Half Changed World

This afternoon, I took an “artist’s date.” As described by Julia Cameron, this just means spending an hour by yourself, doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do, just because it appeals to you.

I was amazed at how hard it was for me to do this, to take time purely for myself, not to work, not to do one of my volunteer activities, not to do something I “ought” to do like exercise. Even though I had signed up for this lecture in advance, I nearly didn’t go, because I’m going to NYC tomorrow and will have some “me” time there, so thought I ought to get stuff done today.

But I went anyway, and I’m glad I did. It was a talk by Sam Maloof, who makes beautiful wooden furniture. It was just lovely to meet someone who has spent his life doing exactly what he chooses, who makes beautiful things, and who has gotten all the money and societal recognition one could want as a result.

[This post is my entry in The Zero Boss’ Blogging for Books #4 contest. The assignment is to “write about a time you were pushed to the brink of insanity (figuratively or literally), and how you lived to tell the tale.” It’s a bit more personal than my usual postings here, but regular readers will be reassured to see that I do have some policy conclusions at the end.]

You need to know that I was badly sleep deprived at the time. This all happened on Sunday evening. Wednesday night I had been having trouble falling asleep, enough that I had gone downstairs to sleep on the futon so that my tossing and turning wouldn’t keep Tony awake. I had been asleep for no more than an hour or two when I woke up to discover that my water had broken. Daniel wasn’t born for about another 25 hours, and the closest I came to sleep during that time was drifting off a little between contractions after I finally accepted an epidural and kicked in. I got a few hours of sleep Friday morning, before the nurses came into the room to try to explain to my roommate, a teenager with limited English skills, that they couldn’t release her from the hospital until she went to the bathroom and proved that everything was still working. Friday (in the hospital) and Saturday nights (at home) I had gotten almost reasonable amounts of sleep, reasonable that is for someone caring for a newborn who woke up every 2 or 3 hours and needed to be breastfed. I certainly hadn’t gotten enough sleep to make up for the previous two sleepless nights and the work involved in giving birth.

The other thing to know is that I had thought breastfeeding was going fine. Daniel had lousy initial APGARS from being so tangled in the cord, but by five minutes, he was pink and fine, and within 10 minutes I was holding him and offering him my breast. I had gone to the newborn breastfeeding class in the hospital, and the nurses had approved of Daniel’s latch. My only problem was that I seemed to require a lot of pillows, and wasn’t sure how I was going to manage this once there wasn’t someone around all the time to hold the baby while I got myself settled.

My dad and brother had driven down from New York on Friday to see the baby, but they had left on Sunday morning, needing to be back for work. So by Sunday afternoon it was just Tony and I, home with our baby, wondering if we were really ready to be parents. Sunday evening, Daniel woke up crying. I picked up him, and immediately realized he had a fever. We called our HMO’s advice line and they said to bring him in to their urgent care center, even though we had an appointment scheduled for the next morning (as recommended for babies who spend less than 48 hours in the hospital after delivery). We grabbed our newly packed diaper bag and rushed out the door.

When we got to the center, they took Daniel’s temperature, weighed him, and immediately told us that he down more than a pound from his birth weight, he was seriously dehydrated and we needed to give him a bottle right away. My milk hadn’t come in, and he wasn’t getting enough to drink. I burst into tears. My baby’s sick, he’s thirsty, of course he needs to drink. But what about nipple confusion? Does this mean that we’re never going to be able to breastfeed? And am I a terrible mother for worrying about my desire for an idealized breastfeeding relationship at the expense of my baby’s health?

So they brought us a little bottle of formula and Tony fed it to Daniel, who sucked eagerly, even desperately at it. And I sat and sobbed and tried to stop and hiccupped and cried some more. The doctor told us that she wanted to send Daniel to the hospital to rule out sepsis, and she’d do the paperwork so that it could be a direct admission and we wouldn’t have to go to the emergency room. So we were left alone, Tony feeding Daniel from the bottle, and me crying.

And then the receptionist stuck her head into the room, and told me that I had to stop crying because the baby can tell when I’m sad and it makes him worse. If I wanted him to get better, I needed to stop crying.

Almost 4 years later, my blood pressure still goes up just thinking about the stupidity of this woman. (Tony uses a different word when referring to her.) My crying wasn’t hurting anyone, and even if it had been, I can’t think of anything she could possibly have said that would make it harder for me to stop crying.

Eventually we got to the hospital and got assigned a room on the pediatrics floor, with Daniel hooked up to IV fluids. The residents were very kind and reassuring, although they looked extremely young. I was still sniffling, and I think they thought I was convinced Daniel was dying. They told us that Daniel’s fever had dropped significantly already, and that he was probably fine, but that in order to rule out sepsis, they needed to do a spinal tap, start him on antibiotics, and keep him in the hospital for at least 48 hours while they did cultures of his blood and spinal fluids.

