Growing the New Life

My first thought upon waking on January 1, 2007 was that I did not want to wake to another new year still working for the company I was working for at the time. Seven months later I quit and began freelancing.

My original plan, however, had been to quit back in 2005, after my wedding and the completion of the largest project my group had yet undertaken, but for various reasons (not the least of which was probably fear), I kept on working there, often feeling more than a twinge of jealousy each time another co-worker announced his or her plans to move on. For some time after I finally quit, I regretted those two additional years I worked for a company I could never entirely respect. But then I realized that without those two years, my freelancing career might not have been possible, because it was during that time that I made the necessary connections at the companies I work for now. All that time that I felt I was wasting my time, I was actually growing my new life inside of the old one.

Hearing that the squirrels in my head have begun to chatter about finding other work, one of my sisters sent me a link to this article about another work-at-home mom who feels that her "expensively educated brain could be helping people." Indeed. But I'll gladly take credit for what I've been doing, late nights and all. And so I've decided to stop worrying about what I'm supposed to do next. I'll just keep on writing, keep in touch (OK, I'm not so good at that, but I can work on it), and trust that I am in fact gestating a new life inside the old one. Having lived through the nine months of unknowing before the Critter was born—Will the baby be a he or a she? What will he or she look like? What will the birth be like? What kind of mother will I be?—and now living day after surprising day with him, I'm learning to be okay with not knowing.

What seeds for tomorrow are you planting today?

This post is part of the Moms' 30-Minute Blog Challenge: More time for kisses, less fuss.

"Real Artists Ship"

I'm reading Linchpin by Seth Godin—or sort of reading it, in the lazy, distracted, uncommitted, skipping-around way of reading that has become almost habitual for me since the birth of the Critter. I'm not particularly interested in what Godin has to say about becoming a linchpin or being a linchpin or whatever, but I am very interested in what he has to say about my lizard brain (tormenting me with fear and shame) and the resistance (pushing me to give into my fears that what I really want to do and say is indeed shameful).

The chapter on the resistance begins with this quotation of Steve Jobs: "Real artists ship." I've been mulling over these words since I read them a few days ago, for two reasons.

1. Why do I spend so much time thinking thinking thinking and worrying about how I'm going to meet my next deadline? My not meeting a job-related deadline is a rare exception, and every time I do meet a deadline, it has nothing to do with how much I worried about the project or the deadline. Getting it done is just a habit.
2. Why has so much time passed since I last sent out a batch of poems for consideration by literary journals?

When it comes to shipping, methinks I have been worrying about the wrong thing.

A Vow

For as long as I can remember, I have put work before just about everything else. To tell why I have done so would be to tell a long story, and probably some day I will tell the story. But for now, I just want to say that I recently have noticed that when someone asks how I have been doing, I tend to talk about work: how much work I have to do, whether or not I like it, how much sleep I am getting (or not getting) because of the work, and so on. Now, because of the Critter, I can't possibly be putting work before just about everything else—at least, it certainly doesn't come before him—but nevertheless, clearly it's at the front of my mind, before so many other things that I care about so much more. And so, a vow: When someone asks how I have been doing, I can talk about the Critter. I can talk about my writing. I can talk about the weather. I can talk about Beckett, running, travel, family, even cooking ... anything ... but I cannot talk about work. Not unless asked.

Routines

As I've written before, the best (only?) way to keep your sanity while taking care of a child (or children) while working at home is to get organized. We're not really organized, but we're getting there. My goal is to have everything that needs to be done captured on a list, on a calendar, or in a routine (a personal variation on David Allen's program for getting things done). For example, my life has improved vastly since I instituted a morning routine for the Critter and me:

• Wake up
• Shower and dress, or, if I'll be going for a run, put on my running clothing
• Change the Critter's diaper
• Make the bed
• Make and eat breakfast
• Wash up the Critter and get him dressed (after breakfast, because he feeds himself oatmeal—messy!)
• Clear off the table and brush my teeth
• Get outside!

Nothing mysterious here, but I've found that if we do everything in the same order every day (with a variation for the two mornings each week when the Critter goes to day care), the rest of the day goes so much more smoothly. And now that we've integrated that routine into our days, I'm working on adding a couple more weekly routines: having a "budget-and-calendar" meeting with Beckett on Sunday evenings and doing our weekly grocery shopping on Thursday afternoons. Why Thursday afternoons? Because we will we receiving our first CSA half-share next Wednesday afternoon, and so for the next twenty weeks I will be planning our weekly menus on Wednesday evenings, based on the contents of our half-share. Next Wednesday I'll also be teaching my first class in a decade. I'm terrified ... but not a little thrilled, too....

