Half Changed World

Kevin Drum went to BlogHer, and didn’t have much interesting to say about it.  But the discussion in the comments section is worth reading. Bitch, PhD posted several times on how "non-political blogs" often talk about the ways that politics affect real people’s lives.  I’ve argued before that personal blogs may even have more influence than political blogs, because they reach people outside the echo chamber. 

Someone named Nancy wrote:

"As long as people like you [Drum] define what the mainstream political topics are, anything women are interested in becomes, by definition, off-topic. Further, writing about political topics with a subjective voice has always been defined as "personal" even when it concerns a mainstream political topic. Part of the point of inclusiveness is widening the definition of political topics to include those that concern women and widening the voice of journalism to include the more subjective, personal language women sometimes use and like to read."

And someone named Maynard Handley wrote:

"bhpd, I am well familiar with your sort of blog, or, for example, profgrrl. And I don’t read them. Why? Because I’m a busy guy who isn’t interested in learning about other people’s private life. There are PLENTY of blogs out there. Why waste time on those that dilute their content with material of no interest to me?"

Differences in taste make the world go around.  I get bored by blogs that cover the same topics all the time.  Very few people have enough interesting things to  say about politics (or about knitting or anything else) to be worth reading day in and day out on that one subject.  But a lot more people can say something interesting about each of five different subjects in the course of a week.

Lisa Williams wrote it more eloquently than I can manage:

"Blogs give you an opportunity to challenge this limited idea of what is important and to say, The rest of my life is important too. I am not a brain in a jar that emits 700 word screeds. I have a family and I have interests and I have favorite foods and a dog, and I am going to place these on the same web page as my essay about Kierkegaard and my instructions for how to crack open the case of my X Box, because that is a more truthful and honest representation of my life, and because I trust and respect other people to appreciate me as a person and not as a narrow pipe spewing bits on a narrow subject…  I also suspect that the general tendency of bloggers towards including personal commentary and “off topic” adventures makes the blogosphere a more polite place than either the mass media or Usenet."

Lisa later wrote another post about work blogs, acknowledging the need to sometimes keep things compartmentalized.  This issue also has been discussed at length in the wake of BlogHer.

So, continue to expect a little bit of everything here at Half Changed World.

bj and jackie asked me to amplify on my comment that "In general, I’m less optimistic about part-time work, and more focused on improving the on-ramps for people who have taken time off from the workforce, but I think it’s worth working for both."

Having thought it about it more, it’s probably an overstatment to say that I’m "not optimistic" about part-time work.  It works very well for some people, and I definitely think it’s worth pushing employers to consider part-time options for more jobs.  But I don’t think it’s going to be the magic bullet that solves work-family conflict.

Let’s look at some types of part-time jobs:

• Jobs that are part-time because there’s really only 20 hours (or 24 hours or whatever) of work each week that needs to be done.   The classic example of this is the small business that only needs a part-time bookkeeper.  Adjunct professors who only teach a class or two probably fall into this category, too.  If the number of hours of work available — and the salary paid — match what a worker is looking for, these can really be win-win setups.
• Jobs that really should be full-time, but the organization only has the money to pay for a part-time position.  This is particularly common in the nonprofit sector, where workers often wind up working more hours than they’re paid for, since there’s always more work that need to be done, and they believe in the mission.  This category also includes jobs that are actually full-time hours, but are officially classified as part-time so the employer can get away without providing health insurance or job security.
• Jobs that don’t require continuity of staffing from day to day.  My guess is that the majority of part-time jobs in the US are in this category, mostly in the retail, food, and service sectors.  These jobs are often highly flexible — for the employer.  Many employers alter workers’ shifts from week to week, depending on projected traffic.  In a few cases these are highly skilled, well-paid jobs — think speciality nurses — but most are low-skill, low-paid jobs.  In either case, they rarely offer a career path.
• The oft-discussed rarely-found career-track professional part-time jobs.  The jobs that Suzanne’s friends desperately want, but can’t find.  I actually know a fair number of people in such jobs, but the trick is that they’re almost never advertised.  The only way to get them is to work full-time, prove yourself to your employer, and then negotiate a part-time deal.  And such deals often include an implicit or explicity promise to check email or come in on your "off" day in the event of a crisis.

The truth is that not all jobs can be done equally well by two part-time workers as by one full-time worker.  Women want OBs who will stay with them until the baby comes, not ones that will walk out in the middle of labor because it’s the end of their shift.   Even when a job can be divided, there’s often a significant cost in time spent passing information from one person to another.  When there’s a labor shortage, sure, employers will accept these costs, but when there are equally qualified people lined up who are willing to work full-time (or more), they’re less likely to be flexible.  And they’re more likely to be flexible with current workers, in whom they’ve already made a significant investment in training than they are with new hires.

