Half Changed World

Today’s book is Unraveled, by Maria Housden.  The subtitle of the book is "The True Story of a Woman Who Dared to Become a Different Kind of Mother" and the "different kind of mother" that Housden became is a non-custodial parent.  When she and her husband divorced, she let him have primary physical custody, accepting a standard visitation schedule of alternate weekends and several weeks over the summer.  For a while she moved to California to be with her boyfriend (now husband), but now she lives on the east coast, not far from her children.  The book challenges its readers’ assumptions, raising the question of why is it shocking that a "good mother" — not one on the brink of collapse like Laura Brown, the runaway housewife of The Hours — would give up custody of her children, when millions of fathers do so all the time. 

Unfortunately Housden spends far too long trying to justify her choice, rather than challenging the need to do so.  And her justifications left me hollow: "I knew in my heart that my gift in the world was more as an artist than an everyday kind of mother.  And my real responsibility to my life, the lives of my children, and the world, was for me to have the courage to create a sense of home and work that would allow me time to explore and express the things I wondered about and knew."  I find this language incredibly insulting to the thousands of men and women who manage to be creative artists without walking out on their kids. 

I’m not criticizing Housden’s choices.  Unlike many of Laura’s commenters, I don’t believe that parents have an obligation to stay in unhappy marriages for the kids’ sake.  She had married young, and (at least in her telling) her husband’s expections for their marriage were stuck in the 1950s of the Feminine Mystique.  They had watched their 3-year-old daughter die, the sort of crisis that either makes or breaks relationships.  Her husband was willing and able to be the custodial parent (with the help of an au pair).  But I lost patience with the new-agey language, the constant claims that this was necessary in order to find her authentic self. 

Sandra Tsing Loh reviewed Unraveled in the September Atlantic.  I requested the book from the library based on the start of the review, only to discover later that Loh hated it, for mostly the same reasons that I did.  But Loh then uses the review as a launching point for a semi-coherent rave about Oprah, Anna Karenina, and "female-rage anthologies by overstressed working mothers bitterly wrestling with husbands and playdates and deadlines."  If anyone who has read Loh’s review can explain the last two pages, I’d love to hear it

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Updated:  Go read Jody’s post on this subject.  Thanks.

We had a nice visit with my family in NYC, but I’m happy to be home again.  Doubly happy not to have any more road trips planned for at least a couple of months.  We got stuck in ugly traffic on I-95 on the way home, and we were all pretty frazzled by the time we got home.

The boys are actually about as good travellers as you could hope for.  They both nap well in the car, and they entertained each other for hours making noises back and forth (Ahhh — beee– pthhffff).  D. has reached the stage where he can give me a reasonable amount of warning when I need to find a bathroom.  And they were even fairly gracious and didn’t whine when the portable DVD player broke down mid-trip and so they couldn’t watch Here Come the ABC’s.

When we bought the DVD player, we paid for the 4 year extended warranty, so T. took it back to Best Buy this afternoon.  They listened to his explanation, then told him to go ahead and pick out a new one.  For the same price, we now get a larger screen, and an included car-mount case.  The catch is that the warranty ends once they replace the player (rather than repair it), so we lose the 2+ years remaining on the warranty.  We went ahead and paid the extra for another 2 year warranty; the new one has a rotating screen that looks pretty flimsy, so we’re guessing we’ll get another replacement before it expires.

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Oh, while I was off-line, I seem to have missed Grrl and Sarah’s birthstory.  And her old posts aren’t available any more, due to weird people stealing her words.  Feh.

In honor of my 1 year blogoversary, I registered the domain www.halfchangedworld.com for this blog.  Observant readers may have noticed that the change showed up in my permalinks a few weeks ago.  The old URLs will continue to work, but feel free to update your bookmarks.

On this occasion, I want to thank you, my readers.  When I started this blog, I had absolutely no idea how much fun it would be, how much I would learn from your comments, or how much sense of community I would come to feel.  I don’t respond personally to every comment, but I do read and appreciate every one.  (Well, except for the spammers.)  If you leave a link to your blog, I always stop by and check it out.  I truly couldn’t do it without you.

