Half Changed World

Deep thanks to everyone who has picked up my post about possible cutbacks in the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).  The National Partnership for Women and Families now has an Action Alert that you can use to send emails, or print letters for mailing, to your Senators and Representative and to the Department of Labor. 

There are some very good discussions going on about this issue in the comments at RebelDad and Bitch, PhD.  I’m curious as to whether there’s something that I could do differently that would encourage folks to comment more here.  Would it help if I added my own comments in response to the comments I receive?  Just wondering.

Others who have picked up the story include the Daily Yak (with a story about the grief he got for taking FMLA leave), DaddyTypes, 11d, Thrifty Mom, Uncommon Woman, Mimilou, and Lifechanges… Delayed, .  Thanks!

Via and I wasted all that birth control, I found this truly thoughtful discussion at Arwen/Elizabeth’s site about a key question behind the abortion debate, namely when does a fetus become a human being with rights of its own. I’m not sure anyone’s opinion was changed, but people were listening, not shouting past each other.  (And Cecily is one of the world’s classiest people.)

I was particularly intrigued by the comments that some people made about how their positions on this issue were affected by their experiences of pregnancy.  I found that having my children made both the reality of the potential life growing within and the horror of forcing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy more vivid to me.  It didn’t change my position on what I think the laws should be, however.

The NYTimes today has an article on how pro-life counseling centers are buying ultrasound machines to use to convince women not to have abortions.  I know such centers sometimes (often?) get women in under false pretenses and put a lot of pressure on them.  But, if you’re going to trust women to make these decisions, I don’t think it’s right to protect them from reminders of the potential for life.  (Although personally, I couldn’t see a thing on any of my sonograms; the simple heartbeat was much more impressive to me.)

Hugo Schwyzer has an interesting post this week on what it means to be male, pro-feminist, and pro-life.  He concludes that his most important work is in the area of changing men’s attitudes and of supporting male responsibility. 

The Nation had a powerful piece a couple of weeks ago on how Mississippi laws have made abortion "out of reach, buried under state laws that make the process unnecessarily difficult, discouraged by a sense of shame enforced by practically every public authority, and inaccessible for many who lack money to pay for it."  This is clearly the strategy being used in Virginia as well.   Unfortunately, this approach makes the sort of honest back and forth discussed above almost impossible.

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Rad Geek People’s Daily is promoting a bit of googlebombing to ensure that searches for Roe v. Wade get you to the text of the decision rather than to an advocacy site. 

I’m really wiped.  Work was nuts today, I didn’t get much of a break over the weekend, and D found the Playmobil catalog and has been pleading for the remote-controlled train all evening (fat chance, kiddo).

So just a few links tonight from two blogs that are new to me:

Harriet the Spy has a nice response to that NY Times article, talking about how blogs build community.  And how can I resist a blog named after one of my alltime favorite books?

Jo(e) lists some of what she enjoys about blogging, and reading blogs.  Sounds right to me.

Good night.

The NY Times article on parenting blogs "Mommy (and me)" doesn’t hit the newsstands until tomorrow, but is already getting a lot of play in the blogosphere.  It’s an odd article.  Hochman is gnerally complimentary towards the specific blogs he discusses (including DotMoms), says that our uncertainty and stress "makes for good reading," and even suggests that blogging may make us better parents   At the same time, he seems to display an undercurrent of "look at these pathetic people craving attention and validation who think every detail of their lives is of interest to anyone else."

I particularly recommend CultureCat’s comments, which put the article into the context of the ongoing discussion of how bloggers who merge the personal and the political (who are more typically female) are marginalized.  She was interviewed for the Times article, but isn’t cited.

On a related note, I’ve been less and less happy with the distinctions I was drawing on my blogroll between different types of blogs.  I love some of the classifications that others use (this blog is classified by Bitch,PhD as part of "my liberal bias," by 11d under "nobody puts baby in the corner," and by GeekyMom under "blogs by women who happen to have kids"), but haven’t been able to come up with anything clever but simple myself.  For now, I’ve revised it to two categories: "Blogs mostly about the author’s life" and "Blogs mostly about the outside world."  And I’m still not sure where to assign some of my favorites.  If you feel misclassified, give me a holler. 

1)  At 9:52 pm, I got my 10,000 hit on this blog.  I know, lots of sites get more than that in a day.  But I’m excited.  Thanks for reading.

2) I’ve been nominated for Best New Blog in the Koufax awards.  It’s an honor just to be mentioned, and I know I have absolutely no chance of winning, but it would be nice to get a vote or two.

3) With this post, I’m nominating myself for the "Land Mine" award (part of Feministe’s Anti-Awards, Part Deux)

I want to make a confession: even after having read a bunch of the fabulous infertility and assisted reproduction blogs out there, like Chez Miscarriage, and I wasted all that birth control, and a little pregnant, I don’t get it.  I still don’t get why people put themselves through such emotional, physical, and financial torture to conceive and bear a child.  I adore my sons, and am very grateful that they’re in my life, but if I hadn’t been able to get pregnant, I wouldn’t have made the sacrifices these women (and many others) have made.  That sort of baby-hunger is as alien to me as James Boylan’s conviction that he was a woman. 

