Half Changed World

The Times has an article today about those poor deluded moms who think that they’re cooking when really they’re just assembling. 

I haven’t been to Dream Dinners or Lets Dish, but I’ll probably give it a try when they open their franchises near me.  (So far, the only ones in the area have been in the distant suburbs.)  I like to cook, but the need to figure out what I want to make, make a shopping list for T, and then find the time to actually cook before the veggies turn into limp blobs means that some weeks we wind up eating an awful lot of pasta with jarred sauce and frozen meals from Trader Joe’s.  The idea of having a freezer full of meals ready to go for those nights is awfully appealing.  (I do wonder whether we can fit the meals in the freezer and still have room for everything else that’s crammed in there.  Do they assume that everyone has a stand-alone freezer?)

I was surprised by the quote from one of the founders of Dream Dinners saying that customers tend not to come in with friends after the first few times.  The social aspect is definitely a big part of the appeal to me.  One of my friends hosts "international dinners" every couple of months where she picks out the recipes and buys all the food and a group of us come over and cook.  We make amazing meals, but the goal is not to have food to take home, but to eat it that night (although there are usually leftovers).  It’s a lot of fun.

In modern society, cooking is probably the domestic task that is most easily outsourced.  You can pick up meals to go from every supermarket and convenience store, let alone a restaurant.  The fact that people are choosing these meal assembly places over take-out is testament to the emotional appeal of home cooked meals.  I think that’s the real story.

T is away at a role-playing game convention this weekend, selling his game.  Rather than leaving me to handle the boys on my own, he arranged with my parents for them to take the boys for the weekend, as his con is close to where they live.  So, I’ve got a rare weekend totally to myself.

I can’t say that I’ve been doing hugely exciting things.  I ran some long neglected errands, finished our taxes, painted the closet in the boys’ room in preparation to install an organizer, read a silly book, cooked a big pot of yellow split pea soup, watched TV.  Tomorrow night I’ve got dinner plans with friends, but mostly I’ve been enjoying the ability to do things without rushing or stressing about time and just to hang out.

Moxie, Cecily, Jody and others have thoroughly covered the weight issues raised by Morphing into Mama’s post, so I’m going to focus on the idea that changing after you get married could be considered a form of "false advertising."  First, as Lisa V points out, it’s crazy to think that any of us aren’t going to change.  She writes:

We have had 8 pregnancies, 2 births, 2 adoptions, 3 homes, 7 dogs, 5 cats and more jobs and deaths than I can count.  These things have all left physical and emotional scars on our psyches and bodies. But we are grown-ups, we can handle it.  I love Bert not because of his spare tire or lack of it, but because of who he is and how he has changed my life for the good and the bad, and how we are still here through all of it. To me this whole thing comes down to accepting who your spouse is, not who you wish they were or used to be, but who they are. And then love them and like them and build a life together.

Exactly.  Some of us will gain weight, others will lose, some of us will get new jobs that require us to travel 20 weeks a year, some of us well get laid off, some of us will have life-threatening physical conditions, some of us are going to become alcoholics, or get sober.  There’s a reason the traditional wedding ceremony talks about "for better or for worse."

But I don’t think it’s totally crazy to talk about false advertising in relationships.  Part of what drives me crazy about books like The Rules is what happens if they actually work and attract a man.  Either you’re stuck the rest of your life pretending that you’re totally fascinated by whatever interests him, or he’s going to wake up one day and figure out that you totally lied to him.  Ugh.

Similarly, I think in some ways that wifestyles guy was doing the women he was dating a favor.  If someone’s going to have a huge long list of expectations for the person you’re going to marry, it’s nice to have it out on the table in advance, so you can go screaming in the opposite direction if that’s not the way you want to live your life.  Much better than having it sprung on you after you’re married. Or, worse and more likely, the list stays hidden until you have a child and then all these hidden expectations come out of the woodwork, just when it’s become even harder for you to walk away from the relationship.  (I am, of course, ignoring the fact that this guy didn’t seem to expect that his wife would have a similar list of his responsibilities.)

Getting this stuff on the table up front is one of the arguments for a pre- or post-nuptual agreement.  If you have major disagreements, it’s better to know them sooner rather than later.  Such contracts also promote better negotiations within relationships, because they make sure that everyone has a decent fall-back position (what people who do this stuff professionally call a Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA).

All that said, I don’t think it’s a terrible thing when two people divorce, even without abuse or anything horrific, but when two people find that they have changed in non-compatible ways.  For all the increase in divorce, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the average length of a marriage has also increased, because of the overall increase in life spans — 100 years ago, an awful lot of women were still dying in childbirth.  Is it reasonable to expect people to pledge to stay together for 40 or 50 or 60 years?