Any requests for the next year?  Suggestions for topics you’d like to see me discuss more often?  Less often?   Recommendations of books I should be reading?

Even though it’s been in the high 90s until this week, the trees know that fall is on the way.  Nothing is turning colors yet, but there are more dead leaves on the street, and the acorns are starting to fall. 

Labor Day is in just two weeks, and then D’s preschool starts on Wednesday.  I hate the fact that our school schedule is set by King’s Dominion, but it still feels right for me that school doesn’t start until September.  The High Holidays aren’t until October this year, which throws off my mental calendar.

T’s been a real trooper having both boys home all day for most of the summer, but even his nerves are starting to fray a bit.  They’ve been watching more TV than usual, but I really can’t complain.  Given the heat, outdoor activities just aren’t reasonable in the afternoon, and crafts only entertain D for about 10 minutes at a time.

D will have preschool 5 mornings a week this year, up from 3 last year.  It feels like a big jump, in some ways bigger than the jump to 5 "full days" (8 to 2.15) in kindergarten next year.  I think N is going to miss having him around.  N is just a little too young for the 2s class at the preschool (just as he’ll be 2 weeks too young for kindergarten in 3 years).  There are programs in the area we could have enrolled him in, but the prospect of having the kids in different preschools was more than we could face.  T will take him to story hour at the library and stuff.

I’m always tempted to buy myself school supplies at this time of year.  There’s something about the call of an unmarked notebook.

As I’m on the road, I have a guest blogger today.  (I don’t have the fancy level of Typepad, so I can’t set it to publish under her name.)  Frequent commenter Jen offers her thoughts on the lessons she learned having her teenage niece stay with her this summer:

What I learned from my niece:

Teenagers talk on cel phones.  A lot.
My 2 and 4-year-old daughters would ditch me for a totally cool 15-year-old in a heartbeat.
Life in Chicago is a lot different from life in suburban Salt Lake City.  (OK, so I knew that one already.)
“Nobody in Chicago wears a bra.”
I swear too much, and I don’t make my bed every day, which now that I think about it is kind of embarrassing.
My husband and I have a pretty good relationship.
There are more ways to let my husband reconnect with his family than just flying to Utah for Thanksgiving.

What I hope my niece learned from us:

Gay people are all around us, and they’re not any weirder than straight people.
The little Mexican fruit market is way better than then big chain grocery store.
If you don’t like a guy, just tell him.  He’ll live, and your life will be much easier.
Of course you can walk to 7-11 by yourself.
Your aunt and uncle may sometimes disagree with your parents, but they’re still your parents and they deserve your respect.
There are many different ways to live.  It’s up to you to choose which is best for you.

Like almost everyone in the US who drives a gasoline-fueled car, I’ve been suffering from sticker shock when I buy gas lately.  The last time I filled up, I paid $2.49 a gallon, after driving past two stations at $2.69 and $2.83.

Unlike almost everyone in the US who drives a gasoline-fueled car, I don’t think the government should be doing something about it.  If anything, I think gas should probably be more expensive.  I don’t think people are ever going to take conservation seriously until it hits them in the wallet, and for both environmental and geopolitical reasons (e.g. not wanting to be dependent on oil-producing nations), I think it’s important that we consume less fossil fuels.

There’s very little evidence that people have started to change their driving patterns in response to the increased cost of gas.  At least in the short-run, fuel consumption is not very sensitive to price (e.g. it’s what economists call inelastic).  At the margin, people may do less leisure driving, but the cost of gas is still a pretty small fraction of the cost of a trip.  And driving is still cheap compared to train and plane tickets, at least for a family.  It’s going to cost us about $100 in gas to drive the minivan to NYC this weekend, but train tickets for the boys and me would be around $250, and that’s with N. riding for free.  And while I love taking the metro to work (I can read!), for most people, public transit is inconvenient if available at all; as Brett at DadTalk wrote: "despite a frugal streak that runs miles deep, I’m going to continue driving to work just to steal a few extra minutes each day with my family.

