Half Changed World

Over at 11d, Laura wrote an interesting post about "What Do Men Want?", specifically about whether men overall prefer stay-at-home wives, as Jane Galt suggested.  Laura thinks that most men underestimate the ways in which stay-at-home wives contribute to the family’s well-being, and so would prefer that their wives work.

My guess, with absolutely no data to back it up, is that most men would prefer that their wives worked part-time — enough to bring in some money to allow for extras (nicer cars, better vacations) — but not so much as to result in an expectation that they’ll be responsible for making serious addditional contributions to the domestic front.  This isn’t because they’re evil.  I know I sound like a broken record, but Rhona Mahony’s point is that once you’ve stepped off the career track, it’s hard to get back on at a level that (economically) justifies your spouse making significant sacrifices (covering an equal share of sick days, relocating) to further your career.

Certainly, all else equal, when the boys are both in school, I’d like it if T figured out a way to bring in more money.  It would give me the freedom to consider lower-paying but more interesting and/or meaningful jobs without feeling like I was sacrificing my family, and it would give us more options generally (see yesterday’s post about schools for an example).  And I’d like to be more involved in the boys’ schools, which is hard to justify while I’m working full-time and T’s staying home.  But it’s probably not worth making him miserable doing database work (even if he could still get hired to do so, which is unclear).  So we shall see. 

The discussion on Laura’s post got a little sidetracked into a back and forth on whether it’s upper-class indulgence to discuss any of this.  I liked Tim Burke’s answer:

"We live our lives, not someone else’s lives; in each of our lives, there are issues, problems, dissatisfactions. Effacing your own life, your own issues, your own reactions, ignoring the ethnographic texture of your immediate social worlds, in favor of endless pious genuflection at the holy shrine of some constituency of "deserving poor" is an upper-middle-class indulgence in its own right, and usually phonier by far than talking about how to do right by your children or your spouse."

Last week, in response to my post about the middle class, bj commented "I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot because we have just made the final step to enrolling our first child in private school" and asked what we were doing about school for our kids.

After an awful lot of agonizing back and forth, what we’re doing — at least for now — is enrolling D in the public school that we’re zoned for.   This is not without some real misgivings.  The test scores are lousy — it’s failing under both "No Child Left Behind" and the Virginia-specific standards.  Something like 70 percent of the students qualify for free lunches.  It’s on something like the 5th principal in 7 years. 

But, it’s literally three blocks from our front door, so we’ll be able to walk D to school and be part of the school community with ease.  The class sizes are very small, especially in the early grades.  The teachers and principal seem enthusiastic and committed.  The city has committed significant resources to the school.  We’ve talked to some parents we trust who are happy with their kids’ experiences.  And we can always try something different down the road if we’re not happy with it.

With private school tuitions in the area in the $20,000s and rising, I don’t see us trying that route unless we truly find ourselves out of other options.  If we’re not happy at this school, we can request a transfer into a different Alexandria school (because ours is a "focus" school, we could request a transfer even if it wasn’t failing under NCLB).  Moving is also a possibility, although not one that I’m thrilled at.

Fundamentally, I’m not worried about whether my kids are going to learn to read.  (D is probably going to be reading by the time he starts kindergarten in the fall.)  What I worry about is whether they’ll learn that school is something to be endured.

My favorite quote in this morning’s Washington Post article on the politics of immigration is the one from Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza:  "I’m not sure anybody totally understands this phenomenon. . . . But we are happily stunned."  NCLR is the biggest Latino advocacy organization in the country, and I’m sure they’d love to claim credit for the mass demonstrations against the House’s harsh anti-immigrant bill, but they can’t.  It seems to be a combination of Spanish-language radio, churches (and the Church), charitable organizations, and genuine grassroots activism.

Meanwhile one of my friends is wondering whether her Irish-Jewish son is going to fail 8th grade because he’s been joining in the mass student protests.  (Arlington schools have been taking a hard line, saying that absences will be treated as unexcused even with parental permission.)   She’s simultaneously worried about him and proud as can be that he’s standing up for what he believes in.  And, by all accounts, these protests were totally student-organized, by IM, mySpace, and cell phones, with no adult involvement.

I’ll be looking closely at the deal that Senate leaders cut today to see what I think of it.  I think there are a lot of valid competing desires — wanting to be a land of opportunity, but not wanting to depress low-skilled workers wages’, wanting to minimize disruption in people’s lives, but not wanting to penalize those who played by the rules.

And I’m thinking about trying to juggle my schedule for Monday afternoon so I can join the march on the mall.

