded me of a point that Jennifer made to me after reading The Two-Income Trap. She wrote:

"I was very struck while reading this book about how changes in the economy make a guy’s work around the house more important than ever. When you’re sending half your income to the mortgage, suddenly keeping those gutters cleared and recaulking the tub becomes a big deal. The average American family now keeps two cars instead of one, and we keep them longer than ever before: now the husband who can tinker on the car is a very valuable asset. But when he doesn’t get dinner on the table? No big deal because eating out is almost as cheap as eating at home, and overall a small part of the budget anyway. Can’t mend those torn jeans? Just go get another pair at Old Navy. And when’s the last time anyone’s work clothes got ironed anyway?

Put it all together and the one remaining big cost that is associated with
traditional mom’s work is child care. So I’m thinking my husband — who’s
great with kids, who does his own wiring/plastering/carpentry on our house,
who can fix the family car — is an economic juggernaut!!! "

Today’s book is American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and A Nation’s Drive to End Welfare. It’s by Jason DeParle, who covered the "welfare beat" for the New York Times during the mid-1990s, when welfare reform was being debated. He eventually decided that he wanted to cover the story more in-depth than the pressures of a newspaper allowed and this book is the result.

It’s a terrific book — DeParle does a masterful job in moving back and forth between the broad strokes of welfare policy and politics, both in Washington DC and in Wisconsin, and the details of three women’s lives. I know a lot about welfare policy — it’s what I do professionally — and I learned some things I didn’t know, but it’s also very accessible for someone who doesn’t know anything about the subject. I think I should carry around a copy of it to hand to all the people who corner me at a party when they find out where I work and rant at me about welfare.

Reading the book made me very angry. Angry at the elected officials who were — and are — more interested in scoring political points off of each other than in making good policies. Angry at the organizations — some private, some "not-for-profit" — who took tons of money from the welfare department and spent a whole lot of it on fancy dinners and advertising and golf balls with the company name on them instead of on the people who needed help. Angry at the men who are almost totally absent from this story many of them in jail. And angry at the mothers for not doing more to protect their children — for drinking and doing crack while pregnant (the alcohol is probably the worse for kids) — for tolerating "friends" and "family" who literally took food out of their kids’ mouths.

The title of this book is bitterly ironic. Not only aren’t these women living the American Dream, they don’t seem to have much in the way of dreams, any hope that life could be better in the future. As DeParle notes, for all the talk of how welfare recipients are held down by a sense of "entitlement," what’s amazing is how little the women he talked to feel entitled to: not a job that pays a living wage, not a safe neighborhood, not a good school for their children. They’re survivors, and that’s both their strength and their downfall. When the welfare office screws up and cuts off their food stamps in error, or when someone steals their car, making it impossible to get to work, they cope. But they’re not doing much to make tomorrow better — either for themselves or their children.

It’s hard to know what policy conclusions to take from this book. The three women DeParle follows — Angie, Jewell and Opal — consistently deny that welfare reform mattered to them. And yet two of them were off of cash assistance and working for almost the entire period covered by the book, part of a huge overall trend. At the same time, their lives were only marginally better than before. DeParle and many others have suggested that part of the solution has to be get the men more involved — as a source of both emotional and financial support — but no one really knows how to do that. It’s a dilemna.

In that infamous article on the "Opt-Out Revolution," Lisa Belkin argues that –on average — women are less ambitious than men, less interested in the conventional measures of success — money, power, titles — and suggests that it may be due to biological differences between men and women.

This conclusion is firmly rejected by Anna Fels, author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. She makes a classic liberal feminist argument: ambition is not seen as a "feminine" quality, especially in the mainstream white middle-class definition of femininity; many women censor their own ambitions and choose not to compete with men as a result; and society penalizes women who are overtly ambitious and competitive. This argument should be familiar to anyone who has read Susan Faludi’s Backlash or taken an introduction to Women’s Studies class.

What’s new and interesting in this book is Fels’ emphasis on recognition as a fundamental human need. She has a very specific definition in mind here:

"Recognition means being valued by others for qualities that we experience and value in ourselves; it involves appreciation by another person that feels accurate and meaningful to the recipient. Because recognition affirms a person’s individual experience or accomplishment, it is different from other forms of attention."

