Half Changed World

In a few hours, my husband should be back home.  He’s been on an out-of-town trip since Thursday morning, the longest he’s been away from the boys since they were born, and we’ve all missed him.  (I also have to admit that the house was a mess until I realized this afternoon how much of a stereotype it would for the primary caregiver to go away for a few days and come back to a disaster zone.)

My mother came down for a couple of days so that I wouldn’t have to take Thursday and Friday off from work, which was very sweet of her.  However, she doesn’t drive, so when he started complaining that his stomach hurt at preschool, I had to cut out in order to pick him up and bring him home.  It was a reminder of how much having an at-home spouse insulates me from that kind of hassle most of the time.  While I share many experiences with working moms in two-income families, there are also some important differences, and that’s one of the big ones. 

Jen at BuddhaMama had a nice post last week about some of the commonalities she found among women who are the wage earners in reverse traditional families.  Her summary sounds about right to me, although my family differs in a few respects (we earned about the same amount pre-children; he doesn’t go as thoroughly off child-duty evenings and weekends as many SAHDs; I write the checks for our household bills).  The only singificant addition I’d make to her list is the sense of responsibility/stress from being the only wage-earner.

In thinking about the ways in which my experiences are similar to, and different from, other groups of working parents, I realized that part of why I loved the recent article about GenX fathers from the Boston Globe is that I saw a lot of myself in these committed dads.  These fathers take their parenting responsibilities seriously and limit the ways in which they allow work to encroach on family — but they also take it for granted that they are going to work.  There’s none of the angst or defensiveness that are recurrent themes in most media coverage of working mothers. 

This morning, as we were trying to get out the door, I asked D. whether he wanted to wear his purple jacket or his silver jacket.  (He’s sort of between sizes, so has two wearable winter coats.)  My red jacket, he said.  No, I said, silver or purple.  "Why isn’t the red jacket in the choices?"  he asked.

I absolutely love that question.  If this blog has a recurring theme, it’s about looking at what’s missing from the options that we’re presented with.  What are the factors that determine the range of choices from which we select?  And how can we expand that range? 

Earlier this month, Julia of Here Be Hippogriffs wrote a long post in which she talked about her and her husband’s division of household labor, and concluded:

"So that is our distribution of labor and it makes us shimmy. Does it follow some bold 1950s pattern? Yep, pretty much. Was it derived from that pattern? Hell no. We have just gravitated towards the tasks that best suit us."

I agree with Julia’s argument that what "matters is that everyone involved is in agreement over how the work gets divided."  But I’m not convinced that these decisions are ever made entirely free from societal influences.  I really liked Laura’s post today about how her life has been affected by the choices she’s made at different points and what the constraints were at each step of the journey.

Oh, the answer to D.’s question?  His red jacket is just fleece, not warm enough for the weather today.

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

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

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

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

1. I have a husband to whom I can say, when I hear crying at 6:30 "it’s your turn; I was up with them in the middle of the night."
2. We have a washing machine in the house, so we don’t have to schlepp the puke covered clothes, sheets, and high chair cover to a laundromat.
3. Because there are two adults in this family, I didn’t have to choose between not having any groceries for the weekend and dragging two sick kids to the supermarket right before a major snowstorm is predicted.  (T. tried going last night, and the lines were all the way down the aisles; he talked to someone who had been on line for an hour and a half.)
4. The birthday party scheduled for tomorrow is at home, so we can wait until the morning to make a final call on whether to proceed.  And if we decide to reschedule, we’re not out several hundred dollars.

So we went to Disney World last week.  Yup, the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when it’s totally packed and insane.  With a not-quite-four-year-old and a fourteen-month old.  I was afraid it was going to be awful, but we actually had a really good time — D adored the race cars at the "Indy Speedway,"  N was fascinated by the shows and gentle rides (although he fell asleep on the spinning teacups), and I was totally blown away by Mission: Space.  And my in-laws bought our tickets, so I didn’t have constant heartburn over the prices for everything.

But then there was the "Hoop De Hoo" show, a vaudeville dinner theater show with a western twist.  Its grand finale was an extended sketch on the Davey Crockett theme song.  I watched in bemusment, mostly hoping that they’d bring out the ice cream before my boys melted down, and then they got to the Alamo.  Except that in this version, Davey and his pals beat that mean Santa Anna.  I started to sputter, looked around at all the smiling faces, then concluded that the only thing I could possibly say in response was "more sangria, please."

