Half Changed World

Via and I wasted all that birth control, I found this truly thoughtful discussion at Arwen/Elizabeth’s site about a key question behind the abortion debate, namely when does a fetus become a human being with rights of its own. I’m not sure anyone’s opinion was changed, but people were listening, not shouting past each other.  (And Cecily is one of the world’s classiest people.)

I was particularly intrigued by the comments that some people made about how their positions on this issue were affected by their experiences of pregnancy.  I found that having my children made both the reality of the potential life growing within and the horror of forcing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy more vivid to me.  It didn’t change my position on what I think the laws should be, however.

The NYTimes today has an article on how pro-life counseling centers are buying ultrasound machines to use to convince women not to have abortions.  I know such centers sometimes (often?) get women in under false pretenses and put a lot of pressure on them.  But, if you’re going to trust women to make these decisions, I don’t think it’s right to protect them from reminders of the potential for life.  (Although personally, I couldn’t see a thing on any of my sonograms; the simple heartbeat was much more impressive to me.)

Hugo Schwyzer has an interesting post this week on what it means to be male, pro-feminist, and pro-life.  He concludes that his most important work is in the area of changing men’s attitudes and of supporting male responsibility. 

The Nation had a powerful piece a couple of weeks ago on how Mississippi laws have made abortion "out of reach, buried under state laws that make the process unnecessarily difficult, discouraged by a sense of shame enforced by practically every public authority, and inaccessible for many who lack money to pay for it."  This is clearly the strategy being used in Virginia as well.   Unfortunately, this approach makes the sort of honest back and forth discussed above almost impossible.

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Rad Geek People’s Daily is promoting a bit of googlebombing to ensure that searches for Roe v. Wade get you to the text of the decision rather than to an advocacy site. 

Today’s book is Alice Munro’s new collection of stories, Runaway. 

As Jonathan Franzen commented in the NY Times Book Review, short stories are almost impossible to review.  Synopses of their plots just don’t do them justice.  So, his review (which appeared in the coveted front page spot) boils down to "Short stories are notoriously underrated. Alice Munro is a master of the art. This is a fabulous collection; trust me and go read it." 

So, what can I say about this book, other than "trust me and go read it"?

Unlike Helen Simpson’s Getting a Life (which Franzen also praises highly, and I discussed here), I didn’t see myself in any of Munro’s characters.  I didn’t find myself saying "ah, yes, that’s how it is; she captures exactly how that feels."  But her characters aren’t exotic creatures either, but ordinary Canadian women.

After reading Runaway, I found myself looking at people walking down the street or riding in the metro, and wondering about what choices they had made in their lives that brought them to this moment.  Munro’s stories are about people making small choices that have momentous consequences, or as Franzen puts it "moments of fateful, irrevocable, dramatic action."  Except that they don’t look like moments of dramatic action: one woman gets off a bus; another woman excuses herself from talking to a boring stranger on a train; a third sits in a car while her boyfriend’s brother buys a bottle of liquor from a bootlegger. 

I’m really wiped.  Work was nuts today, I didn’t get much of a break over the weekend, and D found the Playmobil catalog and has been pleading for the remote-controlled train all evening (fat chance, kiddo).

So just a few links tonight from two blogs that are new to me:

Harriet the Spy has a nice response to that NY Times article, talking about how blogs build community.  And how can I resist a blog named after one of my alltime favorite books?

Jo(e) lists some of what she enjoys about blogging, and reading blogs.  Sounds right to me.

Good night.

In a few hours, my husband should be back home.  He’s been on an out-of-town trip since Thursday morning, the longest he’s been away from the boys since they were born, and we’ve all missed him.  (I also have to admit that the house was a mess until I realized this afternoon how much of a stereotype it would for the primary caregiver to go away for a few days and come back to a disaster zone.)

My mother came down for a couple of days so that I wouldn’t have to take Thursday and Friday off from work, which was very sweet of her.  However, she doesn’t drive, so when he started complaining that his stomach hurt at preschool, I had to cut out in order to pick him up and bring him home.  It was a reminder of how much having an at-home spouse insulates me from that kind of hassle most of the time.  While I share many experiences with working moms in two-income families, there are also some important differences, and that’s one of the big ones. 

Jen at BuddhaMama had a nice post last week about some of the commonalities she found among women who are the wage earners in reverse traditional families.  Her summary sounds about right to me, although my family differs in a few respects (we earned about the same amount pre-children; he doesn’t go as thoroughly off child-duty evenings and weekends as many SAHDs; I write the checks for our household bills).  The only singificant addition I’d make to her list is the sense of responsibility/stress from being the only wage-earner.

In thinking about the ways in which my experiences are similar to, and different from, other groups of working parents, I realized that part of why I loved the recent article about GenX fathers from the Boston Globe is that I saw a lot of myself in these committed dads.  These fathers take their parenting responsibilities seriously and limit the ways in which they allow work to encroach on family — but they also take it for granted that they are going to work.  There’s none of the angst or defensiveness that are recurrent themes in most media coverage of working mothers. 

