Half Changed World

Today was my older son’s first day of preschool. It’s the same school he attended last year, and he was eager to get going, happy to see his friends and teachers. It’s amazing to me to think of how much he’s grown in the past year, and what he’ll be like a year from now.

One of the things that never gets talked about in the endless discussions of whether child care is good or bad for children — which are typically framed as being about whether or not women should work outside the home– is that non-employed parents use child care as well. We send our son to preschool because he likes it, because it’s a good opportunity for him to learn social skills (sharing, taking turns), because it gives our other son a chance to have some one-on-one attention, and because it gives my husband a break.

Child care is expensive, of course, so it’s mostly affluent non-employed parents who use it — full- or part-time nannies if their children are infants, preschool if their children are older. Very low-income parents may also be able to send their children to Head Start, which was explicitly designed to try to make up the gap in the learning opportunities available to poor children before they start school.

Tonight I’m praying for the safety of the hostages in Beslan, Russia. I keep looking at the photographs of their families, looking at the drawn faces of people who haven’t slept, who can’t do anything but wait, and imagining myself in their shoes. At work, I found myself repeatedly checking the news headlines to see if anything had changed.

I knew when I had children that I’d be letting myself in for sleepless nights worrying about them. I didn’t know how much I’d be worrying about all the children of the world. I have to shut myself away from the news some days in order to function.

I realized tonight that some of my recent stress and anxiety is probably related to the upcoming anniversary of September 11. I really hate that every cool sunny fall day makes me think of the attacks. It was such a beautiful day.

I wasn’t sure I was going to post today, as I spent nap time watching the Olympic marathon instead of writing. (Hurrah for my TiVo, which lets me watch what I want during my extremely limited viewing time, and means that my son has probably seen less than 100 commercials in his life.)

I don’t run very much these days, but I’m still on a running email list. I’ve known these people for years, and consider them my friends. Recently, a few of them were commenting that they wished they had started running marathons when they were 30, so they could have seen what they could do before aging started catching up with them. Well, I still dream of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, but it’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s not just the time that the training runs would take from the rest of my life, it’s the idea of spending a weekend chasing after my boys AFTER having done a 20 miler in the morning. I ran about 7 hilly trail miles last week and I was toast afterwards.

When I find myself getting frustrated at the things that I can’t do because of the commitments of parenting, I remind myself that the boys will only be in this very needy stage for a short period of time, a small fraction of my expected life. According to official statistics, I can expect to live almost another 50 years. As one of my friends likes to say, you can have it all, just not all at once.

And yet, there are doors that can’t be reopened once closed. Kids grow up. Taking 5 years out of the workforce shouldn’t totally change the options that are available for the next 45 years, but it all too often does. I hope that I’m still running 20 years from now, but my knees or something might not allow it. Or I could drop dead next week. So I’m not willing to totally postpone things that are important to me. This means I’m often overcommitted, often tired. But I don’t think I’d have it any other way.

Our thoughts about work and family are strongly shaped by the choices that we have made. Books and articles are tested against our own experiences to see if their findings ring true. So, as I begin this blog, I feel that I should describe some of my choices, laying my cards on the table.

I am a working mother to young children — 3 1/2 years and 10 months as of this writing. I work full-time, but not especially long hours — it’s rare that I’m not able to leave my desk by 5.30. I’m a civil service (e.g. not political) employee of the federal government. [And in case it isn’t screamingly obvious, this blog in no way represents the official position of the Federal Government.]

So, if you see the world of mothers as divided into those who are at-home and those who work for pay, I’m firmly in the working camp. But, if you see the world of families as divided into those who have an at-home parent, and those who don’t, we’re on the other side — my husband quit his job when I returned to work after my first maternity leave, and has been a full-time at-home dad ever since. So my perspective on these issues is a bit different from most.

It’s often hard to talk about our parenting choices and why we think they’re the right ones without casting subtle (or not-so-subtle) aspersions on people who have made different choies, but I’m going to try. Let me start by saying that I think we’ve made the right choice, for us, for now, but I don’t think there’s a single right choice for everyone, for all times. (This isn’t just a wishy-washy plea for tolerance, but a general statement of principle, which has implications when we start talking about policies to support families — but I’ll get into that another day.)

So why did we choose this arrangement? I never really considered staying home full-time myself. I don’t think I’d be very happy doing it. The social isolation, the repetition, the impossibility of ever completing a project (food gets eaten, diapers, dishes, clothes and floors all get redirtied), my own absurdly high standards, all would have driven me crazy. While I was home on maternity leave with my older son, I found myself counting the hours until my husband would come home. I’m sure I would have gotten more relaxed and happier with practice, but it wasn’t something I was burning to do.

And my husband really wanted to do it. He’s got the temperament to handle it, and he’s good at it. And he was bored and frustrated with his job, and was really only doing it for the paycheck. Unlike many at-home parents, he was earning more than enough to pay for high quality child care, but it still seemed crazy to us for him to keep working at a job that was meaningless to him, in order to pay for someone else to care for our child.

Some people believe that parental care is inherently better for kids than any child care (cf Caitlin Flanagan). I’m not so sure — I think there are good parents and not-so-good parents and good child care settings and not-so-good child care settings. I think my husband does a terrific job taking care of our boys, but I also think that we know enough about child care options and have enough money that if we decided to keep working we’d probably be able to find an excellent provider or center. But our lives would be that much more stressful and hectic.

In re-reading this, I feel like I keep harping on how much money we have. We’re not rich, certainly not compared to most professionals. But I’m overwhelmingly aware of how the money we have gives us choices that just aren’t there for the vast majority of Americans. Another theme that I’m sure will be recurring in this blog.