And I lost it again. I was sorely tempted to take the baby and tell them no thank you, we’re going home. But I didn’t. Tony went with them to wait in the hall while they did the spinal tap. I called my parents and wailed at them. Between sobs, I asked them how I was supposed to be a parent when I felt like I was about 3 years old myself and wanted them to tell me that everything was going to be ok.

Once Daniel was back in the room, Tony and I decided that one of us should go home and try to get some rest, since it was about 1 am and we were both incoherent from exhaustion. As we were no longer in the maternity ward, there was only one fold-out chair for the two of us. We argued a little, each thinking that the other should leave, but I agreed to go. But I was so messed up I was scared to drive, afraid I’d kill myself on the beltway, so I went to call a cab. The cab company said it would be at least an hour and a half before one came, so I went back to the room and told Tony he had to drive home, I’d stay.

Daniel hated the hospital crib, which was a full-sized metal cage, not the plexiglass cradles they provide on the maternity ward, and refused to sleep in it. So I spent essentially the whole night sitting up, holding him, watching him sleep, nursing him when he woke, and studying his hair and ears and fingers.

After that it got better. Even though I had to go back to the maternity ward and beg for menstrual pads, since I hadn’t brought anything with me. Even though both Tony and I caught a hideous stomach virus at the hospital and were miserably sick. Even though it took another 3 days before my milk came in. Daniel was ok. And there’s nothing like actually spending several days on a children’s ward at a major hospital to make you count your blessings.

Some takeaways, since I am a policy wonk:

1) I know some people see this as a story of the consequences of a short postpartum hospital stay. I’m not convinced. With both of my babies, I was eager to get out of the hospital, which I found incredibly unrestful, and did so even though my insurance would have paid for another day. And we had a follow-up visit scheduled for the next day, which is what is recommended. I do support the idea of having nurses pay home visits to newborns. Just this morning, I read of a study which found that such visits totally eliminated ER visits within the first 10 days of life — compared to a surprising 3.5 percent of newborns in the control group. Jaundice and dehydration were the major reasons for such visits.

2) Some of the advice offered by advocates of breastfeeding was truly unhelpful. With hindsight, I really wish we had given Daniel some water or formula at home, before rushing him to the hospital. But I had been told that breastfed infants never need supplemental liquids and giving it to them will only make them less eager to nurse. And I wish that I hadn’t been so worried about nipple confusion. I don’t dispute that breastmilk is the ideal food for babies — I went to great lengths to provide it for both my children even after I returned to work. But it seems like much of the pro-breastfeeding message is totally missing the large number of women who aren’t even trying to breastfeed, and just succeding in making those who do try more anxious.

Following on the heels of yesterday’s review of The Two-Income Trap is this article from today’s New York Times, about the disastrous consequences of Texas’ Robin Hood system to equalize school finances.

The basic problem (which the Robin Hood system was designed to fix) is that most public school funding in the United States comes from local property taxes. Rich areas have much more of a valuable property base, and so are able to put more money into their schools. As a recent study from the Education Trust showed, nationwide, there’s a gap in school funding of more than $1,000 per student between the highest- and lowest-poverty school districts.

The Robin Hood system was implemented after a group of school districts sued the state, claiming the old system of school funding was unconstitutional, and won. It attempts to overcome this inequity by taking money from the wealthiest school districts — those with property value above a threshold — and distributes it to the poorest. The New York Times article, based on an analysis by Harvard economists Caroline Hoxby and Ilyana Kuziemko, explains what went wrong. Hoxby and Kuziemko argue that the problem is that part of what determines the value of property is the quality of the schools. As the quality of the schools went down (for a given level of taxation), the property values also dropped, so the state’s share of taxes went down. In order to provide the level of funding they had promised to the poor districts, the state had to lower the threshold and therefore affect more districts. And the spiral continued. They conclude that the Robin Hood system only reduced inequality between school districts by about $500 per student, but destroyed thousands of dollars per student in property value.

What are the implications of this study?

First, it both supports Warren and Tyagi’s argument that access to quality schools is a significant portion of what drives up property values, and emphasizes how unlikely it is that their proposal to delink residence from access to schools could ever be implemented. The disruption, as home values in previously “good school districts” plummeted, would be monumental. I can’t imagine the circumstances under which such legislation would pass.

