Half Changed World

Today’s book is Dispatches From A Not-So-Perfect Life OR How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child, by Faulkner Fox. (Side note: until I started this project, I had never noticed how all of the nonfiction books I read about parenting have long subtitles.)

This is a hard book for me to review, because it’s such a personal narrative. It’s about Fox’s struggle with Motherhood and her attempt to keep her sense of self in the midst of the fatigue, messiness, and routines of being a mom to small children. She does a good job of identifying the problems she faced, but doesn’t really try to propose solutions or broad analytical frameworks. Her main goal is to provide a lifeline to other women in the same situation, to make them feel less alone, less crazy, less guilty. I wasn’t feeling any of those things before I read the book, so I’m probably not the target audience.

That said, I enjoyed the book. I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny, as some of the reviews I’d seen suggested, but it’s got a light touch and is well-written. Most of all, I liked the author and enjoyed spending a few hours in her company — if she lived nearby, I’d want to be her friend. She’s mastered the art of raising complaints/concerns about her life and the world without sounding either strident or whiny, which is a rare skill.

The book is divided into thematic chapters, some of which resonated more for me than others. The one that hit home the most for me was on friendship, in which Fox talks about her frustration with her inability to make friends with the mothers around her and the superficial levels of conversation she has with them, and comments that she wants to join an old fashioned consciousness-raising group to talk about motherhood, how it really felt, how it was often joyous but also frustrating. Me too. I found it interesting to see that on her website, Fox has set up discussion boards for women to talk about these issues — I’ve definitely found the internet, especially parenting email lists, my greatest source of support.

Fox thinks that it’s judgmentalism, and the fear of it, that keeps women from talking about these issues. That’s certainly part of it. I agree with her analysis that it’s hard to just put in the hours to make new friends. I also think the playground and coffee shops, those famous mother hang-outs, are terrible places to try to talk, because in neither one are small kids likely to safely self-entertain for long periods of time. My older son is now 3 1/2, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to learn if we have a playdate the kids now actually can play together for 20 minutes or more at a time and the adults can have something resembling a real conversation.

Fox would really like to be able to get together with mothers without the kids, and attributes the difficulties of this to men not doing enough child-rearing. I think she’s totally missing the perspective of the full-time working mom, who rarely feels like she gets enough time with her children. Sure, I’d miss an evening with them occasionally to spend with a good friend — but probably not for the awkward getting-to-know-you stage with someone who might someday be a friend.

Finally — at least in my experience — the biggest obstacle to friendship between full-time working moms and at-home moms is not judgmentalism but scheduling. Working moms want weekend playdates; at-home moms rarely do. For a while I was working a "compressed workweek" meaning I worked 80 hours a payperiod, but over 9 days rather than 10, giving me a weekday off every two weeks. So I’d have my day off and head out to the playground. I had fun with my son, but never really connected with the parents. They all seemed to know each other, and didn’t seem interested in meeting someone new, especially not someone who wasn’t going to be there on a regular basis.

Today’s book is Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, by Rhona Mahony. This is an absolutely fascinating book, published in 1995, that I don’t know anyone else who has ever heard of. I encountered it through a footnote in another book, perhaps The Second Shift.

Kidding Ourselves is almost two books in one. The first two-thirds is an attempt to answer the question of why so many smart ambitious feminist women in egalitarian marriages have kids and all of a sudden find themselves responsible for more than half of the child care and household work. As Naomi Wolf puts it in Misconceptions:

"Our generation did not think we were marrying breadwinners; we thought we were marrying our best friends. But the husbands were pulling rank in a way that best friends don’t do."

Mahony’s answer is that it’s a matter of power, and negotiating positions. And she goes through an interesting list of negotiating strategies that women can use to try to persuade their husbands to do more: Telling them how unhappy the current situation is making, make moral arguments about equality, offer other things in return that will make them happy, nag, threaten to leave. Some of these are more or less effective. Wolf makes similar points, and grimly concludes that men simply aren’t going to make real career sacrifices unless forced to, and women aren’t going to be able to force them to do it, because their threat to leave isn’t serious.

I found Mahony a more optimistic read, even though she also thinks that — on average — women are going to lose these negotiations, necause she believes that there are things that women can do to increase their leverage. The key point, however, is that these are mostly choices made long before the children are born — what career to enter, what spouse to marry.

Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don’t maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework.

Is it Ms magazine that used to refer to "click" moments? CLICK.

The earning potential part is generally understood. The marriage point is interesting, because it’s not just about money. It’s that if you want a husband who is intensely involved in child-rearing, you have to marry someone who values it, even if it has a career cost. And career-oriented ambitious women tend to marry equally career-oriented ambitious men.