My other concern with part-time work as a solution to work-family tensions is that it only addresses the work side of the issue, not the inequitable division of household responsibilities.  And, as Rhona Mahoney points out, women in part-time jobs often wind up with the worst of both worlds: jobs that are unsatisfying, the vast majority of the household responsibilities, little free time, and little power to negotiate a better deal.  Even if a woman has a highly satisfying part-time job, because she brings in the secondary income, she often has to give up her job if her husband’s job demands relocation, or if the work interferes with childcare.

Today’s book review is my entry in the Daddy Types Baby Book Review Contest, otherwise known as the good, the bad, and dear lord don’t make me read this again.

The Good

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems.  I love this book, in which a pigeon employs a series of negotiating tactics to try get to drive a bus.  My son and I usually read it together, with his job being to say "NO!" each time.  At age 4, you get to hear "no" a lot, so he loves being the one to say no.  The line drawing pictures are funny, and convey the pigeon’s increasing desperation as the book progresses.  The book has also provided a means to turn real-world whine-fests into a game, as we point out strategies from the pigeon that D. has skipped (e.g. "You forgot to say that you bet my mommy would let you.")  The bus driver comes back before the pigeon gets to drive the bus — but then it sees an unoccupied truck.

The Bad

My Big Train Book, by Roger Priddy.  This falls into the category of "train porn."  No attempt at plot.  No clever drawings.  No rhythmic language.  Just close-ups of trains.  Red trains.  Yellow trains.  German trains.  Japanese trains.  Commuter trains.  Freight trains.  High-speed trains. 

Dear Lord, Don’t Make Me Read This Again

The Berenstain Bears’ Bedtime Battle, by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  We got this one as a gift, and I hate it.  So of course, D loves it.  I keep trying to bury it at the back of his bookshelf, and he keeps digging it out.

So what do I hate about this book?

• The generic characters, identified only by their roles in the family.  Of course Brother plays with dinosaurs and Sister is scared of spooky stories.
• The way the parents give in to the kids’ whining and foot-dragging.  I’d be happier if Papa only said "Ok, because you asked nicely" instead "If I must" before carrying the little bears up the stairs.
• The way the father is portrayed as incompetant, unable to give a simple bath without putting too much bubble bath in the tub.
• The insipid drawings, which don’t tell any story beyond the text.

I wanted to highlight something that Chip wrote in his comment on yesterday’s post: "I think part of parenting is making hard choices, realizing you can’t have it all."   This remark would have been commonplace if he had said "part of mothering," but it’s still surprisingly rare for anyone to say it about being a father as well.

Even people who should really know better fall into the trap of assuming that men can and do have it all.  In the introduction to The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild writes about envying the "smooth choicelessness" of men with stay-at-home wives, who were able to work undistracted by child care responsibilities or guilt.  In Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, Sylvia Ann Hewlett says that she heard from professional men who spoke of their distress at having essentially missed their kids’ childhood for work, but then blithely dismisses their pain with "well, at least they procreated and can get to know their grandchildren."

Even I fell into this trap.  I used to sit on the metro, and mutter to myself that I bet there wasn’t a single working father with a stay-at-home wife caring for their children who was beating himself up for working a whole 40 hours a week.  And then I realized that if that was true, it was their loss. 

If fathers think they can "have it all", it’s only because they’ve accepted a limited definition of what that "all" could be, that doesn’t include even the possibility of the intense relationship that women are taught to expect as their birthright as mothers.  If that’s the price, I’ll pass on "smooth choicelessness." 

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded by hostile Indians, and had no way to escape.  The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says "Well, we’ve had a lot of adventures together, but it looks like we’ve come to the end of our road.  I’ve been proud to have you as my friend.  And Tonto looks at him and says: "What do you mean "we," White Man?"

Last week, Suzanne at Mother-in-Chief wrote a passionate explanation of how her skills and talents — and those of many women like her — are being wasted because corporate America can’t figure out a way to use them in a meaningful way on a part-time basis.  She wrote:

"We did not quit our careers. Essentially, they quit us. Companies could not merge parent and paycheck.  Instead of heading back into those high-paying, highly respected jobs, we lower our expectations….  Moms do not fit into the corporate culture. As a result companies are missing out on the talents of driven and dedicated women."

I recognize the phenomenon that Suzanne is describing, but I don’t see myself in her "we."  And I know a lot of employed mothers who get nervous when they hear this kind of sweeping rhetoric, because they worry that if their bosses believe that "all women will leave when they have kids," things will get even harder for them.  And some stay-at-home mothers do leave their jobs without regrets or ambivalence.

