Half Changed World

I confess, I watched the "liberal lesbian v. conservative Christian" Wife Swap this week.  It was about as painful as I expected it to be.  Shannon at Waiting for Nat sums up everything that was wrong with it in her terrific post "you can’t pray a lie" and also notes that Kris Gillespie is running for Texas State Senate.  Yikes. (The idea that being on reality tv is good publicity for running for office is a pretty scary notion in itself.)

That said, I do think the two families actually learned something from eachother, which wasn’t the case on the other couple of episodes of the show I’d seen before.  The Gillespies did seem to be more encouraging of their daughter’s interest in art, and  Nicki Boone did say she was going to spend more one-on-one time with Lizzie (her version of the "Princess day").

***

I’m bummed that Kris and Jon didn’t win The Amazing Race.  But I’d rather have their relationship and no money, than Freddy and Kendra’s and the million dollars. 

Supposedly Jonathan and Victoria are going to be on Dr. Phil’s primetime special on Tuesday.  I’ve picked it on the TiVo, but am not sure I’ll watch it.  I’m confident that Dr. Phil will give Jonathon the dressing down he so richly deserves.  But I’m not sure I want to spend another minute more of my life paying attention to that creep.

CBS has opened its casting call for Amazing Race 8, which is going to feature teams of four, who have to be "family" (broadly defined).   T. and I have been joking for months about what it would be like to do this with our kids, but they’re limiting it to 12 and older.

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 a chain of blogs, I found this flash photo-essay of "a day in the life of moms working at Mothering." (For those of you with slow connections, it’s a series of pictures of babies and children in the office, some being held on mommy’s lap while she types or talks, some playing on the floor, etc.)

Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress comments "There is no reason whatsoever to think that every office couldn’t look something like that."

The pictures are awfully cute, but I wouldn’t want to have to do my job while caring for small children at the same time.  My experience with working from home, while caring for children at the same time, is that I always felt like I was doing an inadequate job at both parenting and my paid job, with neither getting my full attention.  And I was totally frazzled, with never the opportunity to drink a cup of tea in peace — if it was naptime, I had to jump to get down to work.  Add to that a less than entirely childproofed office, and it sounds like a total nightmare.

I definitely could imagine this working with a tiny infant, especially one who slept a lot, or who was content hanging out in a sling.  It’s a lot harder for me to imagine bringing my toddler, whose favorite activities these days include: pulling things off shelves, taking things out of trash cans, putting things in trash cans, putting things in his mouth, and pulling on cords to see what happens.  Or rather, it’s far too easy for me to imagine what would result.  I could probably bring my preschooler to work in an emergency, but I’d have to let him use my computer all day (or bring in the portable DVD player) if I wanted to keep him out of trouble.

The discussion of this in the comments at Alas, A Blog also raise the question of whether this would be fair to other workers, as well as pointing out that not everyone works in an office.  They’re worth reading.

Does anyone reading this get Mothering?  The movie seems to go with the current issue, which features a cover story about bringing babies to the office, but it’s not available online.  I’d be interested in hearing whether the story is all about the positives (not forcing people to choose between work and time with their kids) or if it discusses the negatives as well.

David at Scrivenings is calling for more cute kid stories, so I thought I’d oblige.

1)  Sunday morning at the Zoo, the first warm weekend in about a month.  N was happy in the stroller until I took him out to go into the Big Ape House, but now he doesn’t want to get back in.  He’s walking down the main path, falling about every 10 steps, but picking himself up each time without a peep of protest and continuing.  D is happy to take his place in the stroller, and is shouting "Go N. go!"   About as good as parenting gets.

2)  D hates the nebulizer, but is starting to understand that it makes him feel better.  In the car, he has a coughing fit.  He announces his plan: "We go home, and I take my jet medicine [his name for the nebulizer, as the face mask looks like a pilot’s], and I cry, and then doggie helps me calm down."

Today’s book is a light-hearted guide to parenting infants and toddlers, How Not To Be A Perfect Mother, by Libby Purves.  It’s a slim paperback, and I’ve been reading it on the metro to and from work, and getting lots of looks because it keeps making me laugh out loud.

Purves understands the key truths of child-rearing, which are:

• No advice works for everyone; kids are all different.
• Whatever you do, someone will think (and probably tell you) you’re doing it wrong.  So you might as well do it the way you want to.
• Don’t take yourself too seriously.

