"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?

“All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent.” - Benjamin Spock

Spoons
Originally uploaded by Roger Smith

During the winter, I must admit that we sometimes take our son to the local outlet of a National Chain Restaurant that has a giant play structure inside. Perhaps I should feel guilty for feeding my son four or five chemically altered chicken nuggets, but that guilt is heavily balanced by the opportunity for him to run and climb and swing on the giant playground equipment for an hour or two in the dead of winter, when its 14 degrees and there is two feet of snow on the ground.

The last time we were there, as we were leaving, we passed a man who was hauling a weeping child out by the arm.

"If you let anyone hit you again," the man said to the boy, "I'll punch you in the mouth."

My husband's mother (my son's beloved Mimi) spanked her boys with a wooden spoon. The boys laugh about it now; they were a military family and moved often - the boys love to tell the story of how once, when moving, their mother found a cache of wooden spoons - dozens, perhaps - that they boys had hidden away, in the forlorn hope that if there were no spoons to be found there would be no spankings.

I feel like, over the past few days, I've been running into spanking everywhere I look. Matt Haughey (noted blogger but not normally a parenting blogger) wrote earlier this week about how his parents would "whip" him and his brother with a belt, and how his grandmother, too, was a feared wielder of the wooden spoon. Ohio is considering a bill to outlaw "paddling" in public schools, and I find myself wondering how, exactly, that hadn't been done years ago. I was shocked to learn that although the State has a "limited ban" six school districts reported 110 paddlings of students during 2007-08 school year.

I like to think that we, as a society, have moved past hitting children as punishment, but I know it isn't true. I remember, long before our son was born, having dinner with another couple, friends who had two small daughters. Both parents (she a nurse and he a teacher) told us that they had spanked the girls, that sometimes "a good swat on the bottom" was the only way to teach. I remember glancing at Josh nervously during that conversation, realizing that we did not know these people as well as we thought we did, wondering where else our philosophies of living diverged. Before my son was born, my husband told me that he would "consider" spanking our child (natural, I suppose, as a child of a spanker himself) if the offense was grave enough. Now, though, I know he can't imagine himself ever doing it, ever pulling our small son over his lap, ever hitting our son for any reason. I'm confident in that, confident that neither of us would ever do it.

I found out recently, however, that Sarah, the woman who cares for our son during the day in her home, spanks her daughter. One of the reasons that the daughter (Hannah) gets spanked is because she sometimes bites my son.

I don't feel like he's in danger there. Sarah has gone through the process to become a certified in-home daycare provider, and I know she's taken classes and has random in home visits. I also know that Sarah is fairly religious (enough so that she has faith-promoting bumper stickers on her car), and that spanking is somewhat more common in highly religious households. Mostly, I guess, I just don't get it. She has a degree in early childhood education. She's warm and nurturing with the children in her care, and my son is comfortable there. I have no thoughts that she would ever hit him or hurt him in any way.

Now I'm faced with a quandary. Its not up to me to tell her how to parent her own child. We tried once before to move him out of her care (with disastrous results). And, of course, there is the issue that we're not exactly in a position right now to afford an inevitably more expensive childcare solution her "in the city". So what do I do? What would you do?

"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.

"The time will come when winter will ask you what you were doing all summer. " - Henry Clay

I haven't forgotten you.

I was amused to note this morning that my last post (back in August - whew!) was about Gov. Palin. I have to confess that a large part of the reason I took a break from updating this site was that I didn't want it to become all about politics, and there was a strong risk -- especially with her in the race -- that I would end up writing about nothing about her for two months, which isn't the intent of this site. There has been a lot of good stuff out on the web about her, and how having her in the public eye has influenced the conversation on work-family balance (for both genders). Two articles from the New York Times that I'd highlight especially are A New Twist in the Debate on Mothers and Working Mother Questions ‘Irrelevant,’ Palin Says. Plus this one, one of my favorites: Working Mothers Against 'Supermom' Palin.

On the surface, Palin's selection should highlight the possible: here, after all, is a working mom who brings her infant to work with her, wears a sling, breastfeeds at work, whose husband clearly shares the load in raising the family. Her family understands what its like to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, and to try and balance all those things with the needs of the kids. Its puzzling to me that -- even if she's a social or economic conservative -- why her life experience doesn't drive her to use her position to try and make sure that the "perks" and flexibility she has in her own life isn't available to any working mother.

As I said above, I don't want this blog to be about politics or Sarah Palin. Other people are doing that better and more eloquently than I can.

Next week I'll be back for real. I want to tell you about cardboard playhouses, my new-found crafy side, and the adventure that is inviting your mom to help you tackle some home improvement projects.

"If you cannot convince them, confuse them." - Harry S Truman

John McCain has named Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, to be his choice for VP.

I post this here because she's kind of the ultimate working mother: She has five children - Track (18, serving in the US Army), Bristol (17), Willow (13), Piper (7), and Trig, who was born on April 18, 2008 and who has Down syndrome.

Apparently she returned to office three days after giving birth.

