Half Changed World

I’ve been finding myself staying up later and later.  We usually don’t get D to bed until almost 9, and there’s just too much that I want to get done in the evenings.  I often find myself at 11, or later, trying to squeeze in one more item from my to do list.  But it’s not good for me to be walking around like a zombie.

So, the latest addition to my to-do list is "Go to bed by 11 pm."  It sounds silly, but it’s  helping, by making going to bed at a reasonable time one of the things that I’m trying to do, rather than a failure to get things done.   

Last week, in response to my post about income and SAHPs, Amy commented:

"If you’re a person who can live reasonably happily spending all day, every day with small children for 5-10 years — if you don’t require an intellectual life and work, sustained adult conversation, trips to the doctor or dentist where your priority is your health rather than keeping your child safe and amused, exercise, regular sleep, the security of a well-funded retirement account, an active resume, and a few other things — then sure, have at it."

I called this a "low blow" and she responded "in all honesty I have trouble understanding how someone with a serious intellectual life sustains the multiyear desert you get when you do fulltime childcare.  I sure as hell couldn’t."

I disagree with Amy’s suggestion that full-time parenting is incompatible with an intellectual life, but agree with her that I’d have trouble doing it.  (At some point, I realized that all my fantasies about being a stay-at-home parent involved school-age chidren.)  But I don’t think it’s because my brain would rot.  The two main reasons that I think T is better suited for being the at-home parent than I am are:

1)  He doesn’t mind the lack of adult conversation.  At the playground, he’s usually the one on the climbing structure with the kids, not on the bench trying to talk to the other adults, so he isn’t frustrated by the constant interruptions.  He has some online forums where he hangs out in the evenings, but doesn’t miss the water-cooler conversations.

2)  He’s not a multi-tasker.  I know, this is counter-intuitive; aren’t SAHPs supposed to be the masters of multi-tasking?  But it means that when he’s on the floor playing dinosaurs with the boys, he’s generally not stressing over whether the laundry’s getting done.  Whatever he’s doing, he’s giving his attention to.  I think I might get more done if I were the at-home parent, but I’d make myself crazy in the process.

Some interesting related links:

• Dadventure’s list of tips for potential stay at home dads (which generally apply to moms as well).  Via RebelDad.
• Mommy Chronicles argues "in defense of the bake sale" and the skills involved in parenting (although I would suggest that parents who work for pay also do many of the things that she describes).  Via Playground Revolution and MotherShock. 

I got up early this morning and went to the Capitol to pay my respects to Mrs. Parks.  "Pay my respects" is the right term; I didn’t know Rosa Parks personally, and she lived a long and full life, so I can’t really say I was mourning her death.  I was acknowledging her as both a person and as a symbol of what one individual can do.

I don’t have any photos — only the press were allowed to take pictures.  Bitch has a link up to a slideshow of images.  It was a beautiful Washington morning, with the sun just coming up and lighting the monuments.  All the official flags are at half-mast.  From the trampled grass and miles of barriers, it’s clear there were long lines last night (the Post says there were waits of up to 5 hours), but just before 7 am this morning there was hardly any wait.   The police officers guiding people through looked tired.

The people I saw at the viewing were racially mixed, teenagers on up.  (We thought about bringing the boys in this morning, but decided that they wouldn’t understand and it wasn’t worth the hassle in order to be able to tell them that they had done it.)  Everyone looked somber and mostly talked in hushed voices, if at all.  One woman called out "thank you, Rosa" as she walked by.  The coffin was on a box draped in black, and there were three huge wreaths, one each from the President, the House and the Senate.  A Capitol Police officer in dress uniform stood at attention at either end.

The list of those who have lain in state at the Capitol is a strange mix.  Being assassinated while President pretty much guarantees you the honor (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) but just dying in office doesn’t (Roosevelt).  Some pretty mediocre presidents have been honored (Taft?!) as well as a truly obscure Senator (John Alexander Logan).  Two Capitol Police officers who were killed in the line of duty were honored, as were unknown soldiers of World Wars I and II, Korea, and "the Vietnam era."  Congress considered so honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., but did not.  The list is enriched by the addition of Rosa Parks.

Lisa at Learning the Lessons of Nixon has inspired us to start our own version of her  Family Dinners.   And you’re invited.

The idea is that at least half of the effort of having people over for dinner is the hassle of emailing back and forth, trying to find a date that works for everyone, then hoping that no one gets stuck working late and the kids stay healthy.  This hassle can be largely overcome by just saying "Ok, standing invitation for dinner on Tuesday night.  If you can’t make it this week, come next."  The menus are centered on the sort of low-fuss dishes that can be cooked in large batches as easily as in small (and that freeze well if no one shows up some week).  And it will be good for us to have a precipitating event that forces us to vacuum the cat hair off the living room furniture once a week.