My older son (almost 4 years old) is suddenly fascinated by toy guns.  We’re not thrilled, but are allowing them, subject to the rule that he’s not allowed to point them at people, only at things.  D doesn’t quite get it, and keeps wanting us to pretend to be dinosaurs or monsters so that he can shoot us.  We usually go along with his pretend games, and he doesn’t understand why this one isn’t ok.

He doesn’t get it, because he’s never seen a real gun and what it can do.  We don’t watch the television news when the boys are around, and he hasn’t started paying attention to the radio news that I sometimes listen to.  He doesn’t know that we’re at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that over a hundred thousand people were killed by the tsunami last week.  No one he knows has died in his short life, and the concept of death isn’t real to him yet.  (When the fish in our tank die, he just wants us to replace them.)

I know that we can’t shelter him forever, but I’d like to give him a little longer of innocence.  And yet I worry that the brutalities of the world may come crashing in.  Even as I reassure him that "mommies always come back,"  I know that some mommies don’t, no matter how much they want to.  When he learns the truth, I hope he’ll forgive me my gentle lies.

Yesterday I went on a field trip with D’s preschool class.  Thousands of parents do it every day, but it was a big deal for me.  As a working mother married to a stay-at-home dad, it’s hard to justify taking off from work in order to volunteer at the preschool.  It’s a half-day preschool, and they typically have class parties and family snack in the middle of the day, so in addition to whatever time I spent at school, I’d lose another hour and a half to commuting.  So I usually let my husband pass out the muffins, even if I was the one to bake them.  It’s a bit strange, because if we both worked in offices, I’d be eager to take my share of mornings off.

But that means there’s a whole part of D’s life that I’m totally not a part of.  It’s better this year than last, when he was so nonverbal that the only way we knew what he had done in school was the crafts stuffed into his backpack, but I still feel like I’m missing out.  So when they asked for volunteers to go to a nature center with the kids, I checked my work calendar (December is usually fairly quiet), put in for leave, and signed up.

As it turned out, yesterday was a lousy day for me to be out of the office in the morning.  Somehow, even though Thompson announced his resignation two weeks ago, it didn’t occur to the powers that be that we’d have to pull together a briefing book for the new Secretary, whoever it might be, and maybe they didn’t have to wait until the nomination was announced to think about the format etc.  So we’ve been scrambling all week.  This sort of urgent flailing is among my least favorite parts of my job, but I felt bad dumping it on my coworkers.  Fortunately I’m not high up enough to get issued a blackberry, so no one could send me drafts to review en route.

I was bizarrely nervous about the field trip — worried that I’d get into a car accident driving the kids or something.  It was fine, of course.  It was freezing cold, so they stayed inside the center, but got to see a puppet show about how animals deal with the winter, see a live frog and turtles, etc.  No one got lost, and the only blood that was shed was mine.  (D jumped onto my lap and smacked his skull into my mouth, bloodying my lip.)  Everyone seemed to have a good time.

I find it deeply challenging, even frightening, to publically admit to ambition.  Some of the issue is that I have a darn good life already, and it seems greedy and ungrateful to ask for more.  Some of it is that if I acknowlege ambitious goals, I will be one step closer to doing the often scary things needed to further them.  And some of it is the fear that if I stick myself foward as special, someone will unmask me as an imposter, an ordinary person pretending to be the wizard of Oz.

Anna Fels, in Necessary Dreams, (which I’ve discussed previously) argues that such ambivalence about ambition is a rational response to a society in which ambition is still seen as unfeminine and in which overt displays of ambition and self-promotion can be costly to women.  I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here, though.

I usually am pretty good at locking my ambitions up, but occasionally they escape and give me a good kick in the teeth.  This often takes the form of a blinding flash of envy when I hear or read about someone doing what I’d like to do.  I’ll admit to feeling such a flash when I read in Ms. Musings that Amy Richards has a book deal for Opting In: The Case for Feminism and Motherhood, “an exploration of the anxiety over parenting that young women face today, mixing memoir, interviews, historical analysis, and feminist insight to bridge the seeming gap between everyday moms and the feminist movement while providing advice on how women can forge their own path in parenthood.”   