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I have to admit that my first thought was "its no wonder we have no decent maternity leave in this country, with examples like this." My second was "do I want someone making decisions about an entire state as a three-days post-partum hormonal mess?"

My third thought was ... why does that matter to me?

"Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy." - Gandhi

The website UKFamily.co.uk (a division of the Walt Disney Company) has apparently released the following survey findings (which I can't actually find on their site): Two-thirds of working mothers with young children would like to give up work to care for their family. Of course the UK press has picked this up with headlines like 62 per cent of working mums 'want to quit job for a normal family life' (Daily Mail) and Working Brit parents don't even have five minutes a day with their kids (ANI).

"According to Life coach Suzy Greaves, the survey revealed just how many think that they could be better parents if only they had more time on their hands.

"This research shows just how many of us think we'd be a 'better parent' if we had more time. We feel guilty about everything - the amount of time we spend at work, the lack of time we have to play with our children and the amount of time our kids spend in childcare," Greaves said.

"As a result, many working parents, especially mums, are running themselves ragged trying to overcompensate.

"It's time for us to stop being self-critical and let go of our guilt - an absolutely useless emotion - and then shelve some of the tasks that take up so much of our time.

"It really doesn't matter if everything isn't crisply ironed or the toys all put away. Instead, we parents should give ourselves a pat on the back for the amazing amount we do achieve.

"Let's model happiness to our kids instead of guilt and martyrdom," she added."

I feel like I should add some commentary there, but I just can't.

Yep, two posts today. Amazing.

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers" - T.Jefferson

Had a busy camping-trip weekend, and a busy week ahead. So, just three links for you today, with no comment from me. Feel free to discuss among yourselves:

Mother's Need Time-outs Too

Working moms look back with mixed emotions

Study Finds More MBAS Take the Mommy Track

I see a common thread between these three articles. I'm wondering, do you see the same thread?

"There is nothing wrong with change, if its in the right direction."

I really don't want this to become a political blog, but Sen. Obama made a very interesting speech about working mothers yesterday, and since its gotten very little press coverage I wanted to highlight it here - mostly because he's saying things that I'm not sure I ever believed I'd hear a Presidential candidate say.

The complete text of his prepared remarks is on-line here, but let me pull out some specific points:

"As the son of a single mother, I also don’t accept an America that makes women choose between their kids and their careers. It’s not acceptable that women are denied jobs or promotions because they’ve got kids at home. It’s not acceptable that forty percent of working women don’t have a single paid sick day. That’s wrong for working parents, it’s wrong for America’s children, and it’s not who we are as a country."

His specific proposals include:

+ Expand the Child and Dependent Care tax credit to cover up to 50% credit for child care expenses
+ Require employers to provide all workers with seven paid sick days per year.
+ "I’ll support a 50-state strategy to adopt paid-leave systems, and set aside $1.5 billion to fund it." (Is he talking about paid maternity/parental leave here?)
+ Index the minimum wage to inflation so that it goes up each year to keep pace with rising costs.
+ Double funding for after-school programs.
+ Spend $10 billion for "quality, affordable" early childhood education.
Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to:
+ Cover businesses with as few as 25 employees. (Currently only businesses with 50 or more employees must offer leave under FMLA.)
+ Allow parents to take 24 hours of annual leave to join school activities.
+ Allow workers to take leave to care for elderly parents.
+ Cover employees who are victims of domestic violence or sexual assault.

Many of these proposals speak clearly with the voice of a household where there are two working parents. Michelle Obama has been speaking (and has been spoken of) as a working mother (or, these days, I guess that's really a former working mother), and while her executive position is very different from women like me working in offices and call centers across America, I can't imagine that her problems are much different - how do I spend enough time with my child(ren) to instill my values and viewpoint? How do I balance all this?

"There is no delight in owning anything unshared." - Seneca

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine there was a parenting article (When Mom and Dad Share It All by Lisa Belkin) that's getting a lot of play on the blogs this week. In a nutshell, the piece rehashes the familiar housework-imbalance stats: women, even working mothers, generally spend two hours on household chores for every one hour spent by men, and that ratio remains consistent when looking at childcare (which is split into its own category, separate from housework).

The article then goes on to profile a couple of families who have tried to change this, and talks about how they have succeeded or failed to various degrees.

In response to what I posted yesterday (about outsourcing some work so you can free up time to spend "quality time" (notice the quotes) with your child(ren), or perhaps so you can just get everything done that you want to get done without losing your mind), a friend who is a stay-at-home mom wrote "Multitasking is what being a mom is all about - regardless of whether you work or not." Given how much balance their is in their family and their marriage, her comment surprised me -- not because I disagree, but I was surprised at how she phrased it: I immediately wondered why she had not said "Multitasking is what being a parent is all about"

I know I'm the dad at my house. My husband watches our son while I'm working at night and on weekends, he puts away the dishes, does the laundry, changes the sheets, cooks dinner, vacuums, and, in general, makes sure the house is more-or-less acceptably tidy. Earlier this week he cleaned the tub before giving E his bath, and took me to task for not noticing how gross it had become (the bathrooms and loading the dishwasher are my only two assigned tasks. Plus my own laundry). I'm very guilty of being the parent who comes home and wants it to be baby-play time instead of trying to balance spending time with my son with doing some routine household chore. I want to give him my complete and undivided attention for the hour or two we have together before he goes to bed.