The big changes that people can make in response to higher fuel costs — buying more efficient cars, choosing houses closer to work or on public transit routes — all only happen over time, and if people think that gas prices are going to stay high.  And I don’t think people have gotten there yet.

I also worry a lot about the impact of higher gas costs on low-income families, for whom an extra $10 or so is a big hit on their budget, and means that they’ll have to cut back somewhere else.  I think any proposal to increase the price of gas needs to address this issue, and cushion the blow.  One intriguing possibility is Pay at the Pump car insurance, where the price of no-fault car insurance is built into the cost of gasoline.  It simultaneously ensures that everyone is covered and changes one of the major costs of car use from a fixed cost to one that varies with the distance you drive.  It would simultaneously promote conservation and make car ownership a lot more accessible to poor families.

And yes, in spite of my environmental leanings, I think making car ownership a possibility for poor families is generally a good thing.  Many jobs are inaccessible without a car.  Groceries are more expensive at the stores you can reach without a car.  And commutes by public transit often stretch to 2 or more hours a day, especially when you need to take a child to day care or school en route.  A bunch of welfare to work programs have tried to create specialized van routes to bring workers to remote jobs, but my sense in most cases is that it’s cheaper and more helpful to just buy people reliable used cars.

Tonight I’m thinking a lot about the Israeli soldiers who have been carrying out the evictions in Gaza.  I’m sure they’re as divided as the rest of Israeli society, some thinking that the withdrawal is a positive step toward peace, some thinking that it’s rewarding terrorism.  But I’m sure none of them ever thought that they’d be compared to Nazi soldiers as they dragged Jews from their homes and synagogues.  This photo essay gives a good sense of the type of rhetoric and emotional scenes they’re facing.

Back in the US, tonight was also the candlelight vigils in solidarity with Cindy Sheehan. 

I’m constantly amazed at how young soldiers are.

May the One who makes peace in the heavens, send peace to us, to all the children of Abraham, and to all the world.

When I initially heard about We Need to Talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, I had no interest in reading it.  It’s the story of a teenage mass murderer, as told by his mother in a series of letters to his father, and I just didn’t want to go there.  I figured there are enough horror stories in the newspaper that I have to read, why should I read fiction about a Columbine-style massacre?

Then I read flea’s heartbreaking review of the book, and picked it up on my next library trip.  I’m glad I did, as I thought it excellent and thought-provoking, even if it did work its way into my dreams for a couple of nights.

The biggest theme of the book is our desire to find causes for everything — and preferable, someone to blame.  In an odd way, I was reminded of Stephen Mitchell’s introduction to his translation of Job.  Mitchell argues that both Job and his "friends" are stuck in contradictory syllogisms.  Job argues "I am a good person, bad things are happening to me, therefore God is unjust."  His friends argue "God is just, bad things are happening to Job, therefore Job must have sinned."  Mitchell suggests that the Voice from the Whirlwind teaches us that "Job is a good person, bad things are happening to him, God is just."  No therefores.

Eva Khatchadourian’s neighbors blame her for Kevin’s sociopathy.  The parents of one of his victims sue her in a civil case, arguing that Eva was a bad mother, Kevin is a murderer, and therefore Eva is to blame.  At her lawyer’s insistence, Eva’s defense in the case was to argue that she was a good mother, and therefore couldn’t be to blame.  But in We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva makes a much more disturbing case, admitting her many failures as a mother, but arguing that nonetheless, she was not responsible for her son’s actions.  No therefores.

The chilling part of the book, what makes it a horror story, is Eva’s insistence that even as an infant and toddler, Kevin’s actions are deliberately chosen to hurt others — especially Eva herself.  She believes that his constant crying as an infant, his destruction of her belongings, his delayed potty training are all designed to torture her.  As he gets older, she blames him for a series of incidents of increasing magnitude in which things go very badly for classmates, neighbors, his sister, a teacher.

If Eva’s perceptions are accurate, Kevin is indeed a character out of a horror movie, clever and evil, beyond anyone’s control but his own.  But if Eva is wrong, she’s a monstrous figure as well, projecting her ambivalence about motherhood onto the innocent child and treating age-appropriate behavior as a crime. Her husband is duly horrified when she tries to convince him of Kevin’s malignant nature, seeing her, not him, as the freak of nature.  And so Eva is further isolated, helpless to prevent the tragedies that she and the reader both see coming.