Fels’ description of how women simultaneously hunger for this sort of recognition and deny that they desire it (and are uncomfortable when they receive it) rang very true to me. For example, she cites repeated examples of women running for elected office — perhaps the ultimate action of seeking public recognition — who frame their activitism as just another form of caregiving. However, she sometimes pushes this argument to the edge of absurdity. Reading this book, one might think that the biggest danger of divorce to homemakers is the loss of the recognition provided by their ex-husbands rather than the financial threat or that the biggest advantage of the "old boys network" is the recognition it provides rather than the doors to power it opens.

Fels is about as negative about full-time parenting as anything I’ve read since The Feminine Mystique. She writes that a body of literature "document[s] the large component of child care that consists of demanding, low-control, repetitive tasks. This aspect of child care undoubtedly accounts for the fact that virtually everyone who can afford some kind of child care has it. It is the reason that full-time parenting, frequently praised as the most important and meaningful job in the world, is not one that men are lining up to do." Further, she argues that few people receive recognition for their parenting skills, because children are notoriously self-centered (Fels says "comically oblivious") and no one else is paying attention to what you’re doing.

Fels argues that — except for the very stressful years of the late 20s and early 30s when both careers and young children are highly demanding — working mothers are happier and more satisfied with their lives, their marriages, and their sense of self than at-home mothers. Her basic recommendations are for more government support for child care, more paternal care, and for women who are unhappy at work to seek out better jobs rather than to give up on paid employment entirely. She is concerned that women who "opt-out" will be buying temporary relief at the cost of long-term depression.

Yesterday got away from me, so we’re having a Wednesday Book Review this week. The book is The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (With Surprising Solutions That Will Change Our Children’s Future), by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi.

First, let me say that in spite of the title, the book doesn’t bash two-income families. It’s about how more and more American families are only one setback away from financial disaster and bankruptcy. The authors (a mother-daughter team) argue that two-earner families (and single-earner families) who are spending up to their income actually have less of a safety net than families with another earner “in reserve” in the form of an at-home parent.

The book is full of statistics, and I’m not sure I believe all of them. For example, on page 6 they say that “if these trends persist… nearly one of every seven families with children would have declared itself flat broke…” and on the very next page, they cite a study that indicates that “for every family that officially declares bankruptcy, there are seven more whose debt loads suggest that they should file for bankruptcy.” These two figures together suggest that essentially ALL families with children should file for bankruptcy, which clearly isn’t the case. So I recommend taking the claims of the book with a grain of salt. But the arguments are interesting enough that the book is worth reading nonetheless.

For me, the most interesting argument in the book is the claim that housing prices — especially housing prices in neighborhoods with good schools — along with child care/pre-school and college costs, are the main factor driving up family spending, rather than the “overconsumption” that is typically blamed. I think they overstate their argument somewhat, but there’s a lot of truth to it. They focus on homeownership, but the rental market in urban areas is just as bad. And they’re right that the costs of food and clothing are unbelievably low by historical standards. (I’m not sure why they don’t discuss health care costs, which are growing like kudzu.)

Warren and Tyagi’s solution to the problem is to totally de-link housing location from access to schools, with a voucher system. Note that this is a much more radical proposal than most of the vouchers that have been considered in the US, which are essentially a safety valve for a limited number of children in certain school districts. Under their proposal, there would be no such thing as a default school that a child was entitled to attend based on where his or or her family lives. It’s hard to imagine that they seriously expect anyone to adopt their proposal, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

Another interesting section was their discussion of divorce. Warren and Tyagi note that historically, the reason that women and children were impoverished by divorce was: a) the women were less educated than the men and therefore had less earning potential and b) the courts did not enforce child support well. We’ve made significant progress on both fronts, but women and children are still often impoverished and at risk of bankruptcy following divorce. They argue that the problem is that, if a two-earning couple is just barely making ends meet prior to a divorce, the divorce will increase their total expenses as they need to set up two households, but not increase the total income available to the members. Moreover, parents are often unwilling to disrupt their children’s lives even further by taking the steps needed to cut expenses — selling the family home, moving to a less expensive neighborhood, pulling children out of pre-school or afterschool activities — so they wind up in debt.