Balance in a relationship is a tricky thing. Gender roles, social norms, and personal preference all play a part in making sure that everyone is happy with which way the teeter-totter is pointing (is that too weird? The Teeter-totter thing?). I'm wondering if a sociologist would say that I'd rather be home with my son and doing dishes and cleaning baseboards because society has conditioned me to believe that this is my role. If s/he did, I'd say "Sorry, not true. Its not society. I never wanted to do any of this stuff before my son was born."

Honestly? I think its the hormones.

(Two other links that are mentioned in the article: Equally Shared Parenting, Third Path Institute)

“Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, Lie in three words, - health, peace, and competence” - Alexander Pope

On Not Doing Dishes: The Rise of the Core Competency Mom by Laura Vanderkam

I wasn't expecting to find this on the Huffington Post, but there it is. A well-written, thought-provoking essay, whose central point is this: Stay-at-home moms and working moms end up spending about the same amount of time directly caring for their children. Although this seems counterintuitive, there are apparently studies that say that working moms simply prioritize their children first in their available, non working hours, leaving "other stuff" - to quote the article - Stay-at-home moms spend an equal amount of time taking care of their kids and their houses; moms who work full-time spend more time with their kids than on household chores.

Of course, what the article doesn't take into account is the ages of children, and how much more labor intensive it is to care for a four month old than a four year old, but in many ways the essay does reflect what goes on in my own home - choosing play time and walks and bedtime stories over housework.

Its actually the first of an ongoing series: here are part 2 (on organization), opart 3 (on productivity), part 4 (on housework), and part 5 (on time vs. money). I think there are probably more to come.

"The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want." - Ben Stein

Wendy Anderson could probably be considered the cover girl (poster woman?) for the modern executive working mother. After spending five years as the head of global energy research for Lehman Brothers in London, she mommy-tracked herself and moved from London to Edinburgh, taking a position at investment company Martin Currie, where she negotiated two afternoons off per week as a part of her employment package. At the end of 2005, she left Martin Currie to be a full-time mom, and on May 5th, 2008 she gave birth to her fourth and fifth children, twins, son Alexander and daughter Mackenzie.

Two days later she died, at the age of 38.

We all know at some level that the choices we make in how we live our lives are predicated on our perceptions of our own mortality. Before my son was born, I had no fear of death. I'm not religious, and can't really find it within myself to believe the logistics of an afterlife, but the idea of death held no terrors for me.

Now, of course, its all different. Its the mechanics of death that frighten me -- the fear and pain and uncertainty and desire to live contained in the actual moments of dying. Its the loss and confusion and bereavement and anger of those who must live on. I've been reading Gwendomama a lot recently, which is a blog written by a woman whose son, Elijah, died at the age of 11 months after a lifetime of illness. The trial of Pamela Henderson, a local woman whose infant son drowned in the tub when she fell asleep has been big in the news here. And, of course, China and Myanmar. "If it bleeds, it leads" is what they say. Death, and the struggle against death fill our media, our thoughts, our conscious and unconscious minds.

I know this seems like an odd and morbid topic on a beautiful spring day like today, but bear with me.

Right up until the part where she dies, I think a lot of working moms would be green with envy for Wendy Anderson's life. She had a successful, lucrative career. She was able to find a way to balance her desire for a family with whatever personal satisfaction her work gave her. She was also prosperous enough to be able to give it all up when she chose to, deciding that adding more children to her family and being with them full time was the path that would be most fulfilling for her. She worked in hedge funds, so I have no doubt that she had ample investments and savings, but the loss of an executive income like hers, not to mention the addition of two more babies to her household, must have have caused some lifestyle adjustments for her family.

As we get older, parents or not, our priorities change. What seemed life-or-death at 20 is old news at 30, and what seemed crucial at thirty is, at fifty, an amusing phase. In every other aspect of our lives, we are allowed -- indeed encouraged -- to have our priorities change. Its natural, of course, to also have our priorities change when we become parents (one might even say that its instinct). In part, this happens because becoming a parent makes you so much more keenly aware that you are mortal. Platitudes like "every day is valuable" suddenly have a new meaning. "Live each day to the fullest" becomes more than a cliché.

So, despite the abrupt and untimely end to Wendy Anderson's life, I think I'm still green with envy. She had it all. How cruel -- how specially cruel -- for fate or destiny to take it from her.

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today." - FDR

“Kristina,” she said, “everyone has something. You just don’t know what everyone has.”

One of the best articles I've run across recently on being a working parent is Working Mother. While its written to a target audience of parents of children with Autism, I think the core idea -- that those of us who work should not constantly feel the need to explain why we can't make this meeting or attend that after-work function. Just say "I can't, I have a conflict" and move on.