Tomorrow, I’ll have a serious post responding to the widespread blog discussion of this post about post-marriage weight gain and tying it to Jen’s post about wifestyles.  But for tonight, I just want to share this poem by Shel Silverstein.

My Rules

If you want to marry me, here’s what you’ll have to do:
You must learn how to make a perfect chicken-dumpling stew.
And you must sew my holey socks,
And soothe my troubled mind,
And develop the knack for scratching my back,
And keep my shoes spotlessly shined.
And while I rest you must rake up the leaves,
And when it is hailing and snowing
You must shovel the walk… and be still when I talk,
And — hey — where are you going?

From Where The Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein.

I spent the evening at a forum for candidates for the local school board.  For some odd reason, Alexandria elects its City Council and School Board on a cycle completely separate from the state and national elections — every 3 years, in May.  (The official explanation is that the local races would be overshadowed by national ones and wouldn’t get as much attention.  The unofficial explanation is that it keeps more control in the hands of the local party committees, by depressing turnout.)

The Alexandria School Board has 9 members, divided into 3 geographic regions.  (This is a compromise between having board members representing specific neighborhoods, and having city-wide elections, which would make it harder for minorities to be represented.)  None of the three current members from my district are running for reelection, so all three seats are open.  There are five candidates running:

• Elliott Branch
• Sheryl Gorsuch
• Sanford Horn
• Scott Newsham
• Eileen Cassidy Rivera

It was interesting to see what everyone had to say.  There wasn’t a whole lot of controversy — everyone supports fiscal responsibility, improved communications, reducing the achievement gap, challenging all students, retaining good teachers, etc.  Everyone agreed that the laptop inititive had been poorly implemented.  No one supported intelligent design.

Overall, I was most impressed by Branch.  I particularly liked what he had to say about individuation in the classroom.  I’m torn between Rivera, Gorsuch and Horn for my other two votes.  Rivera’s bio is impressive, but she did such a good job of staying on message with her three priorities that I didn’t get as much of a sense of her overall.  Horn’s a teachers, which is a plus for me.  His literature talks a lot about improving school lunches, but he didn’t mention it at all.  Gorsuch seems like a classic PTA lady, but showed an impressive understanding of details.  Newsham didn’t seem to have any specific goals that he wanted to accomplish, but just talked about general management experience.

If there’s anyone reading this who wants to sell me on one of the candidates, I’m definitely up for listening.  More generally, what do you look for in a school board candidate in the absense of burning controversies?

In keeping with the housework theme for the week, today’s book is A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It, by Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman.  It’s a quick read, in an easy conversational style, and I’m quite sure it’s the only book ever written to receive blurbs from both John Gray and Rhona Mahony.

In spite of the provocative title, Sherman really doesn’t have much to say about the division of household labor.  Her basic argument is that time spent doing housework is almost always time that could be spent on higher priority activities, whether working for pay, caring for children, volunteering, or just enjoying yourself.  For most middle-class and above families, time is more valuable than money, so why not spend some money to buy yourself more time? 

Lots of families do buy themselves time by hiring housecleaning services, eating out or getting takeout.  Sherman suggests that you can get more help for the same amount of money by hiring less specialized workers — housekeepers — and providing them with extremely detailed instructions about what to do.  She provides step-by-step guidance on how to figure out those instructions, as well as advice on recruiting, complying with tax requirements, etc.

I thought the book was interesting, but it didn’t make me want to rush out and hire a housekeeper.  Maybe if the boys were older.  But at this stage, a huge part of the work is just staying on top of the clutter, and I can’t imagine a housekeeper being able to make the judgements needed to know what to do with everything.  And I’m not willing to limit ourselves to a weekly rotation of meals.

The latest from the housework tracking experiment: Monday, T spent 1.25 hours shopping (I think that includes driving to Costco and back), 3 hours cooking (he made a triple batch of curried chicken buns to freeze), and 2.25 hours cleaning.  I spent about 20 minutes cleaning.  Today T spent 15 minutes cooking, and an hour and 45 minutes cleaning.  I spent 30 minutes cooking, and about 20 minutes cleaning.

For me, the most surprising part of this experiment is how much cleaner the house is getting.   The act of writing down how much he’s doing has clearly motivated T to clean more.  And he insists that it’s not because he wants to look good for all of you.  In fact, he’s planning to keep tracking it for himself, but not tell me each day.  He suggested that when he doesn’t track how much time he spends doing things, it can feel like he’s spending all the time cleaning, since it’s interspersed with hanging out with the boys.  Writing it down also clearly helps him remember that once he’s put a load in the washer, it really need to move along to the dryer and eventually to get folded.