Working mothers and their advocate are equally likely to use overly sweeping "we" statement.  Dawn at This Women’s Work has written persuasively about how mainstream feminist discussions of work and family issues still tend to marginalize stay-at-home moms.  My favorite example of this is from the Work & Family Program at the New American Foundation.  I think they do great work, but I grind my teeth every time I read one of their documents that includes a statement to the effect that families with stay-at-home partners have gone the way of Ozzie and Harriet.  (I can’t link to an example because their website seems to be down tonight.) 

I’m not saying this to pick on either Suzanne or New America.  It’s an incredible challenge to talk about mothers’ issues without either minimizing the diversity of experiences (and thereby making some group of mothers invisible) or treating everything as a matter of individual choice, with no recognition of the systemic factors that shape our choices.  This is tricky stuff.

T just loaded the boys into the car and is headed out to Michigan to visit his parents and grandmother.  They’ll be back Wednesday.  I’m taking Monday off from work, which means that I have two and a half whole days to do whatever I darn please.  I’m practically giddy at the thought.

No, I don’t have huge exciting plans.  I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do, other than sleep in tomorrow morning and read as much of the Sunday paper as I please.  I want to do some yoga and maybe go for a run.  I feel like I should take advantage and go to a movie in a theater, but I have no idea what’s playing, and I have A Very Long Engagement out from Netflix, so I might just watch that.  If the weather cooperates, I may rent a sunfish and pratice sailing on the Potomac, but right now it’s hot and sticky.  I have a huge stack of books out from the library, and I’d like to make some progress on them.  And I also have a long list of errands to run (get my ATM card turned back on, get my purse fixed) and to-dos (clean the fridge, edit down the zillion digital photos I’ve taken in the past few months).   I might even go clothes shopping.

Yes, I’ll miss them.  (I loved Yankee Transplant’s list of the times that she misses her daughters.)  But having them 5 states away gives me the freedom to do all the things that I almost never choose to do when it means giving up time with the boys.  Does that make sense?

This week, Susan Anne Catherine Torres was born.  Her birth has gotten a lot of attention because her mother died several months ago, of bleeding due to a previously undiagnosed brain tumor.  Her body has been kept on life support since, in order to give the fetus a chance to develop.  However, the cancer was spreading, so they were out of time.  The baby was born at a gestational age of 27 weeks, tiny, but with a good chance of survival.

Several feminist bloggers have been highly critical of this choice, while others have focused their ire on the tone of the media coverage.  I agree that the press has been a bit overwraught, but it’s probably asking to much to expect them to resist the combination of tear-jerker and science fiction.  And the Torres family sought publicity, in order to raise the funds needed for the medical bills. 

I basically see this choice as comparable to organ donation, or embryionic stem cell research.  Susan Torres was gone in May; I see only an affirmation of hope and life in the family’s choice to use her body in this way.  It’s just that we’re not used to having dead bodies be warm and with beating hearts. 

To the extent that I have any reservations about this story, it’s my usual issue that there’s something strange about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep one baby alive, when thousands of children are dying, in Niger and elsewhere, for lack of food, clean water, basic vitamins, and vaccines that cost pennies.  But that utilitarian framework is unrelenting and impossible to live up to.  Pretty much everything anyone in the US spends money on — from bottled water to luxury SUVs, from this Typepad account to my son’s asthma medication — is immoral if you weigh it in such a calculus. 

For what it’s worth, I basically agree with "Mrs. Coulter" that, under comparable circumstances, I’d probably want the same.  In fact, my living will includes the following statement:

"In spite of the above, I am willing to receive treatment under the following conditions:

• If I am pregnant and life-prolonging procedures will result in a reasonable probability of the child being delivered viably and having an acceptable quality of life.
• If keeping my body functioning is necessary to allow my organs to be transplanted. I do not wish to receive treatment for more than one week on this basis."

That’s not to say that I think this is the only reasonable choice.  Especially given how early in Torres’ pregnancy she collapsed, I could well imagine her husband making the decision that, under the circumstances, his living child (they have a 2-year-old as well) needed his full attention and emotional energy.

My thoughts and prayers are with the Torres family tonight.

I’m really enjoying the thoughtful comments on yesterday’s post about housework — thanks to everyone who’s written.

In general, I agree with Wayne’s point that neither working for pay nor caring for children exempts you from doing "the scut work that comes with being an adult."  But I don’t think that each task needs to be divided precisely 50/50 in order for the overall division of labor to be fair.  As Cecily wrote:

"In my house, my husband can’t vacuum successfully to save his life. So I vaccum. But, thankfully, he’s wonderful at cat litter. I can’t imagine that changing if we ever actually get to have a child, even though my husband plans to be a SAHD. It’s not like having a baby is going to make him good at vacuuming."