As an outsider to this world, someone who has never had to deal with infertility, I can’t help but wondering whether assisted reproduction has increased or decreased the net amount of happiness in the world.  On the one side are those people who’ve successfully had children with the help of modern medical miracles.  But on the other side are the people whose heartache has been drawn out for months or years as they ride the reproductive rollercoaster, and those who must endlessly second-guess themselves, wondering whether things would have been different if they tried just one more time.

I’m calling this a land mine because, as Jen at Buddha Mama and I have discussed, it’s hard to talk about the choices that we make without it seeming like we’re implicitly criticizing those who have made other choices.  And that’s truly not my desire.  I’ve actually started to post about this before, and then stopped, for fear of giving pain to people who are already dealing with more than their share of grief.  But I think it’s worth talking about, to open a dialogue, as well as to paint a fuller picture of the diversity of parenting experiences.  I want to tell people that you can be a good mother even if you don’t have that sort of passionate need to be one, even if you could imagine having a happy and full life without children.

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I’m updating this to try to respond to some of the comments I’ve been getting from some of the visitors I’ve received via Uterine Wars.  Let me start by thanking you for taking the time to comment, for being willing to engage in dialogue.  I appreciate it; I know it’s not your job in life to educate me.

A few of the commenters have written that you didn’t imagine or couldn’t have imagined making the choices you’ve made, until you were actually in the situation.  That’s a powerful (and slightly frightening) statement about the limits of our ability to put ourselves in a different situation.  I hear you, and I’ll be more careful in the future about saying what I would or wouldn’t do — I can only say what my best guess is, from the perspective of who I am now.

But some of the commenters implied that I’d definitely make the same choices they are making if I were in their situation.   I still reject this statement; there are many other women who are in their situation who make different choices.  Heck, there are many woman who make a deliberate choice not to have children, regardless of their fertility status.  That’s part of what makes life fascinating; we are all different people and make different choices.

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One more thought.  I am truly sorry to have caused pain, and I can tell, from both the comments and the referring posts, that I have.  I started this post saying I was making a confession, because I believe that my inability to "get it" is a failure of empathy on my part — although some of you are telling me that no fertile woman will ever "get it."  Saying I "don’t get" your choices is different than saying I think you’re making a bad choice.

No, not the lottery, or the BoB awards, or the Koufax awards, or even Blogging for Books.  I won Jay’s Subtitle My Book Contest.  Except that doesn’t actually mean he’s going to use my recommendation for his subtitle (Adventures of a Reluctant Father) — he picked an entry at random. But hey, I WON.  And I get to read Jay’s book.

Happy Delurking Day!  I’d love to hear from all of my readers.

I’m having a quiet New Year’s Eve, even quieter than usual.  I’m tired from travelling, have a bit of a cold, and am subdued by the thoughts of the millions of people mourning the loss of their loved ones in the wake of the tsunami last week.  So I’ll probably be heading to bed soon.

I’m generally not one to pick up on memes, but I like the idea of picking my five favorite posts of the year.  In chronological order, they are:

The Personal is Political:  One of my first posts on this blog, I attempted to describe where I’m coming from as I talk about work and family and gender.

The Dark Side of Flexibility:  A contrarian take on the value of flexible working conditions.

Who’s Opting Out? One of my most data-oriented posts, as I searched through reams of statistics in search of evidence to support the often-cited claim that more mothers are staying home.  I learned a lot in the process.

Targeted v. Universal Programs:  I’m pleased with this post, because I think I did a good job of fairly laying out the case on both sides of the argument.  I think this is a useful background piece for anyone thinking about how public programs should be designed.

Babar, George and Lisa: A recent post looking at the subtexts of children’s literature.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Yes, I’ve read Jennifer Medina’s article in the New York Times on "Desperate Househusbands."  It’s a lousy article, worth notice only because so many people read the Times.  (Earlier today the article was on the list of top 15 emailed articles.)  Obviously, the editors there were hot to get out the door for vacation too.

As Greg at DaddyTypes notes, Medina seems to have forgotten that Desperate Housewives is fiction.  If she can cite it as evidence that stay-at-home moms are busy having affairs while a "man loaded down with diapers" isn’t sexy, I could cite Tom Perotta’s Little Children to make the opposite argument.

And as Brian at RebelDad points out, most of the dads quoted in the article are actually pretty content with their gig.  One of them even responded to his post, objecting to how his comments had been edited.  Sigh.

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I’ve been noticing a fair number of search engine hits to this blog.  Based on the terms, I’d guess that many of them are from students working on assignments.  If you’re thinking of plagarizing, don’t.  It’s wrong, you won’t learn anything, and you’re probably going to get caught.  Teachers know how to use google too, you know.  On the other hand, if you’re doing research and find this site a useful source of info, I’d love to hear about it.  Post a comment and let me know what you’re writing about.

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Yahoo now allows you to add anything that has a RSS feed to your My Yahoo page.  That includes this blog!  Click on "Add Content" and then type "Half Changed World" into the "Find Content" box and it will come right up.  The advantage of adding blogs to a portal is that you can quickly see which of the blogs you’re following have added new content.

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I’m going to be on vacation next week, and probably won’t have access to the internet.  Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and I’ll be back around the New Year.

Best wishes.

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?

Hmmm, now that I’m no longer on my free trial period, and cut back to the cheapest Typepad plan, there doesn’t seem to be any way to arrange postings anyway other than in the order they were originally saved (even if not published).  So, if you’re a frequent reader and only look at the top posting, you might have missed my entry in the Blogging for Books contest which got hidden behind the review of Family First.