Half Changed World

I learned via Shannon at Peter’s Cross Station that today is Blogging for LGBT Families Day.

I don’t have anything terribly profound to say on the subject, so I think I’ll just share a kid story:

Last week at dinner, D asked "Do you know who I’m going to marry when I grow up?"

"No honey, who are you going to marry?"

"I’m going to marry Joe."  [One of his good friends.]

"Uh, ok."

"Boys can marry boys, you know."  [Said in a truculent sort of voice, as if he were daring me to disagree.]

"Uh, yes, that’s true, at least in some states.  Ummm.  Virginia’s not one of them.  But, sweetie, I will do everything I can so that if when you grow up, you still want to marry Joe, you can.  Ok."

"I’m not going to marry N.  Because he’s my brother."

"That’s right, he’s already part of your family."

Today’s book is It’s A Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, edited by Andrea Buchanan.  I’m one of the last stops on this month’s blog book tour.

At the MotherTalk event I attended, Andi read her essay from this book, "Learning to Write," which is about how her daughter used writing to express her anger with — and her separation from — Andi.  I asked her why she included it, since it’s not obviously about gender, and she said that it was because she found the issue of enmeshment and separation was a running theme in the essays about mothering daughters, while it was not in the ones about mothering sons.  As she explains in her response to Meredith at Boston Mommy, Andi found that mothers couldn’t help identifying with their daughters, and revisiting "the ghosts of their girlhoods."  (Do fathers of sons go through the same struggles?)

***

I am the mother of two sons.   I adore them to pieces, but I do sometimes feel a pang for the daughter that I’m never going to have.   These books  (I wrote about It’s A Boy back in November) made me think about what it is that I think would be different with a daughter.  It’s not the traditionally girly stuff that I’m sad about missing (although I’ll admit to coveting the little girls’ dresses in the stores).

I think maybe I’m wistful about not getting to teach a girl that she can do anything she dreams of.  Oh, I’ll certainly teach my boys that they can do anything they dream of, but it’s not the same.  I guess, like many of the writers in the collection, I had thoughts of raising a daughter without the hangups and insecurities I have.  (Also, I think society today is by far harsher on boys who aren’t conventionally masculine than it is on girls who aren’t conventionally feminine, so I’ll worry about my sons even as I encourage them to follow their hearts.)

This sounds silly, but I’m also getting a sinking feeling that my boys may not be willing to sit still for all the books that I’ve dreamed of reading to them.  I know, they’re young yet, but… D is pretty much uninterested in any chapter books that don’t involve pirates or rocketships.  I’m going to be thoroughly disappointed if I don’t get to read Charlotte’s Web, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Little House books to my kids.  Do boys read Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret? Based on what I’m hearing in the blogosphere, my odds would be better if I had girls.

I’ve written so much about Leslie Morgan Steiner’s Mommy Wars book and the press it’s gotten that it almost seemed beside the point to read the book.  But when I picked up the book in a store and realized how many of the authors I’ve written about here — Lonnae O’Neil Parker, Jane Juska, Anna Fels — I decided to give it a second chance, in spite of the dreadful title and the worse subtitle (Stay-At-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families).

The good news is that the book is far better than media coverage or Steiner’s blog would suggest.  Many of the essays are thoughtful, some are funny, others tender.  Almost all of them come to some soothing conclusion about how we’re all doing our best:

• Parker: "I can have it all, just not on the same day."
• Leslie Lehr: "I also hope they’ll respect all women, no matter what choices are made in terms of work and motherhood."
• Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff: "There is no formula for success, but there are many individual solutions, and I’ve found mine."
• Page Evans: "Happy children.  That’s the bottom line for mothers."
• Juska: "I am in favor of choosing, consciously, to have a good time with kids."

Only a few of the essays conclude with what I would call true "mommy wars" moments.  Interestingly, both authors attribute the stinger lines to their 10 year olds —  Catherine Clifford’s son’s asking "Yeah, you love him so much, how come you leave him with some nanny person all the time?" Sara Nelson’s son saying "There once was a time when women didn’t work, wasn’t there?  Is that what they call the Dark Ages?"