Second, it’s a strong rebuttal to those who argue that how much money a school district has doesn’t matter. Homebuyers in Texas certainly valued access to schools in rich districts less when their funding dropped, even though nothing else about the schools had changed. Thus, it could support an argument for either a minimum floor on school spending per student or for some version of equalization or both. Hoxby and Kuziemko are quite clear that they don’t want their paper used as an argument against equalization in general.

Third, as Hoxby and Kuziemko argue, it suggests that lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to design tax systems. They claim that the Robin Hood system was designed solely in order to avoid a legal ban on a statewide property tax, and that it does pretty much everything wrong from the standpoint of creating an efficient tax system.

What none of these studies do is tell you what to do if you’re a parent and a good liberal who believes in public schools and can’t really afford private school anyway and enjoys living in a diverse urban (or semi-urban) area but isn’t quite sure that the schools where you live are as good as you want them to be and doesn’t want to sacrifice your kid to an abstract principle. (Here’s a link to a friend of mine’s much funnier and slightly obscene rant on the same subject. Don’t click if cussing offends you.)

Tomorrow night we’re off to a pizza party being held for parents of preschoolers who are zoned for our local elementary school (which is literally 3 blocks from our house). Part of the goal is to discuss how we can help the school, but another part is just to hold each other’s hands and convince ourselves that we’re making the right choice.

In the online edition of the Washington Post, there’s an interesting article today on Six Ways to Be Happy with Your College Choice. It could just as easily have been called Six Ways to Be Happy With Your Work-Life Choices.

The list, based on a book called The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, is:

1) Listen to your gut instincts — don’t over-analyze.
2) Count your blessings.
3) Be happy about “good enough” and don’t worry that you might not have achieved the absolute maximum level of happiness.
4) Regret less.
5) Remember that the grass is always greener on the other side, and don’t take it as a sign that you’ve made the wrong choice.
6) Avoid conversations about your choices with people who don’t follow the above rules.

Or as our grandparents might have said “you pays your money, and you takes your choices.”

It’s good to remember that choices are rarely permanent — you can stay home for a while, then go back to work, or vice versa — but it doesn’t do anyone good to constantly second guess themselves.

One of my fellow DotMoms recently wrote about being the mother to two daughters. Well, I’m the mother to two sons.

When I was in college, I read a book called X: A Fabulous Children’s Story, which is about a child raised so that no one at all knows if X is a boy or a girl, so X does all the boy games and all the girl games and lives happily ever after. This is the classic position of equality feminism, which denies that there are any innate differences between boys and girls.

Obviously, my husband the SAHD and I aren’t terribly big into gender roles, so we’re often a bit embarassed by how much our older son is into typical boy things — trucks and cars and trains and airplanes and construction equipment. (The younger one is too little to express such preferences.) We’re still not convinced that there are little trucks somewhere on the Y chromosome, though, as we haven’t raised our children in a vacuum — they’re exposed to books and television and other kids on the playground. (One of my friends likes to tell the story of how her son’s preference for pink went away after exactly one day of school.)

If you watch closely on a playground, you can see gender roles being created. Of course there are exceptions, but it seems that mothers are more likely to chase after little girls saying "be careful," while letting their boys explore more freely. David Reed suggests that mothers are more likely to hover than father — and if men are more likely to spend times with their sons than with their daughters, this reinforces the pattern.

At our encouragement, my mother bought my son a doll, which he occasionally undresses and redresses, but mostly ignores. But he often plays with the trucks as if they were dolls, taking them to the "tractor dentist" who cleans their shovels, and having them go to visit their friends.

I’ll be watching to see what happens as he gets older, and what his younger brother’s interests turn out to be.

A few things to take care of today:

First, we’re heading out to see my parents this weekend, so I may not post until next week.

Second, a big thank you to those who have posted comments recently. Like Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, I work harder and faster the more people who are watching. This project is eating up a ludicrous amount of my free time, and it definitely helps to know that people are finding it interesting.

Third, the Brain, Child article I discussed a couple of weeks ago is now available online.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Over on RebelDad’s blog (see September 15), G. wondered whether the American Time Use Survey would allow researchers to examine whether wives of stay-at-home dads got more sleep or did less housework than working moms in dual-earner families.

I’m not sure whether the ATUS will allow for that sort of detailed analysis, but my gut reaction is that researchers wouldn’t pick up a big difference (assuming that they were able to slice the data finely enough so that they only were comparing us to full-time working moms). Based on the not-especially random sample of moms on the MAWDAH (moms at work, dads at home) email list, most of us feel like we’re still doing a lot of the housework. Some even feel like they’d be doing less if their husbands’ worked — because then they could afford to pay someone else to do it. Our husbands do more housework than most men — but a lot less than the average stay-at-home mom.