I am struck that, in spite of all of Eva’s protestations to the contrary, flea still believes that she’s a good mother, pointing out that Eva "gives up everything she ever loved, and all of her time and energy and focus trying to crack the impenetrable shell of a hostile, sullen, sociopathic child."  I’m uncomfortable with sacrifice as the right measure of maternal quality.  Moreover, Eva would say that those are all the motions that she went through to play the role of the good mother, precisely because she was missing something underneath.  And she argues that Kevin always knew the difference. 

In her comment on my post on part-time work, Jennifer wrote:

"So that makes me think that an employer who can figure out how to employ people (of course mainly mothers) part time in an effective way that makes use of their real skill sets will, be able to get some real leverage out of the talent differential they are able to exploit."

I think that’s right — but precisely because so many employers are unwilling to consider part-timers, those that do can often get away with paying them less.  One of my first posts on this blog pointed out a newspaper article in which a publisher referred to stay-at-home moms as "a cheap and highly skilled workforce."

I’m still surprised that employers aren’t more willing to hire parents returning to full-time work after a few years out of the workforce.  Setting aside those few careers where the technology does fundamentally change every 2 or 3 years, it’s hard to make an economic argument for why they shouldn’t be more open. 

The only explanation that makes any sense to me is what economists call "signalling." In this context, a signal is a something that isn’t bad in itself, but is believed to correlate with unobservable characteristics that are undesirable.  For example, young adults with GEDs do much worse in the labor market than their peers with regular high school diplomas, even though they’ve proved themselves by taking the test to have similar levels of knowledge.  Economists suggest that a GED is a signal to employers that the person might have a low tolerance for routine and discipline.  Similarly, I’m afraid that employers see taking any extended period out of the workforce as signaling that the person might lack full commitment to a job.   

I recently read a blog posting where Mandy at Fosterfest pointed out that Justice O’Connor spent a significant period of her life as a stay-at-home mom.  She argued that at the time there really weren’t very many experienced female judges, so given that Reagan wanted to nominated a woman, he had to accept one with fewer credentials than the average nominee.  Today, there are so many women with highly successful linear legal careers, it’s unlikely that another woman with an extended period out of the legal profession could ever be nominated.

I’m not arguing that people who take 5 years out of the workforce should expect to return at the same level as their peers who worked continuously during that period.  But, far too often, they aren’t able to return at even the same level that they were at when they left.  And that just seems crazy.

I had a chance to meet the new principal of our local elementary school this week.  She seemed smart, enthusiastic, interested in engaging parents, committed to the kids.  She gives off less of an "I know exactly what we need to do" air than last year’s principal (Dr. B.), but I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing, particularly since she’s been on the job less than a month.

She had just gotten the results from last year’s SOLs, and they weren’t particularly encouraging.  I’m not quite sure what to make of that.  I don’t think that test scores are especially useful as an indicator of school quality, but given the huge focus on them last year, I’d be lying if I said the lack of progress didn’t make me nervous.

If nothing else, it undermines my confidence that Dr. B.  really did have everything under control last year.  For example, Dr. B had made a big deal about how much absenteeism and tardiness there had been in the past, and the Urban League even donated alarm clocks for every kid in the school.  But it turns out, there were still over 100 kids — nearly half the school — who were absent more than 10 days last year.

I think the overwhelming emphasis on test scores under No Child Left Behind is generally problematic.  But I do think the attention it has focused on schools like this one, low performers in overall decent school districts, has been helpful.  I could easily imagine that without NCLB or Virginia’s Standards of Learning requirements, schools like this could quietly have been left to flounder for years, with no one paying much attention. 

We’ve got another year before D starts kindergarten, so we don’t need to make any decisions right away.  I’m still leaning towards sending him to the local school, knowing that we have the option of switching down the road if we’re really unhappy.  But we haven’t ruled out trying to get him into the dual language (Spanish/English) program at a different public school.