It reminded me of the big bruhaha at Salon in June over Ayelet Waldman’s essay about how her husband does all the home repairs.  Yes, not everyone has the privilege of having a partner who can take over the tasks that you’re bad at, or just don’t want to do.  Yes, there’s a risk that your partner could divorce you or die, and you’d have to figure things out from scratch.  Or a flu pandemic could strike, bringing civilization to a temporary halt, and you’d wish you knew how to build a solar still from parts lying around your house.  But, notwithstanding Robert Heinlein, most of the time specialization does make life easier.  (Waldman goes further and suggests that she likes being dependent in some ways, because it’s a sign of her commentment to the relationship.  I do find that a little oogie.)

That said, if people duck out of all the unpleasant and time-consuming tasks, the ones that need to be done day in and day out, because they’re "not good at it," my recommendation is that they obviously need more practice.  No one is born good at scrubbing toilets.  No one has an innate sense of vacuuming. 

I think this is particularly important when it comes to the nitty-gritty tasks of childcare.  As I believe I’ve written here before, I think one of the biggest obstacles to active fathering is that it’s so rare in our society for men to get long periods when they’re solely responsible for their babies.  That makes it hard for them to gain expertise and confidence in their parenting, so that they don’t just hand the babies back to mom when things get rough.

Last week, Cynical Mom wrote about a conversation she once had with the wife of a SAHD.  In response to a comment about how cool their arrangement was, the wife responded:

"Yeah well it’s great, except when I get home the house is still a mess. What is he doing all day that he can’t clean up a little?"

She’s right that the "what is he doing all day" line is pretty disrespectful of at-home parents and the work that’s involved in keeping everyone alive and sane.  At the same time, I commented that housekeeping standards are probably the single biggest subject of controversy on the email list that I’m on for working wives of SAHDs.

There’s a fair amount of resentment about (some) SAHDs who don’t clean and feel like their day is over when the mom comes home, so that she comes home from a day at work and is immediately juggling needy kids and trying to get dinner made, the house cleaned, etc. We realize that they need a break after a day of at-home (or on the run) parenting, but when’s our break?

Via RebelDad, I read these interviews with Full Time Father Mike Paranzino, who’s quoted as saying: "I signed on to do the kids — not to do the house."   Ok, that’s one thing if you’ve got the money to afford a housecleaner (and many upper-income families do hire housecleaners whether or not they have a stay-at-home parent — of either gender).  And I have no problem with lowering your standards as long as the Department of Health doesn’t need to get involved.  But, in most families, someone’s got to do the chores that keep the family running. 

On his blog, Paranzino writes: "Bottom line: our focus should be on our children, not the dust under our beds."  I agree with that totally.  But food to eat, clean dishes to eat it on, and clean clothes don’t come out of thin air.  The difference between being a parent and being a nanny is that you don’t get to say "that’s not in my job description."

I don’t think the reason housework is such a sore topic among reverse traditional families is that all SAHDs are slugs or slobs — that’s far from the truth.  I think it’s a subject of controversy because two basic cultural assumptions — that housework is the responsibility of the SAH parent, and that housework is the women’s responsibility — conflict.  So there’s no default position about who does what, and everything is up for negotiation.

And no, I’m not writing this because I’m trying to get my husband to do more.  Our house is actually cleaner than it’s been for months.  After the maggot incident, I think both of us realized that we needed to make more of an effort than we had been.  And, having put a lot of energy into cleaning, we’re both more motivated to maintain it rather than have that work be wasted.

Oh, and guess what?  D loves to vacuum with the little dustbuster.  I knew there was a reason we had kids.

Today’s book is Because I Said So, an anthology of essays about diverse experiences of motherhood edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses.  Peri and Moses used to edit Salon’s Life section, back when it was called "Mothers Who Think" and some of the essays have appeared on Salon or elsewhere.

The essays are a mixed bag.  I think my favorite is Peri’s "Prayin’ Hard for Better Dayz" about how her son "went ghetto," in part as his way of coping with her cancer.  Ayelet Waldman’s essay about how she loves her husband (and sex with her husband) more than her kids is just as embarassing to read as it was in the New York Times on Valentine’s day.  I’m not sure if I’m relieved or horrified to learn that even Ariel Gore’s teenage daughter thinks that her mom is embarassing; if the original HipMama is un-hip to her kid, I might as well relax and not even bother trying.

But overall, I’m afraid I found the book to be less than the sum of its parts.  I think the upswelling of mommy blogs makes a book like this somewhat besides the point.  It’s no longer a relevation to hear the voices of smart, thoughtful, funny women talking about motherhood.  I read them every day.