"mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled." - E Dickinson

Preschool Colors
Originally uploaded by barnabywasson

Heather Armstrong (the author of Dooce) announced yesterday via her Twitter feed that she's been invited to attend The White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility.

I want to state up-front that I'm a big fan of Heather Armstrong, and a big fan of the current White House. (So much so that I'm strongly considering standing outside all night in the rain tonight to get tickets for the President's visit to Portland on Thursday.) In particular, I think her voice has done a lot to educate people about the need for healthcare reform in the US, not to mention how she's raised awareness of post-partum depression. However.... (you knew that was coming, right?)

But Heather Armstrong is also the object of envy of every working mother I know. She is one of the few people I can say honestly "has it all" -- she's doing something she loves and has become very famous for it. She and her husband both work from home, on whatever schedule works for their family. You could easily say that she, almost uniquely, has built a career for herself that is the ultimate in family flexibility. But her very unique set of circumstances are not, I think, replicable by a large number of people in the world.

One of the things that makes me proud to have the Obama family in a leadership position in this country is that they are a real, working family. I do strongly believe that they get it, that they do really think they "understand the challenges" of balancing work and parenting, to use the phrasing from their press release.

But, even before he went to the Senate, they were also highly-educated professionals in leadership careers, who had family and paid in-home caregivers available to them. I doubt Sasha and Malia were ever in daycare (although I don't know that for sure). I think its more likely that they were cared for in their own home, either by their Grandmother or by someone else (a nanny, perhaps) who became, more or less, a part of the family. I know they mean well. But the experience is so different for working mothers who are a bit farther down the pay scale.

The press release says they've invited "labor leaders, CEOs, small business owners, and policy experts" to this forum. I wonder if there will be actual working mothers there? Women who hand their child over to a facility at 7:45 am and pick them up at 5:45 pm, who work blue collar jobs, who work service jobs, the low-income women and families for whom workplace flexibility is most needed. There is a cynical voice in my mind who says that the mothers who most need to have a voice at this summit won't be able to attend, and will, in fact, not ever even realize that anyone was having the conversation.

Every morning, I send my son off to be raised by a woman whom I don't know well and who doesn't really share my personal values. And I count myself lucky, because she's warm and loving, because my son spends his days in a mostly unstructured way, because he gets to run in a pasture and play outside for hours ever day, and (to be frank) because she's very inexpensive. And then I go to work and spend a large part of the day watching other, more fortunate parents as they come into my workplace and share experiences with their own children.

I have to wonder if my voice and experience will be represented?

One interesting note: in searching Flickr for an appropriate photo to add to this post, I noted this: if you search on the word "daycare" you get page after page of child care facilities in third world countries. To get middle-class American images, you have to search on the phrase "preschool". I wonder why that is?

"I shut my eyes in order to see." - Paul Gauguin

sprung
Originally uploaded by Robert S. Donovan (booleansplit)

Just a couple of links (and a great and interesting image via Robert S. Donovan on Flickr) for you on this beautiful Friday. I was admiring the cavalcade of tulips in the supermarket yesterday, but as always its hard to take my own photos when your two-year-old wants to hold hands while running.

In theory, today is the first day of spring. Its cold here today, but the snow is slowly melting and I have some hope that by next week or so we'll be able to start going to the playground again.

I don't know if there is a connection between these two links or not. You tell me.

Presidential parenting: Good mothers lead by example

Is the opt-out revolution coming to an end?
-- Let me just say here that I was so very pleased that the second comment caught my thoughts exactly: "Opt out would imply options, would it not?" Of all the dozens families with children I know, exactly four have been able to make the choice to have one parent opt-out of working. In two families, its the traditional "professional dad and stay-at-home mom" profile. In one, the mom had the high paying job and the dad was home when the kids were small. And in one, the family can afford to have one parent stay home because both partners had worked at high paying jobs and the were able to bank and invest enough to plan for the future.

I suppose someone could say that Michelle Obama is part of the "opt-out" revolution: she was, after all, a highly-paid executive who left her job to (as some blogs would tell you) "trail along" after her husband and take care of their home and family. (Of course, another view of being First Lady would be that its the highest-profile and most responsible volunteer position in the US. But I digress.)

But for most families, its not a question of opting out any more. Its a question of balance - two parents working at (at least) two jobs, or one parent (either parent) staying at home and one in the workforce. The balance of "we want another child" against "can we afford to have another child" or the balance of "I want a stay-at-home parent with my child" vs "how to we afford to have one parent at home" vs "which parent has the skills and education to get the best-paying job."

I guess I've never seen this opt-out revolution she speaks of. I've only seen families that try to make the best choices for themselves.