The NY Times article on parenting blogs "Mommy (and me)" doesn’t hit the newsstands until tomorrow, but is already getting a lot of play in the blogosphere.  It’s an odd article.  Hochman is gnerally complimentary towards the specific blogs he discusses (including DotMoms), says that our uncertainty and stress "makes for good reading," and even suggests that blogging may make us better parents   At the same time, he seems to display an undercurrent of "look at these pathetic people craving attention and validation who think every detail of their lives is of interest to anyone else."

I particularly recommend CultureCat’s comments, which put the article into the context of the ongoing discussion of how bloggers who merge the personal and the political (who are more typically female) are marginalized.  She was interviewed for the Times article, but isn’t cited.

On a related note, I’ve been less and less happy with the distinctions I was drawing on my blogroll between different types of blogs.  I love some of the classifications that others use (this blog is classified by Bitch,PhD as part of "my liberal bias," by 11d under "nobody puts baby in the corner," and by GeekyMom under "blogs by women who happen to have kids"), but haven’t been able to come up with anything clever but simple myself.  For now, I’ve revised it to two categories: "Blogs mostly about the author’s life" and "Blogs mostly about the outside world."  And I’m still not sure where to assign some of my favorites.  If you feel misclassified, give me a holler. 

I’m amazed at the attention this little experiment has gotten; I’ve gotten more links to it than any other post, including many that I thought were much more interesting.  I guess it’s because there are lots of people pontificating on the internet, and many fewer trying to match what they eat to what they say.  The discussion here was particularly interesting.

So, when I left off, we had spent $163.24 on groceries, $191.49 including purchased meals, $182.62 including cat food and laundry soap.  We spent about $87 on groceries in the past week: $29 at Shoppers Food Warehouse for frozen grape juice concentrate, graham crackers, soda (for the birthday party that wound up being cancelled due to sick kids), milk, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese (for pizza); $37 at Costco for peanut butter, eggs, bread, spaghetti sauce, cheddar cheese, and dino buddies; and $21 at Giant for milk and taco fixings.  Current grocery total: $249.12, or $277.37 with purchased meals.  Including things like cat food, pedialyte, tylenol and cleaning supplies, we’re at $340.09.

I’m fascinated by how defensive I could feel myself getting as I read some of the comments that suggested ways in which we could cut our grocery budget further, even though the goal of this experiment was never to spend the absolute minimum possible.

I’m quite surprised by Amy’s statement that she’s able to buy organic food for $250/month or less — the stores that sell organic food around here are VERY expensive.  Even when I’m not trying to stick to the Thrifty Food Plan, I find it painful to buy wild salmon at $14 a pound when I can get farmed salmon (even if full of PCBs) for $3.99 a pound.  Amy, if you’re still reading, I’d love examples of what things cost where you shop.

Someone else ("PGC-ist") suggested a bunch of different chains that he said were cheaper, but Shoppers Food Warehouse is the only one of them that has a store anywhere near me.  I enjoy cooking, so am willing to spend 20 minutes making muffins or waffles rather than buying them at the store, but I’m not willing to spend an extra hour driving around the Beltway in order to save a few dollars.  And if I didn’t have a car, they’d be totally out of consideration.

One of the goals of the experiment was to see how trying to stick to this budget affected the quality of our diet.  Bean soup is cheap, healthy and filling, but its appeal wears somewhat thin after several days in a row.  Fresh vegetables have been surprisingly expensive — the ground turkey for our tacos was only $2.67, but peppers, lettuce and plum tomatoes were another $5.  I always have a harder time eating the recommended servings of fruit and vegetables during the winter than during the summer, and this project has made that worse, because I think they’re overpriced.

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2/6/05: Final report on the experiment is posted here.

Two links I wanted to share:

1)  The LA Times last month ran a series on the increase in income volatility — or family risk — that is the best piece of reporting I’ve read in a long time.  They commissioned original analysis of the data, talked to the right people to comment on it, and brought it to life by focusing on the experiences of a few families.  This is really about as good as it gets.   Kevin Drum pointed it out when the second article came out, and there’s a long series of comments on his post, some of which are also interesting (and some of which are the usual name-calling blather).

2) Tomorrow (Friday), the Center for Law and Social Policy kicks off their audioconference series on "The Family Squeeze" with a dicussion of a UK law that guarantees workers the right to ask for a flexible schedule.  CLASP is one of my favorite research and advocacy organizations, so I’m excited that they’re taking on work-family issues.  Should be interesting.

This morning, as we were trying to get out the door, I asked D. whether he wanted to wear his purple jacket or his silver jacket.  (He’s sort of between sizes, so has two wearable winter coats.)  My red jacket, he said.  No, I said, silver or purple.  "Why isn’t the red jacket in the choices?"  he asked.

I absolutely love that question.  If this blog has a recurring theme, it’s about looking at what’s missing from the options that we’re presented with.  What are the factors that determine the range of choices from which we select?  And how can we expand that range? 

Earlier this month, Julia of Here Be Hippogriffs wrote a long post in which she talked about her and her husband’s division of household labor, and concluded:

"So that is our distribution of labor and it makes us shimmy. Does it follow some bold 1950s pattern? Yep, pretty much. Was it derived from that pattern? Hell no. We have just gravitated towards the tasks that best suit us."