The downside of the book is that, as Sandra Tsing Loh nastily points out in the Atlantic, the writers lack a certain diversity.  (Thanks Sandy.)  It’s not just that they’re almost all white and affluent.  It’s that they almost all seem to work (or used to) as writers, editors, or television producers and use brand names to prove their credentials.  That said, I think Loh takes her criticism to an extreme (and is somewhat hypocritical, as she’s the one who turned a book review last year into a tale of her own troubles getting her kid into preschool).  And, as we discussed last week, I think the work-family issues of the affluent are worth discussing.  The problem is what Steiner writes in her introduction:

"Most of the debate in the United States about the benefits of working versus stay-at-home motherhood has been taken over by experts: researchers, academics, politicians, journalists.  Many of them aren’t women.  Some aren’t even parents.  The most authoritative (and fascinating) answers come from moms themselves."

I just don’t think that’s true, especially when the only moms you’re talking to are the ones like you.  I enjoyed many of these essays, but I learned a lot more from reading journalists like Jason DeParle and academics like Annette Lareau and Kathryn Edin. 

A more fundamental problem is that — as usual for these work-family discussions — fathers and husbands are all but invisible (with Sarnoff’s "I Do Know How She Does It," where she explicitly says that she couldn’t have succeeded in her high pressure career without her husband’s sharing of parenting duties, as a notable exception).  One passage in particular stood out for me, from Beth Brophy’s "Good Enough":

"It’s been eight years since I quit my job.  I’ve never looked back.  My husband has glanced back, usually with a calculator in one hand and a stack of mortgage and orthodontia bills in the other.  He misses my paycheck and I do too.  When I had a steady one and I wanted something, I usually bought it.  Now I can’t.  Or if I do buy it, I feel guilty…. While I’m feeling a lot more relaxed with the new world order, my husband is developing an ulcer.  As I’ve made abundantly clear to him and anyone else who asks, I hope never again to work full-time in an office."

I wonder what he thinks about this.   

Today’s book is a collection of essays by Marjorie Williams, called The Woman at the Washington Zoo (after a poem by Randall Jarrell).  The subtitle is "Writings on politics, family, and fate" and the book is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to the three topics — political profiles, columns that appeared in the Washington Post and in Slate, and a set of essays about her diagnosis (in her mid 40s) with terminal liver cancer and how she lived with the disease and the knowledge of her impending death.

The political profiles are elegantly written, but seem like period pieces at this point, full of references that need to be footnoted to explain them to contemporary readers.  Even the joint profile of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, written just after the 2000 election, seems like a postcard from long ago. 

In her essays and columns, Williams writes about many of the issues that I cover in this blog.  She calls feminists to task for letting Bill Clinton off the hook for his pattern of sexual harassment, writes about the decline of the "political wife," and is dismayed by the inclusion of a makeup "advertorial" in Ms Magazine.  She reviews books likeThe Nuture Assumption, The Baby Boon, and The Marriage Sabbatical.  She is equally scornful of Real Simple and politicians’ false apologies.

Williams is not a soothing writer. In a review of I Don’t Know How She Does It (which she liked a lot more than I did), she writes:

"American women — can-do daughters of their country’s optimism — still secretly nourish a poignant hope that there is An Answer to the dilemna of work and family.  On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

But unlike Caitlin Flanagan, Williams is never smug.  She never conveys any sense that she thinks she’s got things any more figured out than anyone else, or that her choices are superior to yours.  She admits that as the mother of young children, she enjoyed the time to herself that she got when she was commuting back and forth from Washington to New Jersey to visit her dying mother.