As I wrote last summer, I was cautiously optimistic about the movie of V for Vendetta.  We saw it over the weekend, and it was neither as good as I had hoped (nor as the book) nor as bad as I had feared.  It’s gotten very mixed reviews, which are justified, because it’s a very mixed bag of a movie.  Parts are taken directly from the book — not just word for word, but frame by frame.  In other places, there are significant changes, some to justify the violence, some to simplify the (admitedly extremely complicated) plot, and some just becuase it’s Hollywood.  But the changes include some of the strongest parts of the movie as well as some of the cheesiest bits.  Except for about 10 minutes, I enjoyed the movie, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it.

We saw it at the Old Town Theater, which I walk by at least 10 times a week, but this was the first time I had been inside.  It’s a neat space, with a ceiling that must be 30 feet high.  Because of the way the seats recline, and the decoration, it’s possible to get the feeling that the screen is below you.  It’s a very different feel than the multiplex.  The "lobby" is about a foot and a half deep.  You buy your tickets on the same line as the concession stand, and there aren’t any previews, let alone ads.  Before the show, the owner stood up and urged people to consider buying memberships, because he’s trying to pay off the debt and turn the place over to a nonprofit trust.

On another note, T and I also watched The Maltese Falcon on video over the weekend.  It’s been a while since I had seen it.  Does anyone else think that the whole movie makes more sense if Effie (the incredibly efficient secretary) double crosses Spade?  She certainly has more of a chance to switch the bird than anyone else.  Maybe, like Tiptree’s Ruth Parsons, Effie Perine "doesn’t want to be memorable."

First the update, then a few responses to the comments on why I think this matters.

Friday, T reported spending 2.5 hours on housework — 45 minutes cleaning the kitchen, 45 minutes on laundry, 30 minutes mopping the kitchen and bathroom (unfortunately we have light colored tile floors that look dirty 10 minutes after you finish cleaning them), and 30 minutes sorting the papers on his "launch pad" shelf.  He also spent 45 minutes cooking.  I spent 30 minutes cooking (I started the chili cooking in the crockpot in the morning) and about 15 minutes doing laundry and miscellaneous picking up (taking out the recycling, cleaning up after the cat, bringing in dishes from around the house).  I also spent 30 minutes cleaning up my desk and the area around it.  (Is that housework?  I don’t really think so, but it’s certainly comparable to T’s cleaning his launch pad.) 

Saturday, T spent 1.25 hours cleaning — half an hour in the kitchen, 45 minutes in the bedroom and family room, and about 15 minutes cooking.  I also spent about 15 minutes cooking (we had pancakes for breakfast, but went out for dinner), and about 15 minutes picking up and doing laundry.

Today, T spent 45 minutes cleaning — 15 minutes in the kitchen, 30 minutes doing the bathroom, and about 15 cooking.  I spent about 15 minutes cleaning and doing laundry.  We spent about 20 minutes together shopping, and about half an hour moving furniture around in the boys’ room.

So why do I think it’s worth paying attention to this?  Certainly I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, any more than I track every cent I spend all the time.  But I think both are worth doing for short periods of time.

First, it does draw attention to the division of labor.  I’ll admit that I’m feeling self-conscious to see that T is doing more household work than me, even on the weekend.  In my defense, I’ll say that I was taking care of the boys when T was cleaning.  I also think I may do more of the 30 seconds here and there type stuff, picking up socks and dirty dishes when I see them.  (But I’m also realizing that I may be giving myself too much credit for doing that.)

Second, I think that most people don’t have a particularly realistic sense of the "cost" of a certain level of cleanliness.  If you don’t realize that having a house that is "guest-clean" at all times requires 2 hours a day of cleaning, it’s easy to beat yourself up for not achieving that standard, to think that you’re lazy or inefficient.  Part of effective time management is knowing how long a task actually takes.

Third, in response to Jennifer’s comment, I do think it’s possible to make changes when you realize how long things really take.  You might institute a family rule that everyone only gets clean towels once a week, and people who leave their wet towels on the floor have to deal with the consequences.  You might decide that it’s really important to you to mop the kitchen every other day, but that you’re willing to only vacuum once a week (or vice versa).  Or you might decide that you’re willing to hire a housecleaner.

If anyone else decides to track this for a while, please let me know.  I’d love to see what this looks like in other households.

Last week’s NYTimes article on mothers’ labor force participation (which I also wrote about last Friday) suggests that the decline in housework that has occurred over the past 40 years may have reached a limit — that we can’t reasonably go much lower.  I’m not sure if I think that’s true. 