The specific advice in the book isn’t really the point (although it’s generally sensible).  What’s wonderful is Purves’ calm perspective — her confidence that neither the stains on your child’s clothing nor your fervent desire that he’d just go somewhere else for a few minutes so you can finish the chapter make you any less of a good mother.  Perhaps my favorite suggestion is the game of crawling on mommy (or "mummy" as Purves writes) as an activity:

"It has survived, with the first child, well beyond the first birthday, since he can now pretend I am a wrecked locomotive, and go round tapping my wheels with a foam-rubber hammer.  The baby pretends I am a horse.  I, meanwhile, can pretend that I am on a beach in Corfu.  All three of us are happy."

The book isn’t perfect — fathers are viewed as very welcome assistants, but not much more, and the comments about car seats are sorely out of date (the book was first published in 1986) — but it’s a lot of fun.

I wish I could say the same about two other books I’ve picked up that were clearly sold to the publishers as short self-depricating humor about imperfect moms, but both of them were total wastes.  The problem with If all else fails, lower your expections, by Susan Murphy, is that it wasn’t funny.  The targets were obvious, the strokes broad.  But it was better than Confessions of a Slacker Mom by Muffy Mead-Ferro, which was plain out annoying.  Mead-Ferro pretends to be "confessing," but she seems smugly convinced that she is actually a perfect mom, far superior to those who buy lots of toys or gadgets, or try to childproof their houses.  She’s the Andy Rooney of parenting, meeting all modern inventions with a scornful statement to the effect that "my mother didn’t have that on the Wyoming prarie and I turned out ok."  She even mentions a childhood friend whose arm was blown off in a dynamite accident but who "went on to live a scandalously great life."  Oh, and she’s not funny either.  Stick with Purves.

Twelve years ago, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was signed into law.  It was the first bill signed by President Clinton, as it had been repeatedly passed by Congress, but vetoed by Presidents Reagan and Bush.  It’s not perfect — the leave is unpaid, which means that it’s of limited use to the most vulnerable families, and it only covers about 60 percent of the workforce, because small companies are excluded — but it’s a lot better than nothing.

Today, there are widespread rumors that the Family and Medical Leave Act is under attack.  While nothing official has been released, the rumors are that the Department of Labor is considering making regulatory changes that would severely undercut the protections of FMLA.  There are two changes that are commonly mentioned:

• Limit the protection to illnesses that require more than 10 days of leave (up from the 3 in current regs).  This would mean that if you had to miss 4 days of work because of surgery or a child’s asthma flare-up, you could be fired.  Those of us at the upper end of the income scale would probably still be ok, because we could "shop around" until we found a doctor who was willing to say we needed the full two weeks off, but those without such resources — or who can’t afford to be without a paycheck for that long — would be screwed.  This seems like a bad idea for employers too, as it would create a perverse incentive for people not to go back to work as soon as they were able.
• Require that employees take FMLA-protected leave no less than half a day at a time.  This one would hurt anyone with an condition that requires ongoing care which doesn’t take that much time.  For example, prenatal care.  During my pregnancies, I always tried to schedule my appointments for the beginning or end of the day, so as to minimize the amount of leave that I had to use.  (This was both a courtesy to my boss, and personally necessary, because your accumulated leave is the only paid maternity leave you get as a federal employee.)  If this rule were in place, an employer could have required me to take 4 hours of leave for each appointment.  Someone with an even slightly less than routine pregnancy could easily burn through 2 or more weeks of her FMLA before the baby was even born.

If these changes worry you, please act now.  If the Department of Labor gets a clear message that people care about family and medical leave, and will oppose the proposed changes, they may well back off before they start the formal rulemaking process.

• Write Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.  Her address is:

Elaine Chao
U.S. Department of Labor
200 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20210

• Write your Senators and Representative.  Even though the proposed changes are regulatory, not legislative, your elected officials can put pressure on the Department of Labor if they hear that this is a big deal to their constituents.  While you’re at it, you might ask them to cosponsor the Healthy Families Act, which would guarantee workers 7 days of paid sick leave.
• If you are a business owner who supports FMLA, your voice is especially needed.  The Administration is going to claim that these changes are business-friendly.  If you think that these changes are bad policy, if you think they’ll encourage employees to take more leave than they need, if you’ve managed fine under the current system, please speak up.   Write Chao, write your elected officials, but also write the Chamber of Commerce and similar organizations and tell them your story.
• Spread the word.  If you have a blog, write about this. Tell your friends, your coworkers.  Bring sample letters to your playgroup, your moms night out, your weekly basketball game.  This issue is especially important for parents, but it affects everyone — even if you don’t have kids, you can get sick yourself, or have to care for a sick parent or other family member.  You shouldn’t lose your job as a result.