I agree with Julia’s argument that what "matters is that everyone involved is in agreement over how the work gets divided."  But I’m not convinced that these decisions are ever made entirely free from societal influences.  I really liked Laura’s post today about how her life has been affected by the choices she’s made at different points and what the constraints were at each step of the journey.

Oh, the answer to D.’s question?  His red jacket is just fleece, not warm enough for the weather today.

I get Granta because it was free with my subscription to Salon.com, but I rarely have the time to read it.  But the theme of the latest issue is Mothers, so I put it in my bag to read on my commute.   I’ve now read it cover to cover, and it’s left me somewhat stunned.

The issue is exclusively about Mothers as seen by their sons, or daughters, or sons-in-law, rather than about the experience of being a mother. (There’s one essay by Alexandra Fuller about her experience of being pregnant and post-partum in Zambia, but even that one isn’t really about her as a mother.)  And the Mothers in the stories and memoirs seem right out of a book of archetypes — the idealized recipient of worshipful love, or the evil ogress manipulating her children, the housewife whom the children underestimated or the self-centered career woman.  The writing is powerful, but the images are painful.

A very different vision of motherhood is offered by a coffeetable book I bought while I was pregnant with D., Jewish Mothers, by Paula Wolfson, with photographs by Lloyd Wolf.  I bought it in part because it was at a reading organized by people I knew, but also because I wanted to study the pictures to see if I could find myself in them, if these were women I could imagine myself becoming, if there was an alternative to becoming the punchline to a bad joke.

Tomorrow is D’s fourth birthday.  Today is the fourth anniversary of the day I spent in a hospital room, watching it get light and then dark again.  After four years, I’m comfortable and generally confident in my role as his (and his brother’s) mommy, more or less adjusted to being a mother.  But I’m still not ready to be The Mother, and I don’t think I ever will be.

Via Laura at 11d, I found this article from The Public Interest by Neil Gilbert on what makes a policy "family-friendly."  This article makes the policy case for the proposal from David Brooks that I discussed Friday a lot more convincingly than Brooks does, and deserves some of the attention that Brooks has been getting.  (I think the Brooks article is an attempt to popularize Gilbert’s argument, but could be wrong.)

Gilbert makes the obvious, but often overlooked, point that women don’t all want the same thing.  Far too many commentators look at a trend — whether the general trend of the past 30 years towards increased maternal participation in the work force, or the recent modest reversal of that trend — and act as if it says something about all women.  (Gilbert claims that "many feminists like to portray women as a monolithic group…." but this is a gratuitous slap; anti-feminists do the same thing.)

Gilbert argues that it’s useful to think of a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the US, from "traditional" women who "derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts" to "postmodern" women for whom "personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life."  In the middle, he places "neo-traditional" women and "modern" women who fall between the two.  (Interestingly, Gilbert uses number of children, rather than labor force participation, to divide women into these categories.  I’m not convinced that’s the right measure; when I have a chance, I’d like to look up how strong the correlation between the two is.  Also, like Brooks, he totally ignores the role of men.)

This diversity has important policy implications, as I noted in my second post ever on this blog:

"Let me start by saying that I think we’ve made the right choice, for us, for now, but I don’t think there’s a single right choice for everyone, for all times. (This isn’t just a wishy-washy plea for tolerance, but a general statement of principle, which has implications when we start talking about policies to support families — but I’ll get into that another day.)"

I guess today’s that day.  Back to Gilbert.  He goes on to argue that most "family-friendly" policies  — specifically referring to day care subsidies and family leave policies —

"address the needs of women in the neo-traditional and modern categories—those trying to balance work and family obligations. The costs of publicly subsidized day care are born by all taxpayers, but the programs offer no benefits to childless women who prefer the postmodern life style and are of little use to traditional stay-at-home mothers."

Fair enough.  Gilbert then proposes several alternative "family-friendly" policies that are aimed instead at the needs of women in the traditional category such as tax credits, social security credits, tuition breaks, and hiring preferences, all targeted to stay-at-home parents.  In other words, pretty much the feminist agenda of Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights. (A similar proposal has also been getting some attention on a thread over at MyDD.)

Where Gilbert makes a lot more sense to me than Brooks is that he doesn’t pretend that these credits are going to move women dramatically from the postmodern or modern groups into the traditional groups.  At most, he suggests that they might move some women from the neo-traditional category into the traditional category — and he argues that this would mostly overcome the existing bias of public policy towards women who are combining work and parenting.  He also acknowledges that women entering the workforce after 5-10 years of childrearing would be at a disadvantage, at least in some fields ("those careers that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth"), which Brooks blithely ignores.

This post is getting long, so I’ll come back another day to discuss some of my concerns with Gilbert’s specific proposals. (I’m much more inclined towards something along the lines of the Simplified Family Credit proposed by EPI.)  But I think the underlying point — that people have different preferences, and public policy shouldn’t only work for the majority preference — is an important one.