Half Changed World

1. I have a husband to whom I can say, when I hear crying at 6:30 "it’s your turn; I was up with them in the middle of the night."
2. We have a washing machine in the house, so we don’t have to schlepp the puke covered clothes, sheets, and high chair cover to a laundromat.
3. Because there are two adults in this family, I didn’t have to choose between not having any groceries for the weekend and dragging two sick kids to the supermarket right before a major snowstorm is predicted.  (T. tried going last night, and the lines were all the way down the aisles; he talked to someone who had been on line for an hour and a half.)
4. The birthday party scheduled for tomorrow is at home, so we can wait until the morning to make a final call on whether to proceed.  And if we decide to reschedule, we’re not out several hundred dollars.

It seems like the people writing a lot of the blogs I’m reading are renegotiating the terms of their work lives.

• Laura at 11d is going to be teaching again.
• At this woman’s work, either Dawn or her husband is going to quit working.
• Suzanne at Mimilou is quitting her job, and is going to freelance.
• Dr B. at Bitch, PhD is going to quit her job, but is looking for another one.
• Brian at RebelDad is starting a new job, with more hours outside the home.

Some of this is clearly a matter of selection bias — I read the blogs of people who wrestle with these issues, and are more likely to find no one solution satisfying all the time.  But I also wonder if it might not be part of a movement towards seeking balance across time, not just at a given moment.

I also wanted to point out (via RebelDad and DaddyTypes), this terrific Boston Globe article on dads deaing with work-family issues.

As previously discussed, we’re tracking our grocery spending this month to see how hard it is for us to stay within the limits of USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan, which allows up to $434.40 per month for a family of our size.

For the record, I don’t think this gives us a real feel for what it’s like to be poor, any more than making teenagers carry around an egg or a sack of flour for a month gives them real insight into what it’s like to be a parent.  I know that it makes a huge difference not to really have to worry that my kids are going to go hungry if I don’t leave enough money for the last week.  But it’s a useful consciousness raising exercise.

When I last updated, we had spent $112.38 on food.  This week we’ve mostly been doing quick grocery runs when we’re running out of food, and haven’t really done meal planning.  Friday I spent $8.90 on milk, bread, eggs and tea at Trader Joe’s.  Monday, I went to Giant, and spent $23.90 on rolls, bread, cheese, milk, eggs, butter, spinach, graham crackers, grape juice, and ice cream.  Today, we spent $22.95 on milk, chicken and veggies for stir fry, flour, cake mix (D’s birthday is next week and the party is Sunday), and chocolate and marshmallows (D talked us into making s’mores).  So, our current total is $163.24, or $182.62 if we include the cat food and laundry detergent (which are pretty much necessities, but are not legitimate uses of food stamps).  Not too bad for halfway.  Except that I also went out to dinner with friends on Sunday, and then we bought part of our lunch on Monday, and I bought lunch at work on Tuesday.  So add another $28.25 to the total, for $210.87, just barely under half the budget.

A few comments about some of the choices that we’ve made this week.

• Mostly, we’re eating the way we normally do, although with slightly less prepared foods.  I’ve made muffins and coffee cake from scratch, but that’s something I do semi-regularly in any case.
• We’re eating more eggs than usual, but some of that is because we’ve just discovered that the 15 month old adores them, and once we’re scrambling them for him, it’s easy to make them for us too. 
• I’ve been stunned at how much variation there is in the price of milk across stores.  The least we’ve paid for a gallon of milk is $2.35 at Shoppers Food Warehouse (cheaper than Costco); the most we’ve paid is $3.99 (at Giant).  I also don’t understand why 2% milk is so much cheaper than whole milk. This is likely to affect our shopping patterns even after the month is over. 
• Monday, I was shopping with D and I let him convince me to buy ice cream, since Breyer’s was on sale for $2.50 for a half gallon.  But when we got through the checkout lane, I saw that I had been charged the full price for it.  I went to the manager, who told me that only some flavors were on sale.  I returned the half gallon I had been charged $5.29 for, and would have left the store, but D was saying "you said we could get ice cream" and was about to burst into tears.  So we got a package of the other flavor, got back on line, and got it.  I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I weren’t watching the budget — at least not with D in tow.

The most basic insight I’ve had is about how much of a privilege it is to be able to shop and not pay attention to the total cost of what’s in your cart.  I’ve never been one to shop for anything without paying attention to the price — I scrutinize unit price labels with the best of them — but if I’m confident that each individual item is a reasonable buy, I generally don’t worry about what the total is going to be.  That’s had to change this month.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer available for free on the New York Times website, but last summer, Adrian Nichole LeBlanc, author of Random Family (reviewed here), had a fascinating article in the magazine section about grocery shopping and attitudes towards money.  She wrote:

"That afternoon, I was trailing my book’s main subject, Lolli, as she bought the month’s groceries. She was a teenager, pregnant, homeless and already the mother of two children. Her young family subsisted on food stamps and vouchers from the federal subsidy program, WIC. The shield of my judgment rose when she passed right by the C-Town weekly discount flier and made her way down the dirty aisles with her shopping cart. She just grabbed things — packs of chicken legs and pork chops, bags of sugar and rice, bottles of vegetable oil; in went cans of beans and tins of Spam. I stood, stunned, as she reached for the individual-portion cartons of juice — with their brightly colored miniature straws — ignoring the larger, economy-size bottles. No calculation of unit price, no can’ts or shoulds or ought-not-to’s, no keen eye to the comparative ounce. By the time her stuffed cart reached the checkout line, my unease was turning into anger. Didn’t she know she was poor?"