I have no idea how messy the average house is, to be honest, or how we compare.  We do a pretty good job of staying on top of the dirty dishes and the laundry (since we don’t have a basement, there’s no real room to let the laundry pile up), but the clutter (books, papers, toys) builds up as fast as we can put it away.  And by the time we’ve cleared away the clutter, we often run out of steam before we get to the sweeping/vacuuming/mopping stage.

So I asked my husband if he’d be willing to track all the housework we did for a week, and he said sure. He even suggested we post photos.  (We’ve been snapping them, but I don’t have the energy to transfer them tonight.)

So, today is day 1.  T reports that he spent 1 hour grocery shopping today, 1 hour cooking (we had chicken paprikash), and 2.75 hours doing housework (.5 hours cleaning the kitchen, .25 hours cleaning up after each of lunch and dinner, .25 hours running laundry, .75 hours sorting and putting it away, .5 hours picking up the dining room, and .25 hours picking up the library/family room).  He says that’s about average — I think it’s probably a bit more than usual.  But that might be a sign of the invisibility of housework — you only notice it when it’s not done.

I spent about 20 minutes cooking (mostly making challah for tomorrow, but also putting my breakfast and lunch together) and about 40 minutes cleaning — 10 minutes cleaning the kitchen (scrubbing the stovetop and the microwave, which didn’t rise to the top of T’s list), 15 minutes putting away laundry, and 15 minutes picking up in the library. I also spent about 30 minutes trying to get caught up recording our finances, which got a bit scrambled by not having access to my computer files for two weeks.  And now I’ve spent about 30 minutes blogging and checking my messages, and I think I’m going to bed.

Over the weekend, my husband and I babysat for two kids for a couple of hours.  (After almost 5 years of trying, we’ve finally managed to join a functioning babysitting coop!)  The three-year-old was happy to play with our boys (and their toys), but the nine-month-old was quite upset to wake up in a strange place and cried most of the time she was here.  After trying the obvious problems (interested in bottle? needs a fresh diaper?), T. and I took turns walking back and forth with her, singing in her ear.  She seemed to be happier with T. holding her, maybe because he can carry a tune, maybe because he was less disturbingly like-mommy but not-mommy.

Tertia had a pair of interesting posts recently, in which she talked about a incident where her daughter was crying while she was getting the babies ready for a bath.  Rose (her nanny) heard her, came in, and without saying anything took Kate, who immediately calmed down.  Tertia asked her readers what their reaction would be, and then shared hers: a moment of jealousy and anger, followed by gladness that her children have another person in their lives who loves them so much and is able to make them happy and appreciation that Rose is comfortable enough with her role to do that.

I know that when the boys were babies, I always felt a ton of mixed emotions whenever T was able to calm them down when I wasn’t — glad that they weren’t screaming in my ear any more, but also profound insecurity in my parenting skills.  And I’m sure T felt the same way when I did it — and I did it more often, because I had the unfair advantage of being the provider of magic mommy milk.  And, over time, we both got more confident and recognized that the boys’ passing preferences weren’t something to get worked up over.  (Not that we still don’t cringe when they insist on one of us over the other.)

That said, I do believe that it’s important to let both parents (and any other key caregivers) develop their own sets of soothing skills and a sense of competency.   And sometimes that does mean the more experienced parent (or caregiver) standing back and letting the other one figure it out on their own.  If someone is always rushing in to bail you out as soon as it gets rough, you’re never going to learn.  (Tertia did say that, based on her reaction, she’s going to work harder not to rescue her husband when he’s struggling.)

I had a few minutes in a bookstore the other day, and I picked up the Mommy Wars book, and turned to Carolyn Hax’s essay.  Hax is the author of Tell Me About It, the Post’s advice column, and the mom of three kids under three.  I usually think her advice is right on target, and so when I heard that she had written one of the essays, I was interested in hearing what she had to say.  She acknowledges that she stepped right into the middle of the mommy wars in a column before she had kids, but says that now, her only test for parents is "would you want to be your own kid?"

I think that’s a useful perspective to bring to the daycare debate, more useful than the studies I’ve talked about before.  There are lots of happy thriving kids in parental care, and lots of happy thriving kids in paid care, and their parents shouldn’t be worrying about whether their kid might have slightly higher test scores down the road if they were doing something different.  But if your kid isn’t happy, it’s worth thinking about what might be changed — whether it’s a setting with more or fewer other kids around, more or less structure, whatever makes sense.

I’m not saying that this makes for easy answers.  Let’s go back to crying babies.  What do you do if you’re a working parent and your child cries every day when you drop him off at child care?  Especially if your child is too young to explain what’s going on in words.  Lots of kids cry a bit and then settle in and have fun the rest of the day, but what if yours doesn’t?  How long do you wait before concluding that this is more than just a transitional problem?  And what do you do then?