For more information on this issue, see the AFL-CIO working women’s department or the National Partnership for Women and Children.

Update:  The National Partnership now has an Action Alert available that you can use to send emails to Congress and the Department of Labor with a push of a button. 

Today marks the end of our one month experiment in restricting our food spending to what we’d be allowed under the USDA Thrifty Food Plan.

As it turns out, we finished well under our $434.40 budget.  Our total spending on food groceries totalled just $340.84, with just under $40 in purchased meals (including one full dinner, one fancy coffee, and a couple of lunches at the very cheap cafeteria down the street from my office).  Even if I accounted at a fair price for the spices and such that we didn’t have to pay for because they’re in my basic pantry, we’d make it in under budget.

Following the suggestions of some of the commenters, I drove out to the Grand Mart supermarket on Little River Turnpike last weekend, which serves a largely Asian clientele.  I was mindboggled by the array of vegetables they offered — four different kinds of eggplant (American, Italian, Thai and Japanese) — and the prices.  If someone can explain to me why Giant or Shoppers can’t have half as good produce for twice the price, I’d be very grateful.  Unfortunately, after I had loaded up my cart and got on line, the manager announced that their computers were down, they couldn’t run the cash registers without them, and the store was closing.  And I didn’t have the time or energy to return later in the week.

We ate pretty close to our typical diet, although a bit heavier on the eggs and homemade pizza than an average month.  Although I didn’t track it, I’m sure we didn’t come anywhere near meeting the food pyramid recommendations for fruit and vegetables.  I’m not sure we do that much better in mid-winter even when we’re not on a budget, as I find the seasonal offerings awfully uninspiring.  (Although worries about the budget did stop me from buying some of my usual mid-winter healthy treats, like frozen cherries.)

The time-money tradeoff was a big factor in the budget, both in the shopping (do I make a separate trip to another store that has a better price on specific items?) and in the preparation (is the two dollars saved buying regular spinach v. the prewashed stuff worth the time involved in preparing it?).  And I truly can’t imagine doing this if I didn’t have access to a car, or had to bring my kids along on every single shopping trip.  (Shopping with kids can be much more expensive, both because you don’t want to spend the extra time studying price labels when they’re getting restless and because they constantly ask for things that aren’t on the shopping list.)

Although I wasn’t tracking our expenditures on non-food items, this experiment made me much more aware of all of our spending.  Friday we took D. to the doctor because his cough was getting worse, and came home with a nebulizer and two kinds of medicine.  Even with our quite good insurance, the copays totalled $60.  For us, that’s not a terribly big deal.  But if every dollar that comes in is already spent, an unexpected expense like that has to come out of somewhere.  And food is almost always the most flexible part of poor families’ budgets.  That, rather than the cost of food, is why so many American families are "food insecure"

Fred at Stone Court points out a post by Richard Posner about Larry Summers’ comments about women in the sciences.

The sentence of Posner’s that Fred objects to is "Women who want to have children, as most do, must expect to devote more time to child care that men do."

Fred correctly points out that except for pregnancy itself and breastfeeding, there is nothing a woman can do that a man can’t.  Posner has taken an unwarranted leap from the division of labor in the world as it is to talking about the way things "must" be.

Reverse-traditional families — those where the wife is the primary bread earner and the husband is the primary caretaker — exemplify Fred’s point.  My husband can change a diaper, read a story, and care for a sick child as well as I can, and there are some things that he can clearly do better than me (making up songs on the fly is one of his special talents).

And yet… 

I spend the vast majority of my non-work hours with my children (squeezing in blogging and domestic chores in the few hours between when they go to bed and when I crash myself).  I work pretty much a standard 9-5:30 schedule, and at this point in my life, am generally not interested in jobs that would require 60 or 80 hour weeks on a regular basis.  And this is true of all but two or three of the other women I know (online and in person) in reverse traditional families.