LeBlanc notes that one of the emotions fueling her anger was envy — neither she nor her parents had ever shopped that way, as they had scrimped and squeezed the grocery budget in order to save for college.  But she also acknowledges that it’s hard to imagine that any amount of scrimping was going to bring Lolli and her family a noticably better future.

********

Next update here.

So, David Brooks has noticed that it’s not always ideal to take a chunk of time off in the middle of the intensive phase of your career to take care of kids.  He thinks this is one of the reasons that people have smaller families than they’d like. So he’s got an idea:

"This is not necessarily the sequence she would choose if she were starting from scratch. For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents. Then she could work in one uninterrupted stint from, say, 40 to 70.

This option would allow her to raise kids during her most fertile years and work during her mature ones, and the trade-off between family and career might be less onerous.

But the fact is that right now, there are few social institutions that are friendly to this way of living. Social custom flows in the opposite direction."

So he suggests tax credits for stay-at-home parents.  He thinks this will give people more options, encourage them to have more kids, and make everyone happier.  Why didn’t anyone think of it before?

Well, let’s consider some of the scenarios under which more women might choose to have children in their early 20s:

1)  The River Scenario.  As Springsteen sings: "Then I got Mary pregnant / and man that was all she wrote / And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat."  This is basically the scenario under which age at first birth reached historical lows during the late 1940s and 1950s.  It was dependent on two conditions, neither of which exists any more:  a social compact that expected young men who became fathers to marry and financially support their wives and children, and an economy that made it possible for a high school graduate to support a family.  Even if a young woman today could find a partner her age who wanted to start a family right away (which is pretty rare in the circles I travel in), it’s unlikely that he’d make enough money to allow her to focus exclusively on child raising.

2) The Older Man scenario.  Ayelet Waldman asks whether Brooks is really suggesting that 23-year-old women should marry 40-year-old men, who are more likely than their peers to be both emotionally ready to have children and financially able to support a stay-at-home wife.  And if your goal is to be a life-long at-home parent, that’s probably not a bad strategy (if neither divorce nor spousal death intervene).  But as Rhona Mahoney points out, we’re Kidding Ourselves if we think that after 10 years of childrearing, the women in such marriages are going to have much bargaining power when it comes to family decisions.  So, they’ll be able to go to grad school — if there’s a program in the city where their husbands work — and get jobs — as long as they’re still willing to do the majority of housework and child care in order to support their husband’s role as primary wage earner. 

3)  The Welfare scenario.  Alternatively, we could decide as a society that we value child rearing enough to create a program that would financially support people who do it, to the point that they don’t need to delay childbearing until they earn enough to support themselves and/or have a partner who does so.  Actually we used to have such a program, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), also known as "welfare."  Welfare never paid enough to lift families out of poverty, but if you were willing to get by on the pittance it provided, you could stay home with your kids.  However, as Mary at Stone Court points out, welfare reform was based on the premise that this was unacceptable behavior — that no one who is able to work for pay should receive public support for not working.  Maybe Brooks is proposing to reverse these changes — but somehow, I doubt it.  (I’m particularly bemused by the rave review Brooks’ column got from familyscholars.org, who generally line up with the folks who blame AFDC for promoting the dissolution of the American family.)

I’m actually quite sympathetic to Brooks’ more general point about examining the social structures constraining the choices that women (and men) have available to them.  But there’s a huge mismatch between the scale of the social structures in question and the policies he thinks are going to change them. 

Moreover, Brooks totally fails to question the assumption that workers ought to be available for 30-year continuous careers, whether from ages 25-55 or 40-70.  It seems particularly bizarre to try to restructure all of society to make childrearing compatible with such a career, just at the time when it’s less and less likely that any of us, regardless of our family choices, will have a continuous career with a single employer. 

Today’s book review is of What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank.  It came out this summer, to generally positive reviews, but not a whole lot of attention, then seemed to top every Democrat’s reading list after the election.

Frank explores how Kansas, once a center of Populist revolt against oppressive economic elites, has in recent years come to be dominated by a form of Republicanism defined by revolt against cultural elites.  Democrats are almost entirely absent from Frank’s story — he argues that the battle in Kansas is between Conservative and Moderate Republicans.  He discusses the ways in which those who are the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism describe themselves as "just folks" like the victims of modern capitalism, in contrast to liberals, atheists, intellectuals, feminists, etc. and harness outrage against those groups into a political movement.

It’s an interesting book and I enjoyed reading it.  But ultimately, I felt like I was left hanging; Frank describes what has happened in Kansas — a story both funny and sad — but doesn’t really answer the why part of it.  One chapter ends with the image of an angry mob, storming the statehouse, chanting "we are here — to cut your taxes."  It’s a great line, but I still don’t have a clue why the pro-life anti-gay Christian movement is passionately opposed to taxes. 