I’m serious about the invitation.  Since we can’t guarantee that we’ll be home every single Tuesday evening, I’m making a list to send everyone whose interested a weekly notice of a) whether we’re on and b) what’s for dinner (this week, it’s homemade pizza).  If you’re in the greater DC area and would like to be added to the list, send me an email.

I respond well to deadlines.  I’ve been thinking of doing the guided walk by Janet Cardiff at the Hirshhorn since it opened.  It’s about 4 blocks from my office, and takes 45 minutes.  It closes Sunday, so I finally got over to it today.  I really enjoyed it.  Even knowing what she does with audio, I still found myself turning to see if someone was coming up behind me.

Without deadlines, I procrastinate endlessly.  So, I’ve gotten pretty good at seeking out things that create artificial structure when there isn’t natural.  It’s how I wound up running several marathons.  I found myself looking at the National Novel Writing Month website this week.  I don’t especially want to write a novel, but the structure and comraderie appeal to me.  (No, I’m not going to do it.)

I fantasize about figuring out a way to make a living by reading and thinking, but I worry that without a structure to keep me moving, I’d get really good at playing Bejeweled. 

Ironically, one of my favorite ways to procrastinate these days is to read the productivity tips at 43folders.

Landismom wrote yesterday about working as a waitress:

"And waitressing seems to cross class lines for a lot of women. I know a number of men–my husband included–who have never had a job in food service. But I don’t know any women who I can say that about–even women I know who have high-level corporate jobs have some kind of waitressing in their backgrounds."

I’ve never worked as a waitress.  Is that really so unusual?  I’ve worked as a babysitter, and as a camp counselor, and as a receptionist/file clerk/girl friday in a doctor’s office, but never in food service.

Part of the explanation is that I grew up in New York City, and I think those sorts of jobs are less open to teenagers there than in suburbia.  (I know Katherine Newman has written about how in Harlem, even fast-food jobs are hard to get.)  And part is that my parents were generous enough that I didn’t have to work while in college, and was able to take unpaid or low-paying internships over the summer.

I wonder if anyone’s ever done a study of the role of unpaid internships in transmitting class privilege.  Well-off students can afford to spend their summers doing things that look good on a resume, but pay little or nothing.  Students whose families are already reaching to send them to college can’t.  (Or have to moonlight at a paying job or two on top of their internships.)  I used to fantasize about organizing a strike of all the interns on Capitol Hill. I still think that politicians who consider themselves progressive ought to figure out a way to pay their interns at least enough to cover the cost of housing for the summer.

As I think about it, I suspect the main barrier to paying interns isn’t the cost of the stipend, but the time that it would take to wade through the pile of applications that you’d receive if you advertised a decent wage.  I know in my office (which far less a glamorous place to work than the Hill), the only interns we’re able to pay are those who come to us through various formal programs, which serve to prescreen the pool of applicants.

In case anyone was wondering, the reason it’s been so quiet here is that we were up in NYC for much of last week, visiting my family, observing Yom Kippur, and celebrating N’s birthday.  We had a good time, in spite of the monsoon.  Friday we took the boys to the Toys R Us with the Ferris Wheel inside the store.  And Saturday it cleared up, and we visited the Indian museum and rode the Staten Island ferry back and forth.  It was fun, although the ferries don’t seem to have outdoor seating anymore.  The boys loved the big spiral fountain, and had great fun running up to the edge and then dashing away when the water started to spray them.

I was in a real pissy mood last night when we got back from New York.  I think I was mostly grumpy at the fact that I was so tired from our "vacation" and now had a full week of work ahead of me.  Plus my last two evenings of CASA training.  Plus a civic association meeting about the local elementary school, and an open house to look at our options if we decide not to send D to the local elementary school.  Plus doctor’s appointments for both boys.  And then, trying to check my work email from home (so I could make sure that my 9 am meeting out of the office was still happening), I managed to lock myself out of my account.  Ok, I guess I had a right to be a little overwhelmed.

Anyway, I hope to be back on a more regular posting schedule soon.

After a month of almost no rain, it’s been cold and rainy all weekend.  Yesterday we had one of D’s friends over for a sleepover, and went to the Children’s Rain Garden in Arlington and saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie.  Today, we had pancakes for breakfast, and then the boys ran all over the house hunting rabbits.  We ran a few errands after the friend went home, and then T and I were pretty much wiped.

In the interest of distracting D, and maybe getting him to eat an occasional vegetable, I offered him a new computer game — MyPyramid Blast Off, from the fine folks at the US Department of Agriculture.  In order to make the rocket blast off and travel to Planet Power!, you have to pick an assortment of foods that equals the right number of portions from the different food groups, without overloading your "fuel tanks" by eating too many calories.  Sounds thrilling, no?