I think my favorite essay from the book is her previously unpublished memoir of her mother.  She unblinkingly writes about the joys and costs of her mother’s traditionally female path of service and reflected glory, and of her own ambivalence toward it:

"I never knew which would be worse: to be right or wrong in my hunch that her life was an unhappy one.  I suppose I will always wonder if it is self-justification that makes me see tragedy in the perfection of her kitchen.  I only know that, frozen in the passage between my mother’s mooon and my father’s sun, I made my choice many years ago.  but, although I always craved the gaudy satisfaction of my father’s sun, it is my mother’s life that fascinates me now.  And it is my love for her that both comforts and pains me more.  In life, I shrank from what I took (rightly, I still think) to be her judgments of me, her anger at my repudiation of the bargains she made.  Now, I dream about her often, and usually I wake from them with delight….

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear."

Over the weekend, my husband and I babysat for two kids for a couple of hours.  (After almost 5 years of trying, we’ve finally managed to join a functioning babysitting coop!)  The three-year-old was happy to play with our boys (and their toys), but the nine-month-old was quite upset to wake up in a strange place and cried most of the time she was here.  After trying the obvious problems (interested in bottle? needs a fresh diaper?), T. and I took turns walking back and forth with her, singing in her ear.  She seemed to be happier with T. holding her, maybe because he can carry a tune, maybe because he was less disturbingly like-mommy but not-mommy.

Tertia had a pair of interesting posts recently, in which she talked about a incident where her daughter was crying while she was getting the babies ready for a bath.  Rose (her nanny) heard her, came in, and without saying anything took Kate, who immediately calmed down.  Tertia asked her readers what their reaction would be, and then shared hers: a moment of jealousy and anger, followed by gladness that her children have another person in their lives who loves them so much and is able to make them happy and appreciation that Rose is comfortable enough with her role to do that.

I know that when the boys were babies, I always felt a ton of mixed emotions whenever T was able to calm them down when I wasn’t — glad that they weren’t screaming in my ear any more, but also profound insecurity in my parenting skills.  And I’m sure T felt the same way when I did it — and I did it more often, because I had the unfair advantage of being the provider of magic mommy milk.  And, over time, we both got more confident and recognized that the boys’ passing preferences weren’t something to get worked up over.  (Not that we still don’t cringe when they insist on one of us over the other.)

That said, I do believe that it’s important to let both parents (and any other key caregivers) develop their own sets of soothing skills and a sense of competency.   And sometimes that does mean the more experienced parent (or caregiver) standing back and letting the other one figure it out on their own.  If someone is always rushing in to bail you out as soon as it gets rough, you’re never going to learn.  (Tertia did say that, based on her reaction, she’s going to work harder not to rescue her husband when he’s struggling.)

I had a few minutes in a bookstore the other day, and I picked up the Mommy Wars book, and turned to Carolyn Hax’s essay.  Hax is the author of Tell Me About It, the Post’s advice column, and the mom of three kids under three.  I usually think her advice is right on target, and so when I heard that she had written one of the essays, I was interested in hearing what she had to say.  She acknowledges that she stepped right into the middle of the mommy wars in a column before she had kids, but says that now, her only test for parents is "would you want to be your own kid?"

I think that’s a useful perspective to bring to the daycare debate, more useful than the studies I’ve talked about before.  There are lots of happy thriving kids in parental care, and lots of happy thriving kids in paid care, and their parents shouldn’t be worrying about whether their kid might have slightly higher test scores down the road if they were doing something different.  But if your kid isn’t happy, it’s worth thinking about what might be changed — whether it’s a setting with more or fewer other kids around, more or less structure, whatever makes sense.

I’m not saying that this makes for easy answers.  Let’s go back to crying babies.  What do you do if you’re a working parent and your child cries every day when you drop him off at child care?  Especially if your child is too young to explain what’s going on in words.  Lots of kids cry a bit and then settle in and have fun the rest of the day, but what if yours doesn’t?  How long do you wait before concluding that this is more than just a transitional problem?  And what do you do then? 