Joan Williams argued in a Washington Post op-ed a while back that this is part of a general trend.  When mothers stay home, their husbands typically work longer hours and are less involved with childrearing.  (The causality in this statement is unclear — you could argue with equal plausiblity that women with spouses who work crazy hours are more likely to feel that their children need an at-home parent, that sole earners need to work more hours in order to maintain a standard of living, or that traditional families believe that child care is a woman’s responsiblity.)

However, Williams claims that:

"employed mothers typically are less willing to consign all child care to the stay-at-home spouse. So children in families with stay-at-home fathers may well receive more parental attention than children in households with stay-at-home mothers."

So, while it’s certainly true that mothers can delegate enough childrearing responsibilities to spouses, other family members, or paid help in order to free up 80 hours a week for work, it’s also clearly true that there are very few mothers who are willing to do so.  We could debate from here until the next century whether the reasons that women and men make different choices in this regard — on average — is biological or cultural and still not come to a resolution, but I honestly don’t think it matters. 

I do think parents who work these kinds of hours — both men and women — are missing out on something. What they achieve instead may or may not be worth it; I’ll always support the right of both women and men to make that choice for themselves.  (FYI, for a fictional look at this issue, the protagonist of Life, which I discussed here, is a research scientist with a SAHD spouse; she works very long hours, and her family life suffers, but she makes a major discovery.)

An important empirical question for this discussion is whether the choice between professional achievement and having a life is inherent in the nature of some kinds of work, or is primarily a result of the way we as a society have structured these jobs.  There’s been some great discussion of these issues over at GeekyMom and Mother in Chief; I’m not sure I have much to add.  There are almost certainly cases of both — I don’t think you could be White House Chief of Staff and not expect to spend 100 hours a week working, but I don’t see why on a case where there’s already 30 different people working on it, you can’t sometimes have two lawyers working 40 hours each instead of one working 80.

… the Bush Administration is also proposing to completely gut a bunch of social programs, and no one’s paying attention. 

Here’s the official press release and here’s the NY Times story on it. 

The Bush proposal would take 18 different programs — including the Community Development Block Grant (run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development) and the Community Services Block Grant (run by Health and Human Services) — and consolidate them into a single program based at the Department of Commerce.  Why Commerce?  Because HUD and HHS actually think helping poor people is part of our mission, while Commerce works for the business community.

Oh, and the total funding would drop from $5.6 billion to $3.7 billion.  But if you move the shells back and forth fast enough, maybe people won’t notice that you’ve palmed the ball.

I actually agree that some degree of consolidation would be a good thing — HHS has a few small pure economic development grant programs that clearly belong somewhere else, if they’re worth funding at all.  But this is a slash-and-burn operation, not a careful pruning.

Unchallenged Republicans in Northern Virginia:

Via the Women’s Information Network and the Virginia Grassroots Coalition:

As far as we know, two Republican members of the House of Delegates, Gary Reese in the 67th District and Tom Rust in the 86th District are currently running unopposed.   Both these districts are on the Fairfax/Loudon County border. If you live in one of those districts and would consider running for Delegate, or if you think you can recruit someone, contact Jim Edwards-Hewitt and he’ll get you hooked up with the Fairfax Democrats.  As we all know, it’s important  to contest every race, even in areas that lean Republican, both to make each Republican spend money (and keep them from raising money for other Republicans), to put Democratic issues on the table, and to take advantage of any unexpected opportunities.

EMILY’s List Candidate Training

On March 18th and 19th, EMILY’s List will be offering a terrific training opportunity for pro-choice Democratic women in Virginia.  We would like to extend an invitation for you to participate in the training.

As you may know, EMILY’s List is a political donor network and political resource for pro-choice Democratic women candidates. EMILY’s List has initiated a program designed to recruit and train women to run for and serve in elected office in the states.  Whether you are currently serving on the school board, or in the State Assembly, or if you are just beginning to think about running for elective office, we are certain this training will provide you with the skills and inspiration you need.

The program will begin on the evening of March 18th with a welcome dinner and short session.  Saturday, March 19th will be filled with training on fundraising, message development, direct mail and other important campaign issues.  

The program, including materials and meals is free, however space is limited.  Partial participation is not possible- you must commit to attending the full program in order to be allocated a seat at the training.

For details, contact Kate Coyne-McCoy

[My district’s wonderful Delegate, Marian Van Landingham, isn’t running for reelection due to personal health issues.  For about 24 hours, I considered trying to run myself, but since there are already about six Democrats running for the seat, I decided it wasn’t worth quitting my job to run.]