D was actually quite intrigued by the game, even though it’s about as basic as you can get.  (I suspect kids in the official target age range (6-12) would be bored stiff.)  The only big problem we had was that it really did require one of us to sit with him the whole time and read the choices, so it didn’t give us quite as much of a break as we had hoped.   On the nutritional front, I’d rate it about a B:

• It did help us talk to D about the need to eat a bigger variety of foods, including some vegetables.  We’ve been floundering a bit trying to explain to him why we don’t want him to eat peanut butter on graham crackers for 3 meals a day, even if it is a reasonably healthy food.
• He was willing to try a carrot stick at dinner this evening.  He only ate about 2 bites of it, but he claimed to like it.  So that’s a good thing.

On the negative side:

• They were pushing the low-fat options pretty hard, including praising a choice of non-fat chocolate milk over the 2% fat milk that we serve the boys.  Given the overall mix of his diet, the fat is a better choice than the extra sugar.
• The options listed for the "meat and beans" category were pretty limited.  They didn’t seem to count peanuts and peanut butter toward it, and they rarely provided eggs as an option.  Those are pretty big sources of protein for our kids.
• There was essentially no discussion of portion size.   And at the "official" portion size, almost anything can fit into a balanced diet — even burgers and fries.  But almost no one eats that little of them at a sitting.

I wanted to thank Jody for her comment on yesterday’s post in which she talks about how Wake County’s desegregation scheme affected her choice of where to live.  I think it’s incredibly hard for people to talk about these issues, especially white people who don’t want to be labelled racist.

It made me want to talk a bit about where I live.  I just looked it up, and as of 2000, the census tract where I live was almost exactly 50/50 black/white.  But I wouldn’t call it a stable integrated community either — almost 2/3 of the population lived in a different house in 1995.  Forty years ago, it was the historic heart of black Alexandria.  Today it’s gentrifying and getting whiter, but slowly.  The change is slow both because there’s a good chunk of public housing in it, and because there are a significant number of older residents who own their own homes and aren’t moving.  But the housing prices have appreciated so much that when the older generation dies, their children are mostly taking the money and running.

We knew very little of this history when we moved here.  Our primary search strategy was that we wanted to be walking distance to the metro, and I wanted to feel safe doing so by myself at night.  We started looking along the Red line, then the Orange line, but didn’t find anything that we liked and could afford.  (And yes, everything was ludicrously cheap compared to what it’s going for now — but it still seemed like a lot of money to us.)  Our realtor convinced us to extend our search to the Blue/Yellow lines, and this was the first house we saw in Alexandria.

So, we weren’t looking at race directly when we looked for a house, but it was only a step removed.  If you look at a metro map of DC, the racial politics of transportation becomes glaringly obvious.  African-American neighborhoods are underserved by metrorail, and the disparity was even worse before the last parts of the Green line were finally opened a few years ago.  There are a few majority-black neighborhoods with metro stations (especially along the eastern branch of the Red Line), but I woudn’t feel comfortable walking alone in them at night. 

Cashin talks a little about "accidental integrationists" in her book.  She focuses on South Arlington, which is the next community over. It has a similar class mix as Alexandria, although it has less public housing and has more of a Latino population, and less of an African-American one.  I saw a lot of myself in the white parents that Cashin talked to and I found it reassuring to hear their stories.

Last week, Phantom Scribbler asked me to post a bit about how I’m keeping shabbat. 

The short answer is "inconsistently."  But that’s actually a step toward observing it, not away.  In the past, I’ve let perfectionism get in the way — which means that I’ve been least likely to celebrate shabbat those weeks when I’m stressed and overwhelmed, most in need of a step back.

So two weeks ago, we lit candles and said motzi over sliced wheat bread because we hadn’t bought any challah and said p’ree hagafen over apple juice, rather than grape juice.  (I know, it should be p’ree ha-etz, fruit of the tree, not fruit of the vine, but we were pretending it was grape juice.)  And we went to tot shabbat services the next morning.  Last week, D had a sleepover with a friend, and I went out to dinner with my friends, so we didn’t really do anything.  It varies.

I’m actually baking challah this week.  Or rather, I left it to rise in the fridge this morning, and T should have put it in the oven sometime this afternoon.  I know, it sounds very Martha Stewartish, but it’s really not any more of a hassle than making a separate trip to the bakery.  But D loves challah — it will probably be all he eats for dinner tonight — and I love the feel of kneeding dough.

As I said last week, I’m trying to cut back on my computer time.  I should probably just turn it off, and not turn it on until Sunday.  I’m encouraging board games, but not banning television.  I’m willing to drive to services or the library, but trying not to run a million errands.

And tomorrow I’m spending all day in my training class. Oh well.