In the conclusion, Frank suggests that Democrats are — at least on economic issues — all but indistinguishable from Moderate Republicans.  And with the all-but-disappearance of labor unions, there’s no one to keep economic issues on the table.  Lower- and middle-income Americans therefore vote against their class interests on a regular basis.

It makes a lot of sense.  And yet, a quick look at the exit polls from the last election indicates that there’s still a linear relationship between how much money you have and how likely you are to vote Republican.  Kansas is a lot more Republican than the country as a whole, but the relationship holds true there, too.  So, implicit behind Frank’s argument is a claim that there ought to be an even stronger correlation between income and voting patterns. 

I’m not enough of a political historian to know if that’s ever been the case — I do know that for almost a hundred years, leftists have been lamenting the lack of class consciousness among American workers.

My one misgiving about the title of this blog is that it implies that this is a transitional stage, that one day the world will be "fully changed."  I’m not sure I believe that.  Some days I think that it’s inevitable, that the old attitudes are dying out with the generations that believed them; other days I think there are three steps back for every two steps forward.  (Two recent studies on hiring and marriage preferences, using undergrads as their research subjects, were especially disillusioning.)

Since it’s Martin Luther King Day, I thought I’d share a piece of one my favorite King sermons:

"As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human hisotry up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn’t stop there…

"Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth centry, I will be happy." Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth centry in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world….

"Well I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight, I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

King gave this sermon on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated.

My almost-four-year-old saw the TurboTax boxes and asked "what’s that?"

"It’s a program for the computer to help us figure out our taxes." 

"What are taxes?"

Hmmm.  Most people would probably just have said something to the effect of whatever money you make, the government takes a piece of, and that’s taxes.  But being a person who believes that government is, by and large, a useful thing to have around, I didn’t want to leave my answer at that.  So I plunged ahead:

"Well, there are some things that everyone wants, but that are too expensive for anyone to buy by themselves.  Like roads.  Wouldn’t it be silly if you had your own road and I had my own road and daddy had his road, and they went the same place, and we didn’t share?  So instead, we all put our money together to build a road that we can all use, and that’s what taxes are."

In her essay on being pro-choice and still valuing the fetus as a potential human life (Is There Life After Roe: How to Think About the Fetus), Frances Kissling suggests that people who wore Planned Parenthood’s "I had an abortion" t-shirt were bragging.  While I think a lot of what she wrote makes sense, I think she’s missed the point on this one.  The t-shirt campaign was designed to make women who have abortions less a faceless anonymous other, and instead remind people it might be the proverbial girl next door.  As all good lobbyists know, putting a specific human face and voice behind a problem is often more effective than all the fancy statistically valid studies you could possibly put together. 

But right now I’m thinking about the limits of empathy.  Because the people who commented on Wednesday’s post have convinced me that we’re only guessing when we try to imagine how we’d feel in someone else’s situation.  And because I think that control over our own reproductive choices are too fundamental to depend on something as random as whether or not someone finds our story sympathetic.  I fear a world in which someone gets to decide that Ayelet‘s abortion is allowed because she was appropriately agonized about it but Amy‘s is not because she was too casual in talking about it.

The other day I noticed that someone had found my blog by googling for Max and Ruby jump the shark.  I thought this was pretty funny, so I mentioned it to my husband.

Without missing a beat, he said "it’s the Easter bunny episode."

Ema at the Well-Timed Period writes:

"The saga of HB 1677 has made me realize that the lives and health of tens of millions of women are literally at the mercy of legislators of Del. Cosgrove’s caliber. This realization is enough to subdue even the most optimistic person.  [By all means, if you were already aware of the existence of legislators like the Delegate, please, carry on with the celebration.]"

I knew that there were legislators like Cosgrove, here in Virginia and even in more "enlightened" states.  That doesn’t even depress me all that much; while they can introduce bills like this, they’re unlikely to get them passed.

What depresses me is that Tim Kaine, who is running unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Virginia (we have odd year elections) argues that the "partial-birth" (e.g. dilation and extraction) abortion ban should have an exception for the life and health of the mother — but only because the Supreme Court has ruled that such laws are unconstitutional without them.  Reading his letter to the editor, I’m left with the impression that he would have opposed such an exception if it weren’t for that meddling federal court.

Chap Petersen, who is one of the leading contenders for the Lieutenant Governor position, also has taken some positions that I’m pretty horrified by.  In addition to supporting the ban on dilation and extraction (without an exception for the life and health of the mother), he also opposed the recommendation that the feticide bill be amended to clarify that it should not be construed as limiting the right to an abortion.  And he voted for HB751, the anti-civil-union bill that became law last year. (To be fair, he did introduce a bill today, HB2940, that would amend that law to say that it "shall not abridge the right of any person to enter into a lawful contract that pertains to the ownership or devising of joint property, the maintenance of personal health, or the protection of private assets. ")

If that’s what the Democratic candidates look like, I’m more than depressed; I’m scared.

(Most of these legislative links are thanks to Maura‘s posting on Daily Kos.  Thanks.)