For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Via RebelDad, I found Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic’s post about why he’s happy to claim the title of Mr. Mom:

"When I’m taking care of Liko, I don’t feel like I’m “fathering” him. In my mind – and this is just the thought I was raised with, not the one I want to have – a father goes to work and comes home in the evening. "Fathering" is playing ball, patting on the back, putting food on the table. An honorable role."

"A mother, meanwhile, is home changing diapers and cleaning baby food off the floor and kissing skinned knees. That’s also honorable and often honored. That’s what I do. So I feel like by staying home with him, I’m “mothering” Liko. I’m a mom, or at least, that’s my role. In many respects, a man out in the middle of the afternoon with his toddler, who is known to neighbors and neighborhood shop clerks and waitresses as a “Mr. Mom,” is a man in drag, and queer in the most political sense of the term. Why shouldn’t I be proud to be a Mr. Mom?"

I commented that I worry that this definition implies that working mothers aren’t real mothers, and there’s been some interesting back and forth on Jeremy’s blog. 

But maybe Jeremy’s right in some ways.  I write here a fair amount about what I call "reverse traditional families" — families with working mothers and at-home fathers.  One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners.  We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don’t do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do.  Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we’re good enough mothers, and decide that we’re damned good fathers.

I can’t remember if I posted here about the "daddies and donuts" event at D’s preschool last month.  This was a chance to have a snack and do a craft with the kids, at the relatively working-parent friendly hour of 9 am (vs. the 11 am time for "family snack" and most other events to which parents are invited).  When I got the flyer, I asked T if he thought in this context, "daddy" meant "male parent" (e.g. him) or "the parent who never gets to do things at preschool" (e.g. me).  [The flyer did say that if a father couldn’t come, a mother or "other Very Important Person" could attend.]  Ultimately, since I was taking off a day the week before to go on a field trip with the class (to the Planetarium), I decided not to fight T for the chance to go.  As it turns out, the "craft" was that the kids decorated paper ties. 

***

On another note, RebelDad is having an online chat with Leslie Morgan Steiner at WashingtonPost.com tomorrow (Thursday) at 1 pm.  If you can’t be online at the time, you can submit questions in advance and read the transcript later.  I got Steiner’s book out of the library — look for a review in the next week or two.

Today I’m catching up on the last of the books that I’ve been sent by publicists and have been feeling guilty for not getting around to.  It’s The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think about the Rest of Your Life, by Lee Eisenberg.

When I got the email asking if I’d be interested in the book, I said sure, because we’d been strugging with the question of how to think about our long-term finances.  As I’m sure I’ve said before, we’re doing fine on one income in the short-term, but I worry about the long-term impact.  And when I consider switching to a job that pays significantly less than I currently make, I don’t have any sense of how to evaluate the implicit tradeoffs that I’d be making, down the road as well as today.  Having read the book, I can’t say that I have any better of an answer than I started with.  And I’m not sure that I’d do any better going to a financial planner, because Eisenberg makes it clear that the types of places that are interested in serving people at my income scale generally don’t do a whole lot of individualized hand-holding.

The most interesting parts of the book are at the beginning, when Eisenberg talks to real people about what they think their "number" — the amount they need to live happily ever after — is.  Eisenberg had an article in New York magazine last fall that focuses on this aspect of the book.  Among other things, this section gave me a new operational definition of rich — if you have a concrete idea of the difference it would make to your quality of life to have $7 million instead of $3 million, you’re rich. 

Overall, I was underwhelmed by the book.  I’m surprised that it’s been on some of the best seller lists.  Eisenberg’s "completely different way to think about the rest of your life" turns out to be not all that different after all, unless it’s a new concept to you that the quality of your retirement will depend as much on whether you’re doing things that are meaningful to you than on the number of zeros at the end of your IRA balance.  To be fair, I’m at least 15 years too young to really be in Eisenberg’s target audience.

I know, even I’m getting sick of hearing about mommy wars.  But, via 11d, Jane Galt has a different perspective on them:

"But I would like to point out that if you think you’ve found the One Right Way to raise YOUR child, then it does indeed make sense to fight hard to persuade as many other women as possible to make the same choice. If you are at home, working mothers are your enemy, at least until they chuck the rat race, and vice versa.

"Why do I say this? Simple: having the majority of people live the way you do has significant positive externalities.

I think she’s at least partially right about the externalities, wrong that they’re the explanation behind the "mommy wars." 