I’ve been thinking about that NYTimes article on mother’s labor force participation.  The article suggests that the slight recent drop-off in women’s labor force participation in recent years is because we’ve pushed unpaid work — housework and child care — about to its lower limit, and there are only so many hours in the day and something has to give. 

Bitch, PhD thinks that makes sense.  She wrote:

if, broadly speaking, we’ve wrung about all we can out of the 24 hours in a day, then it makes sense both that some women would step back from the grueling regime in favor of a more balanced personal life, regardless of the possible risks they run in doing so: when you’ve reached the limit of your energy, you can’t keep going and that’s all there is to it. It also makes sense that women who are still trying to hang onto the stressful balancing act of career, children, and coupledom would feel that they’re singlehandedly carrying the world on their shoulders. And given the pressures on all of us, of course we’re all defensive and insistent and argumentative about our choices.

But one of her commenters, Steve Horwitz, points to this Economist article (based on this paper by Aguilar and Hurst) which uses the same underlying data as the Times article and comes to the conclusion that total leisure time for all groups — including working moms — has increased significantly over the past 40 years.  Is this possible?  And if it’s true, why do we all feel so tired?

I think there’s a bunch of different things going on.

If I’m reading the papers accurately, the biggest issue is whether you consider time spent with children doing generally recreational activities — reading to them, taking them to parties, watching school plays, even going to the park — as leisure.  Aguilar and Hurst do, while I think Bianchi (whose data the NYTimes uses) counts them as child care.  Conceptually, I think these activities somewhere between true leisure and work.  They’re not in the same category as changing diapers or attending parent-teacher conferences, which you do because they’re important, but no one really considers fun.  But they’re also at least semi-obligatory —  you feel guilty if you don’t do them enough, and you often have to do them even if you’d really rather be doing something else.  So they add to the modern parent’s endless to-do list.

While the time-use studies clearly show that the amount of time spent on housework has dropped significantly, they don’t account for the fact that people’s expectations  haven’t fallen as much.  So even if we only vaccuum once a month, we feel like we ought to do it more often, and it stays on our to-do list, even if we know that we’re never going to get to it.

Aguilar and Hurst also point out that there’s been an increase in inequality in leisure time, with more of the gain in leisure concentrated among less educated individuals.  If you believe Annette Lareau, the parents with more education are also spending more of their "free" time in intensive parenting activities.  And if you’re reading this blog, or Dr B’s, the chances are high that you’re in that group.

As the Economist article acknowledges, the blurring of the lines between work and free time are also a factor in our perception of overwork.  If you have to carry a blackberry to your kid’s soccer game, and check your voice mail over the weekend, it’s hard to leave the office behind.  And I don’t think it’s coincidence that Dr. B and Sandy Piderit are academics.  It’s not just that professors work long hours, but that their hours of work are unbounded — there’s almost always something else that they could/should be working on.

Overall, I think it’s that sense of things left undone, rather than the total number of hours worked, that makes people feel overwhelmed.  When I started work after getting my masters, I remember how excited I was at the concept of the weekend.  Look, it’s Friday, and I get to go home!  And I don’t have to think about work, or feel guilty about not doing it, until Monday morning!  What a concept.

But at this point in my life, my personal to-do list is a lot longer than my work one.  Some days are busier than others at work, but I generally leave the office having accomplished most of what I need to do.  At home, I almost always feel like I’m running behind.   Therefore, I need to make a conscious choice at times to let go of the endless to-list.

Or, as Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

Shabbat Shalom.

To go with the Barbara Crooker poem that we were discussing earlier in the week, I want to share this one by Marge Piercy.

Your cats are your children

Certain friends come in, they say
Your cats are your children.
hey smile from a great height on down.
Clouds roll in around their hair.
have real children, they mean,
while you have imitation.

My cats are not my children.
I gave Morgaine away yesterday
to a little boy she liked.
I’m not saving to send them to Harvard.
When they stay out overnight, I don’t call the police.