The child care is a point that I keep making to everyone I know. Child care is not an inherent skill. You can get some ideas of how to do it by reading books or taking classes or talking to other parents, but mostly you learn how to do it by doing it. And you make some mistakes — forgetting to bring a change of clothes on an outing, bouncing the child too much after a feeding — but you learn from them. Most fathers spend ridiculously little time on their own with their infants, which puts them behind. And once one parent is "the expert" and the other "the assistant" it becomes far too easy to maintain that role.

The last third of the book, much to my surprise, is a vision of a world in which breadwinning mothers and caregiving fathers are as common as breadwinning fathers and caregiving mothers. Like me (!) Mahony rejects the goal of having all families divide breadwinning and childrearing equally. She writes:

"Not all fathers can do half the child rearing, or want to, or should. Much more to the point, some fathers can do lots more, and want to, and should. People give the incorrect answer [a 50-50 future[, I think, because they can’t boost their imaginations over the hump of the present to imagine a future in which there really exists no sexual division of labor. "

Since my review of Getting a Life, by Helen Simpson, was swallowed by technical problems last week, I”m trying again.

This is a collection of short stories. A few of the characters reoccur across stories, but the real linkages are thematic. With a few exceptions, the the stories are all about mothers — some employed, some not — in and around contemporary London. Not much happens in most of the stories, but Simpson captures the daily details and inner thoughts of her characters in almost painful detail. I do mean painful — at times reading the stories is like watching a dissection, with lots of bloody flesh hanging out until suddenly you see something that was hidden before.

My favorite story, by which I suppose I mean the one that resonated the most strongly with my life, is “Cafe Society” in which two women, who think that they might be friends, try to have a conversation over a cup of coffee while simultaneously dealing with one of their three-year-olds. Of course, they only manage to say a tiny fraction of what they’re thinking — enough maybe to sustain an existing friendship, but not to create a new one, to breach the walls of politeness and actually show a little of your real self.

I recommend skipping “Millennium Blues,” which may have been entertaining in 2001 but is now sadly out of key. It’s hard to read an ironic story about planes exploding overhead these days.

Some of the reader reviews on Amazon complained that the stories are unremittingly negative about motherhood. It’s true — the working mothers are mostly stressed and overwhelmed, the at-home mothers have lost touch with themselves, both groups are cattily judgmental about each other. But the stories are funny and sad, and sometimes sweet.

It does make me wonder about books like Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions and Susan Mausart’s The Mask of Motherhood, which complain “no one ever told me it would be like this.” Maybe I’ve been luckier than others, but I’ve found plenty of both books and people to tell me the downsides as well as the positives.

*****

A note on the links: Typepad automatically links the books on the sidebar list to Amazon.com (and I get a few cents if you buy them through them). I’m manually inserting links to Powell’s, which I love for being a real live bookstore, with employees who love books, and for selling (and listing) both used and new books. If you’re buying new books, Amazon is generally cheaper. If you’re buying a lot of used books, Powell’s is often a better deal, because you can get free shipping on orders over $50 while the Amazon marketplace charges shipping per item. My favorite source for comparison shopping is www.fetchbook.info.

I’ve got about a hundred and one books that I’d like to write about, so I think I’m going to have a weekly book review. Note that the "books I’m talking about" list will include books that ticked me off as well as ones I’d recommend, so check out the review before you treat the inclusion as an endorsement.

I wanted to talk a bit more about Flux. In brief, the author, Peggy Orenstein, interviewed dozens of women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s to see how their attitudes about work/family/life issues differed at different life stages. The synthesized findings are wrapped around portraits of individual women, and her own musings about whether to become a parent. This book is an easy, mostly enjoyable read. The women are portrayed sympathetically, and largely allowed to speak in their own words.

The sections on parenting largely cover ground that has been covered by other authors. What I hadn’t seen elsewhere (at the time) is the wledgment that by the time you’ve been in the workforce for 10 or so years, the bloom is often off the rose. Obviously, it depends on your career path, but in lots of jobs, you’re starting to hit the flat side of the learning curve, the excitement has worn off, and you’re starting to ask "is this really what I want to do with the next 30 years of my life?" For many of the women in their 30s in Orenstein’s book, becoming a mother was a socially acceptable opportunity to step back from their careers and to see their lives as a whole and to reflect on their priorities, a sabbatical of sorts.

The other part of Orenstein’s book that I liked is her recognition of what seems obvious to me — the main reason that many women postpone childbearing until their late 30s isn’t because they’re so focused on their careers, as Sylvia Ann Hewett suggests, but because they’d rather not go it alone, and they haven’t met a partner who is ready to parent.

The title of this blog comes from the subtitle to Peggy Orenstein’s book “Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World.” In this book, Orenstein examines how women in their 20s, 30s and 40s are living with the options and choices now available to them.

I read the book while on maternity leave with my first child — mostly while nursing him — and it hit a nerve for me. When I decided to start this blog, the phrase “half-changed world” immediately came to mind.