If you’re a working parent in a neighborhood full of at-home parents, all of the social and school-related events are likely to happen while you’re at work.  The afterschool program at the school is likely to be not very good, because few parents are fighting for it.  And if your coworkers who are parents all have partners at home, they’re probably not going to be as sympathetic of your need to take off for a sick kid as someone else in your situation would be.

If you’re an at-home parent in a neighborhood full of two-income families, you’re likely to be socially isolated during the day.  Your kids probably won’t have as fancy birthday parties or go on as many trips as their peers.  The PTA will be more likely to meet at night, when you’d rather spend time with your spouse, less likely to meet during the day.

(I think Galt is seriously overstating the case when she suggests that there’s a real shortage of at-home parents for socializing with:

"Let me point out that staying at home with children is not nearly as rewarding as it was in the 1960’s. All right, there are more daytime television options than there used to be, and gyms now have day-care centres. But there is something huge missing, and that is all the other women in your neighbourhood. The ones that your mother had coffee with, asked to watch the children for an hour, played afternoon bridge with, formed the pillar of the PTA with, and so on . . . they’re all off trading bonds or editing books or waiting tables…"

Although there are fewer at-home parents, there’s still an awful lot.  I think the increase in social isolation has more to do with a) suburban sprawl — a lot of the suburbs of the 50s and 60s look pretty urban by modern standards; and b) expectations of intensive parenting — it’s no longer socially acceptable to send your children out to amuse themselves in the street or to watch TV for hours while you drink coffee with the neighbors.)

But, I don’t think any of that is why the mommy wars exist.  I just don’t believe that thousands of people are thinking — gee, my life would be easier if my neighbor also stayed home, so I’ll make cutting remarks every time I see her in office clothes so she’ll decide to quit her job.  Or — it’s not fair that I need to compete at work with Roger, whose wife stays home, so I’ll try to convince her that she’s wasting her brain and would really be happier if she worked.

I think two types of parents make mommy wars type comments.  One is those who are so happy with their choices that they truly can’t imagine that everyone else wouldn’t also be happier if they made the same choices.  And the other is those who are deeply insecure about their choice, and so need to constantly try to prove that it’s objectively better.

In her comment on yesterday’s post, Jody wrote "it’s worth asking what we mean by a middle-class life."  She points out that, due to the declining cost of manufactured goods, even people with relatively low incomes can have many of the material markers of a middle-class life — televisions, cars, etc.  This is a fair point — when measured by stuff, even poor Americans are incredibly well-off by both international and historical standards.

The statistical definition of "middle class" as the middle quintile of the income distribution makes the question of "is the middle class diminishing?" meaningless since, by definition, 20 percent of the population is going to be in that quintile.  And most Americans continue to describe themselves as middle class, even when their income seems to suggest that they’re outside that range.

What do I have in mind, then?  It combines a bunch of economic and psychological variables.  Being middle-class doesn’t necessarily mean you own your own home, but it means that you can reasonably expect to do so at some point in your adult life.  (I think the rising cost of homeownership in big cities is one of the reasons that people whose income in the $80,000 and up range don’t think of themselves as upper class.)  It means that you can’t afford everything you want, but that there’s room in your budget for non-necessities — a vacation, cable TV, an occasional restaurant meal.  It means that something going wrong — a kid getting sick, a car breaking down — is a hassle, but not an immediate disaster.  It means paid vacation days, health insurance, and some plan for retirement that doesn’t involve working until you drop dead.  It means either employment security, or at least a decent chance of finding a comparable job if you get laid off.  It means decent schools for your kids, and an expectation that they’ll have at least as good a life as you do.

Is this what you mean by "middle class"? 

I don’t have the energy to tie this all together into a thoughtful post tonight, but I’ve been reading some interesting articles about displaced workers and the economy.  They’re particularly resonant this week in light of the huge buyout that GM is offering its workers.

First up is Louis Uchitelle writing in NYTimes about the limited success of job training programs for displaced workers.  It’s adapted from a book he’s written, which I’ve requested from the library.

Second is Mark Schmitt, writing more broadly about the limits of education as a strategy for reducing income inequality.  It’s worth both reading the posts that he links to, and the comments he received — there’s a bunch of very big names in economics joining in the discussion.