I like the way they don’t talk
The way they do, eyes shining
or narrowed, tails bannering,
paws kneading, cats with private
lives and passions sharp as their claws,
hunters, lovers, great sulkers.

No, my children are my friends,
my lover, my dependents on whom
I depend, those few for whom
I will rise in the middle of the night to give
comfort, massage, medicine
whose calls I always take.

My children are my books
that I gestate for years,
a slow-witted elephant
eternally pregnant, books
that I sit on for eras like the great
auk on a vast marble egg.

I raise them with loving care,
I groom and educate them,
I chastise, reward and adore.
I exercise them lean and fatten them up.
I roll them about my mind all night
and fuss over them in the mornings.

Then they march off into the world
to be misunderstood, mistreated, stolen,
to be loved for the wrong reasons,
to be fondled, beaten, lost.
Now and then I get a postcard
from Topeka Kansas, doing just fine.

People take them in and devour them.
People marry them for love.
People write me letters and tell me
how they are my children too.
I have children whose languages
rattle dumbly in my ears like gravel,

children born of the wind that blows
through me from the graves of the poor
and brave who struggled all their short
throttled lives to free people
whose faces they could not imagine.
Such are the children of my words.

Marge Piercy, from My Mother’s Body

I’m not sure what it says about me that I’m charmed by Piercy’s imagining of her books as children, growing up to have lives of their own, but am slightly alarmed by Crooker’s vision of her child as a poem, something she created.

Today’s book is Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, edited by Andrea J. Buchanan & Amy Hudock.  Specifically, this is one of the stops on Buchanan’s blog book tour.

The anthology is a selection of writing — poetry, memoir, fiction — from the Literary Mama website, and it’s truly a delight.  The first poem, Pregnancy, by Lori Romero, made me grin with recognition.  Johnny, by Heidi Raykeil, made me cry openly on the metro, wiping my nose on my coat sleeve because I didn’t have a tissue.  The authors write about the first day of school, and watching a grown child pack to leave the house.  They write about wrestling with the legacy of imperfect parenting handed down from their parents, and they write about parenting as imperfect humans themselves.

Some of the pieces made me nod, yes, that’s it, some seemed like maps to the strange countries I have yet to explore, and some made me wonder at how different my experience is from the authors’.  Barbara Crooker writes:

But to work is to abandon
to indifferent, casual hands,
what I, the potter, have worked
this demi-decade to achieve in you,
soft claygirl.

For me, one of the surprises of parenting has been how much my children are their own people, how little I feel that I am molding them.

In the introduction, Buchanan and Hudock discuss the conflicts between writing and motherhood.  I feel compelled to point out that writing is more compatible with motherhood than many careers.  The real problem is that (in most cases) it doesn’t pay very well, making it challenging to justify spending the money for child care in order to do it.  Furthermore, because writing doesn’t require you to leave home at set hours, many parents are tempted into thinking that they can be writers without having someone else provide child care.  And of course when you’re trying to squeeze anything into the margins of the day, you’re going to be cramped and frazzled.  But I really don’t think the conflict is something unique about writing.

Last week, I borrowed Fly Away Home from the library to watch with D.  I winced when I realized within the first few minutes of the movie that they were about to kill off the mother, but it was done subtly enough that I think it went straight over D’s head.  He  loved the movie, and is going around saying that he’s going to ask for it for his sixth birthday (which is only 11 1/2 months away).

We finished our reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe over the weekend.  Prompted by Jody’s lovely description of reading scary stories to an empty room, with her kids peaking around the doorway, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t send D to bed having just read the chapter in which Aslan is killed.  So we read two chapters that night, moving right from the death to the rebirth, with hardly a chance to think in between.

Sunday night we watched March of the Penguins.  Some of you are probably seeing the problem coming, but I was totally blindsided.  I wasn’t sure D would have the patience to sit through the whole thing, but he did.  And then some of the eggs were dropped and froze.  And some of the adult penguins were eaten by the leopard seals.  And when the big blizzard hit just after the eggs hatched, and some of the penguins chicks froze to death, he looked at the pictures of the pathetic little bodies and asked if they were going to come back to life.  And we said no, in this world people and animals don’t come back to life when they’re dead.  And he burst into tears. 