Today's post at Antique Mommy talks about a photo of her mother-in-law, and how "[w]hen her husband encouraged her to sell Tupperware to make a little mad money, she discovered that she liked it. And she was good at it — so good that she won a car and quickly rose through the ranks to become a sales director." Then tragedy struck her family, and her husband was killed, and what had formerly been "mad money" was now the family's sole means of support. (I can't imagine how good you'd have to be at selling Tupperware to support a family of four. I couldn't do it.) Some might say that it was a stroke of good fortune that she had kept her toe in the water, so to speak. But this woman's story also speaks to so many other things: how work brings fulfillment, recognition, and rewards. How its good to have some backup skills in case of disaster (death being the worst, of course, but for many families the impact of a job-loss can be as or more economically devastating than a death). But, of course, no one was writing about mothers like AM's MIL in the papers back then. It wasn't a "trend". It was just families doing what they wanted or needed to do.

I get so tired of the fallacy that "working mothers" are a new phenomenon, or that there has been some "opting revolution" in the past decade or two. In some families, both parents have always worked. On the farm, maybe, or in the store, or with mom doing in-home parties or taking on piece work, but both parents were contributing to the finances of the family. In other families, only one parent was the wage-earner. In yet other families, the roles shifted depending on circumstance. What has changed -- what the fundamental change is that no one really talks about much -- is the way the culture has changed to make things less easy and hospitable for two-earner families. The media wants to make hay out of the "mommy wars" - working parents vs. stay at homes. We're encouraged to envy or criticize those on the other side of the fence, rather than support them. Our sense of community as parents has vanished and now its all about making the "right" choices, as though only one set of choices were the correct one.

'Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.' - P K Dick

I have slowly started to noodle around with the idea that as soon as the car payment goes away we might be able to survive on my (two-job) income alone, and Josh could stay home full-time with young Mr. E. There are some notable obstacles to overcome in this plan (most significantly the fact that Josh's job provides us with some really stellar health insurance), but I'm at the point where I've noodled it enough that I felt comfortable asking Josh how he felt about the idea.

"I'd feel inadequate," was his reply.

This was not the reply I'd expected, and I rushed to explain to him all the ways in which his not being the "breadwinner" for our family wouldn't be an issue for me.

"No, no, no," he clarified, "I'd feel inadequate to the job of staying home with him. I'm not sure what we would do and I'm afraid we would just end up with him sitting on my lap watching TV all day. Plus, I'd feel bad that he wouldn't get to spend time with other kids."

Well, I don't think that they'd spend up watching TV all day (although it might be more than I'd like), but the "other kids" point is an interesting one. One of the upsides of having E in daycare is that he gets to have two "sorta-siblings". M and H are both girls, and both about ten months older than E is, but he loves them and they love him, and being with them day in and day out does teach him things about interacting with other people that he couldn't learn by, say, just attending a "mommy and me" type exercise class for one or two days per week.

When I have the worst of my daycare angst, I must try to remember these sorts of things. That despite the fact I wish he were with me every moment of every day there are certain benefits from being "in care" that he just can't get at home.

"First secure an independent income, then practice virtue." - Greek Proverb

Oh yes, two other things, that I had planned all day to write about and then very nearly forgot.

I've been wanting E to start some sort of tumbling class, partly because I think tumbling and rolling is as valuable a life skill to have as swimming is, and partly because I want him to have more chances to interact with children his own age. After hunting around, I only found one option - a place in a nearby town called My Gym, which seems to be some sort of Gymboree-type chain, but their Saturday morning "Waddlers" (ugh) program seemed to be just what I needed. So I called them to find out about rates and such-like, and, of course, the class is full. Then the nice woman on the phone suggested one of their weekday sessions.

"I can't," I said, "I work during the week."

"Oh," she said. Then - silence. I swear it was like I had told her that I spanked my child, or kept him in a box. I cannot imagine a way that she could have conveyed a more disgusted tone in a single syllable. After a moment she sort of half-heartedly offered to put him on the waiting list, which I agreed to let her do, but I don't think I'll be taking him there. Not because of the expense (I have since found a much less expensive and better program- including pool time! - with our local rec department), but because of her tone. I've never really run across this sort of attitude before, so its not like I was looking for it or expecting it, but is was unmistakably there. A very unusual experience. I wonder what she would have said if I told her that it needed to be on Saturday so that E's dad could come with him. Would that have changed her viewpoint any?

The second thing on my mind right now is E's baby bottles. We've finally convinced him that milk tastes just as good coming out of a cup as it does out of a bottle, and are ready to rid ourselves of the 40+ Dr Brown and other miscellaneous Avent bottles that we have stashed in cupboards taking up space. Of course, I bought all these before the big Bisphenol-A studies came out, so I've unintentionally poisoned my child so a greater or lesser extent, but I've come to terms with that, more or less (partly because he always loved drinking milk cold and I believe that not much leaching could have occurred in 15-20 minutes of unheated exposure in a cold bottle, but I'm still sure it adds up.)

My puzzle is what to do with the old bottles. My impulse is to donate them to the local shelter, where they will be used, I'm sure (we even have nipples that are still sealed in packaging), but then it becomes an ethical issue. These bottles probably leach BPA. Most low-income mothers are not yet educated about BPA because the story has not yet been picked up by the mainstream media. These same bottles are still for sale in stores, so if I didn't donate them some low-income mom would end up spending cash on the exact same product. But am I encouraging these mothers to also expose their babies to BPA? Its an ethical puzzle I'm still working my way through.