I really think we’re reaching the end of an era in which even skilled blue-collar workers could count on a solid middle-class lifestyle.   There just are going to be fewer and fewer jobs that pay $30 an hour plus benefits for people who don’t go to college.  (The exceptions are likely to be things like plumbing, that can’t be outsourced to India and aren’t subject to mechanization.  But there are going to be fewer repair-type jobs too, as it become cheaper to just replace things than to fix them.)  But going to college isn’t a guarantee of a middle-class life either.  It may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

Today’s book is a collection of essays by Marjorie Williams, called The Woman at the Washington Zoo (after a poem by Randall Jarrell).  The subtitle is "Writings on politics, family, and fate" and the book is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to the three topics — political profiles, columns that appeared in the Washington Post and in Slate, and a set of essays about her diagnosis (in her mid 40s) with terminal liver cancer and how she lived with the disease and the knowledge of her impending death.

The political profiles are elegantly written, but seem like period pieces at this point, full of references that need to be footnoted to explain them to contemporary readers.  Even the joint profile of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, written just after the 2000 election, seems like a postcard from long ago. 

In her essays and columns, Williams writes about many of the issues that I cover in this blog.  She calls feminists to task for letting Bill Clinton off the hook for his pattern of sexual harassment, writes about the decline of the "political wife," and is dismayed by the inclusion of a makeup "advertorial" in Ms Magazine.  She reviews books likeThe Nuture Assumption, The Baby Boon, and The Marriage Sabbatical.  She is equally scornful of Real Simple and politicians’ false apologies.

Williams is not a soothing writer. In a review of I Don’t Know How She Does It (which she liked a lot more than I did), she writes:

"American women — can-do daughters of their country’s optimism — still secretly nourish a poignant hope that there is An Answer to the dilemna of work and family.  On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

But unlike Caitlin Flanagan, Williams is never smug.  She never conveys any sense that she thinks she’s got things any more figured out than anyone else, or that her choices are superior to yours.  She admits that as the mother of young children, she enjoyed the time to herself that she got when she was commuting back and forth from Washington to New Jersey to visit her dying mother.

I think my favorite essay from the book is her previously unpublished memoir of her mother.  She unblinkingly writes about the joys and costs of her mother’s traditionally female path of service and reflected glory, and of her own ambivalence toward it:

"I never knew which would be worse: to be right or wrong in my hunch that her life was an unhappy one.  I suppose I will always wonder if it is self-justification that makes me see tragedy in the perfection of her kitchen.  I only know that, frozen in the passage between my mother’s mooon and my father’s sun, I made my choice many years ago.  but, although I always craved the gaudy satisfaction of my father’s sun, it is my mother’s life that fascinates me now.  And it is my love for her that both comforts and pains me more.  In life, I shrank from what I took (rightly, I still think) to be her judgments of me, her anger at my repudiation of the bargains she made.  Now, I dream about her often, and usually I wake from them with delight….

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear."

I wanted to share these two posts about marriage that were in response to the same post about "false advertising" I wrote about last week.  They’re very different, but both lovely.

Becca at Not Quite Sure writes:

"But I see marriage as two people coming together as autonomous individuals to share their lives. Indeed, in my vision, it is that very autonomy that generates the pleasure and productivity of marriage… But our bodies? Our thoughts? Our work? Our friends? Our passions? Those are very much our own, if sometimes, happily, shared, and one of the cornerstones of our marriage is that we each try to enable the other’s life… Our marriage is in no way perfect–sometimes I wish it would just go away, or maybe I wish he would just go away–but one of the things I like best about it is that in it I can be fully myself, knowing that S is supporting and appreciating me for myself, whatever or however I am."

Dutch at Sweet Juniper writes:

"At some point you could almost stop drawing a line between us as individuals, and consider every step that we took and choice that we made as done together. In that way, we were married before we were married. We were one… I realize that kind of experience before marriage might put us in a minority, but I hope that most successful marriages go through that once the knot is tied. Individuality and individual interests sort of become secondary to what works as a unit. Passion doesn’t recede, but grows as you find completion in another person. All of that horrible pain of loneliness disappears. What happens on the surface means nothing compared to the inward attraction and bond. One partner can’t "let themselves go" because that partner is inextricably bound to the other…"

I guess Tolstoy was wrong.

My image of my marriage is closer to Becca’s, but Dutch’s comment about "growing up together" very much resonated with me, as T and I met when we were both 18.  My image is of the trees that you sometimes see growing right next to each other — they’re separate, and have their own root trunks and root systems (sometimes they’re even different species), but they’ve each been shaped by the other, and in places their branches intertwine.

(Image borrowed from: http://www.ethicalfutures.co.uk/ethics.html  Found via google images for "two trees intertwined", which also resulted in lots of ketubah pictures.  Guess it’s not an original idea.