If childrearing is only marginally valued in our society, housecleaning is definitely not valued. Because gender roles are up for negotiation in a MAWDAH family, there isn’t the fundamental assumption that housework is primariliy the at-home parent’s job.

Plus, most of us have pre-school age children, and the fact is, it’s awfully hard to get much cleaning done while caring for infants and toddlers. (The dads who have only school-age children do seem to do more housework, but there’s not a whole lot of them — if you think SAHDs get funny looks from strangers when they’re caring for preschoolers, wait until the kids are in school.) Most of our families have chosen to have an at-home parent because we value hands-on childrearing, and it’s hard to argue that the kids should be left to watch television so dad can mop the floors.

So how are things divided up in this household? Our motto is the song from Free to Be You And Me: “Your mommy hates housework, and your daddy hates housework, and someday, when you grow up, you can hate housework too.”

My husband does most of the grocery shopping, because I refuse to deal with the insanity of a supermarket on a weekend when he can do it mid week. I do a bit more than half the cooking — and tend to make more elaborate meals when I cook. (My husband doesn’t believe in side vegetables, as far as I can tell.) But I like cooking and miss it when I don’t do it. I do more than half of the laundry, which drives me crazy because it seems so much easier for him to do while he’s home during the day (we have a washer and dryer in the house). We do about equal amounts of vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing, etc. — but neither of us does very much. He usually takes out the trash, because when it rains our back gate swells from the moisture and I can’t get it to open.

I think I’d do more housework than my husband does if I were the at-home parent — but I also think that’s part of why I wouldn’t be happy as an at-home parent. I’m afraid that I’d always be aware of the undone chores that were hanging over me, whereas he’s apparently quite capable of totally putting them out of mind.

I conclude with a quote from the New York Times Week in Review article on the ATUS study. They cite relationship researcher John Gottman:

“The more men participated in the care of children, housework and daily conversation, he found, the more the wife increased her level of satisfaction and sexual intimacy.”

Tonight is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. May you and your loved ones be written in the book of life for a good and sweet new year.

(Why good and sweet? Because if you wish only for a "good year," you might get one full of what a friend of mine refers to as AFGE — Another F-ing Growth Experience. So may your year be both good and sweet.)

Thanks to RebelDad for the prominent mention in his blog. Reading his blog — and filling up his comments column — was one of the main things that inspired me to start writing this.

I read a nice article last week about how writing the Portraits of Grief that the New York Times ran after September 11 affected one of the journalists. She wrote:

“The profiles were about love – not the usual subject of daily newspapers – and that is probably why the project is still remembered with such intensity and affection”

That sounds about right to me.

I ran a trail half-marathon this morning. It wasn’t one of my better races. I was undertrained for the extremely hilly course, I probably started a bit too fast, and I took a couple of nasty spills and more near-misses than I can count. By mile 10 or so, I was tired and hurting. At this point in races, I usually ask myself “ok, why exactly am I doing this?” But I knew why I was running this race. Because I’m alive and healthy and I can run is reason enough.

Today’s what the heck were they thinking award goes to the New York Times, for the op-ed piece they ran yesterday entitled “Mom vs. Nanny” in which working mom Jenny Rosenstrach discusses the ways in which she attempts to manipulate her calculations in order to come out ahead in the contest she’s holding with her children’s nanny for who spends more “quality time” with them. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be funny, or make other working parents feel sane by comparison, or what.

It’s not a contest. Being the working spouse of a stay-at-home dad has taught me a few things, and one of the most important is that it’s not a contest. If you decide that you’re competing with your partner to be the most-loved parent, you’re going to drive everyone crazy, starting with yourself and ending with your children. The goal of this whole effort is raise your children to be happy, and secure, and confident in the love of the people who take care of them. If they adore you, and adore their daddy, and adore their nanny or babysitter or grandmother, that’s a good thing (as Rosenstrach acknowledges at the end of her essay). The tricky part is that most working mothers tell themselves that their children may love the sitter, but they’ll always be number one. Mommies are special.

Well, at times I’ve been quite sure that I wasn’t number one. And I had to admit, it was only fair that my son should love his father best, as he was the one with him all day, climbing on the jungle gym, making silly faces, reading the same stories over and over again. But it forced me to confront my hidden assumption that being a good mother meant being number one.

Like Rosenstrach, I carefully counted the hours I spent with my son. Parenting is challenging, and it’s often hard to know if you’re doing the right thing. It was all too easy to seize on anything quantifiable as a measure of my devotion. For months, I tandem pumped in the mornings, attaching myself to a pump on one side while my son nursed in the mornings. With hindsight, I regret the time spent fussing with a machine instead of paying attention to the moment, but I took the number of ounces I produced as another sign of my maternal commitment.