We stopped the movie and held him, and agreed that yes, it is sad, and yes, it’s ok to cry, and no, we don’t know why everything has to die.  And after a bit he calmed down and blew his nose, and we watched the rest of the movie.

Of all the things I want for my children, I think I most want them to develop empathy, to be people who pay attention to how things affect others, to be mensches.   But I don’t want them to be what a friend calls "skinless," totally exposed to the harshness and craziness of the world.   

In her comment on yesterday’s post, bj wondered:

"Is 300 really that unreasonable? I feel like I’m supporting personal performance. And I’d spend that much on ballet tickets, so what’s the big deal for an entertainer? I mean if we’re talking 300 ($3000) would be steep for me."

A while back, I read a book that talked about how not to overindulge kids.  (Their framework sounds similar to the one Jody mentioned last week, but the title doesn’t sound familiar.)  They offered a list of questions for determining whether something was overindulgence, which I found useful:

1)  Can you afford it?

If you can’t afford something, it’s overindulgence to buy it for your kids.  This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s routinely violated at all income levels, from poor single moms skipping meals to buy their kids designer clothers to upper-income families taking out home equity loans to pay for summer camp. 

2)  Whose needs are being met by the spending?

The authors of this book (which I really wish I could remember) argued that in many cases, overindulgence is the result of parents meeting their own needs — to provide what they missed as a child, or to keep up with the Jones — rather than meeting kids’ needs.

The nameless mom quoted in the Great Zucchini article is clearly worried about her own reputation, not her kids:

"It’s an insane, indulgent thing to do," she said. "You could just have a party where you all played pin the tail on the donkey or musical chairs or something. But that is just not done in this part of D.C. If you did that, you would be talked about."

3)  Does the spending cause the child to miss out on an important developmental task?

Even if you’re rolling in money, you still want your children to develop the concepts of sharing, deferred gratification, etc.  No one wants to raise Veruca Salt.  Two people I know have recently commented that because their relatives always bring gifts when they visit, their kids have taken to greeting guests with "what did you bring for me?" 

***

On a related note, Maggie emailed me and shared with me a letter that she recently sent to her extended family.  I quote it with her permission:

"Having spent a good deal of this last month digging out from Christmas, [husband] and I have decided that we need to do something about the volume of toys that the kids have. Times are very different than they were when we were kids – toys are relatively cheap and we can all afford to buy lots of them. We all like buying stuff for kids. And birthdays/Christmases come around pretty darn quickly….

So I’m not asking you all to do anything radical, like not give birthday gifts entirely. I am, however, asking that you exercise some more restraint than you might if I didn’t write today!

Bottom line: It is OK to buy [child] *one* hot wheels car or *one* star wars figure for a gift. I will not think that you are cheap even though I know that one hot wheels costs about $1.99 – I will be grateful that the volume of plastic in my house is that much smaller, he will be happy to have something to open, and we can probably find space to store it in an existing storage bin. Likewise, it would be wonderful for [child] to get one T-shirt or one board book for her birthday – she won’t miss the other 3 or 4 little things that usually come along, and the one will be that much more important to her because it won’t get lost in the rush. And if you want to get something bigger, that’s fine too – I’m just asking you not to give big things where small will do, or give 4 things where 1 will do."

That’s exactly right, and I wish I had read it before yesterday’s party.  T and I considered saying "no gifts, please" on the invitation, but decided against it, because we knew that D would be disappointed not getting presents.   But I am overwhelmed by the volume of stuff that he got, and honestly surprised at the number of people who gave two or three items.  (At the same time, I have to admit that I’m also wondering if the parents of D’s friends are going to think we’re cheap for giving a small card game as a birthday present.)