The New York Times has an article today about bloggers with book deals, including one story of a minister-blogger who was approached by an editor after just three weeks of blogging.  I think I’m still hanging onto the fantasy that someone is going to read this blog and be so blown away by my brilliance that they offer me a book deal, or a series of columns in a major magazine or "the standard rich and famous contract."   It’s not just that self-promotion is scary; it’s that I’m in the school of thought that devalues anything that seems to be the result of self-promotion. 

A few weeks ago, Salon ran an article about Iris Chang, in which one of her peers writes about envying Chang her articles in major newspapers, before learning what she terms "the Iris code."  Paula Kamen writes: "I had finally cracked it. And it was so simple: Think big. Almost to the point of being naive."  Is that the secret to success?  And if so, what to make of the fact that Chang killed herself at age 36?

There’s an absolutely terrific discussion about child care going on in the comments section over at 11d.  It’s stimulated by Laura’s review of Home Alone America: The Hidden Cost of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes by Mary Eberstadt.  I’ve made several responses on Laura’s blog, but have enough to say that it deserves its own post.  (I just got the book out of the library, so will presumably have more to say when I’ve actually read it.)

As I’ve noted before, lots and lots of affluent parents who have either an at-home parent or a full-time nanny also send their kids to part-day preschool for the socialization and education benefits (and to get a break).  And there’s good evidence that high-quality preschools (such as the Perry Preschool) are often more educationally rich and stable evironments for at-risk (mostly very poor) kids than they’re likely to experience at home. 

So, I don’t think there’s a lot of controversy around high-quality part-day or school-day length care for preschoolers.  (If Eberstadt is going after that, she’s even more radical than Laura suggested.) Or rather, the real controversy is around whether it’s valuable enough that society should figure out a way to pay for it for all kids, or even just all high-risk kids.

Where there’s more controversy is about full-time care — which often means 50 to 60 hours a week, once you’ve added parental commuting time to a full-time workweek — and care for infants and toddlers.  Here’s where some of the rigorous studies (most notably, the NICHD-funded Study of Early Child Care) suggest there might be some negative effects.  But the effects are fairly small, not enough that I’d tell anyone to change their behavior based on them.

So, if we don’t think child care is terrible for kids, why are we forgoing the not insignificant amount of money my husband could be making building Oracle databases?  For one thing, he was bored to death by his old job.  And he really enjoys spending time with the boys (although, of course, some days are better than others) and values the close relationship he’s developed with them.

Our lives are a lot less stressful with him home.  We don’t have to rush to get the kids dressed and out the door in the morning, and when I get stuck in a metro delay on the way home, I don’t have to worry about late fees accruing at $1 a minute.  We didn’t have to get on waiting lists the minute I knew I was pregnant (literally what you need to do if you want center-based care in the DC area). We don’t have to deal with scrambling for coverage when the boys are sick, or when a nanny suddenly quits.  He does most of our errand running during the week, so I don’t have to face the supermarket on a Saturday morning.

Laura mentioned (in her comments, scroll way to the bottom) the recent study that found that women rated actually caring for children as a fairly low-pleasure activity, slightly above housework but below cooking.  That study was of working women; I’d love to see a similar study for stay-at-home parents.  There’s more time for their kids to get on their nerves, but I think their interactions are also less likely to be stressed by the pressures of trying to get kids fed, homework done, and ready for bed at a civilized hour.

We had a Hanukah party last night, which was a lot of fun.  The baked "party latkes" from Cooking Light were a disaster, but the fried latkes were a huge hit, both the traditional ones and the curried sweet potato latkes from Joan Nathan’s Jewish Cooking in America.  I like cooking and I like having people over.  Can’t say I love the hectic cleaning that’s needed to get the house ready to have company.  (I wish we had entertained more during the period when we were feeling flush enough to have a biweekly housecleaner.)

The party was a nice mix of people we know from different settings — work, online communities, school, hobbies.  I think it worked because there were no big clumps of people who already knew each other, so people had to find different things to talk about.

I had an interesting conversation with one of our guests, a Christian married to a Jew, about why I am less than totally thrilled about celebrating Christmas with my in-laws.  Why, he asked, is it not a totally positive thing to have another holiday to celebrate?  I don’t have a really good answer.  I think I have this vague notion of Christmas as a big seductive force that will try to suck us all in if I don’t draw a bright line against it.  It is one of the ironies of the season that Hanukah is a celebration of resistance against assimilation, and it is the most assimilated of Jewish holiday.