The villians of this book are clearly the credit card and mortgage lending companies. The authors note that they are most eager to lend to people when they’re already in a little bit of trouble, because they make the most money from people who carry balances. Warren and Tyagi describe this as the “cement life raft,” arguing that borrowing allows people to postpone facing the harsh realities of divorce and unemployment, but puts them into a hole that they can’t dig out of.

The book concludes with some surprising financial advice. They particularly advise against the common practice of taking out a lower-interest home equity loan in order to pay off credit cards — most people simple run up the credit card balance again, and are now at risk of losing their homes. They also argue against the “no latte” strategy beloved of consumer finance magazines — they say you’re better off spending some money on non-essentials that can be easily cut in an emergency, than committing every last dollar to your mortgage or tuition bill, which are fixed costs.

For today’s book review, I turn to Ann Crittenden’s new book If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home. I felt bad about having taking a bit of a cheap shot at it a few weeks back, without having actually read it. So I read it.

The good news is that Ann Crittenden has not taken leave of her senses — she’s very well aware that the business world does not currently value the skills developed through parenting. The bad news is that this book is unlikely to convince anyone of the value of parenting experience who isn’t already a believer — even if they read the book, which they won’t. I’m not quite sure who the target audience for this book is, other than weirdos like me who are obsessed with the work-family literature. Maybe stay-at-home parents who are looking for a confidence boost as they consider moving back into the paid workforce? (There’s an appendix discussing how to list skills gained through parenting on a resume.) As of today, it’s somewhere in the 4,000s on the Amazon sales list, which I think is pretty good.

To be honest, I found this book a slow read. Crittenden makes her case with exhaustive quotes and examples, but after a while it felt awfully repetitive. And, to a great degree, it felt like she was attacking a straw-man (straw-woman?) argument — that parenting rots your brain. Except for those awful sleep-deprived mornings, that’s not a claim that anyone I know takes seriously.

RebelDad shared his perspective on this book a few weeks ago, and commented that Crittenden lumps all parents together — those combining paid work and parenting, and those returning to the workforce after time spent exclusively parenting. I think I’d go further than that — while the interviews that Crittenden cites were with both "juggling" and "sequencing" parents, I think the book is really aimed at promoting sequencing.

This makes sense when you think of If you’ve raised kids… as sort of an addendum to Crittenden’s last book, The Price of Motherhood. As throughly documented by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, it’s not just the years out of the labor force that cripple women’s lifetime earnings, it’s the effect of these years on their earnings when they try to return. (The limited evidence suggests that it’s just as bad, or even worse, for men who take time out to parent.) And, as I’ve argued before, it’s crazy that in a potential lifespan of 80 or more years, we shouldn’t be able to focus on parenting for the few years when our children are very young or otherwise needy.

However, I wish that Crittenden hadn’t let her bias in favor of at-home-parents show through so much. There are several passages in the book that made me wince as a working parent, including the one in which Crittenden imagines herself telling her teenage son "I gave all that [a prestigious job at the New York Times] up so that you would have at least one parent at home who would be there for you and make sure you didn’t turn out pathetic!" Ouch! Crittenden also shares a horror story of a poor working mother whose children died in a fire when she left them unattended to go to work, a story of a union leader whose daughter was "still angry about her frequent absences and for a long time remained more deeply attached to her grandmother," a story of a media executive who had to remain on the job at September 11, not knowing whether her son was safe, and the story of a lawyer who became an at-home-mom because her job forced her into an "inauthentic persona." Not exactly the most reassuring reading.

This is particularly unfortunate, because, as Crittenden suggests, if the doors are going to be opened to recognize parenting skills any time soon, it’s probably going to be other parents who open them. And by and large, it’s going to be working parents who are going to be in the position to open them.

***

1/14/05: This post is getting a zillion hits via google all of a sudden.  I’m assuming this is part of some sort of assignment.  Please read my comments about the internet and plagarism on my About page.

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.”