On My Mind

It is in our collective interest that children be raised well, but evidently we are not doing such a good job of taking care of them: 21 percent of American children will be living in poverty this year, and 500,000 may be homeless (the link tweeted by @laura11D; her blog is here). And by we I don't mean that individual families are doing a poor job, but all of us, together.

And did you know that in April, Amnesty International declared that maternal health in the U.S.A. is in a state of crisis? From the summary of the report:

Maternal mortality ratios have increased from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006.... The USA spends more than any other country on health care, and more on maternal health than any other type of hospital care. Despite this, women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 40 other countries.... African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women.

*   *   *
I'll finally be reading the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts this weekend. In the meantime, I'm still puzzling over why President Obama's approach to school reform has been so godawful. (One of these days I'll find the time to unpack the meaning of the Race to the Top, the title of which alone nauseates me, wherein the pursuit of an education is likened not just to a competition, but a zero-sum competition, in which someone must lose.) At the blog of The New York Review of Books, Diane Ravtich offers her thoughts on the topic, writing, "My sense is that it has a lot to do with the administration’s connections to the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation." Which doesn't really explain much, apparently unless you read her new book, which I don't intend to do. I'm actually also still puzzling over Ravitch's recent before-I-was-for-it-but-now-I'm-against-it switcharoo on No Child Left Behind.

*   *   *
At the MomsRising blog, Rebecca Rodskog writes about wanting to go back to work after the birth of her child. From the conclusion of her essay:

No longer was it okay to just have a “job”. If it was going to take me away from my babies, it had better be pretty darn meaningful work. Being a mother made me a better judge of how I was applying my skills, and how I was spending my time each day—allowing me the clarity to carefully engage in only those things that mattered.

Alas, my job is not only just a job, but for the most part it involves pretty darn anti-meaningful work. I've written before about my ethical qualms about the way I earn an income for my family. My long-term plan is to keep on working at home (mostly) until our family is complete and the little ones old enough for full-time school, at which time I will begin teaching again. Yes, as a teacher, I will continue to serve the system. But, instead of working at my laptop on products for theoretical students and teachers (as I do now), I will be in an actual classroom with the actual children whom the system purports to serve, and I do believe that by giving my physical presence to children, I will be able to do meaningful work with them.

That's the plan, anyway. But the squirrels in my head have begun to chatter about finding other, more meaningful work-at-home work. Maybe I want to be a childbirth educator, or even a birth doula (not really work-at-home work, though). Maybe I can figure out a way to earn money from my writing (except that I don't know a damn thing about a damn thing). Maybe, maybe ... and I suspect that the squirrels are simply repeating something that the shitbird is whispering to them (straining my metaphor here ... can a bird whisper, much less whisper to a squirrel?), and that the shitbird is trying to distract me from the life I actually have, in which it is possible, on occasion, for me to write a poem ... or enjoy a sunny morning at the park with the Critter ...

The War on Moms

The discussion last night of The War on Moms by Sharon Lerner at Kris Waldherr's Art and Words Gallery was lively and invigorating. And yet ... I returned home in a foul mood. What brought on the bad mood? Was it the news that of more than 170 nations on this planet, only four provide no paid leave for new mothers: Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, Liberia, and the good ol' U.S.A.? Was it Lerner's description of the day care center she visited in Florida, where two caregivers looked after 38 toddlers while in another room a sole caregiver looked after 8 infants — all of them reaching their arms toward Lerner, wanting to be held? Was it hearing about the not-atypical response to the book (coming, I imagine, most frequently from folks who haven't actually read it), that having children is a choice, and so if you can't afford one or aren't willing to put up with the resulting difficulties, maybe you shouldn't have one?

To take on that response ... First, in a long-ago post that has stuck with me since I first read it, Bitch Ph.D. posits that not having children is the choice, not the other way around. Her argument is hardly airtight — for one thing, not everyone "fuck[s] someone of the opposite sex," as she puts it. However, it is certainly true that what we'd like to think of as our "choices," even major life decisions, are often hardly solely determined by our personal wishes. Fate, serendipity, luck (good and bad), karma, or whatever you want to call it usually has a hand. Besides, we live in a country where access to affordable birth control is not guaranteed (though Planned Parenthood is going to fight for it) and many teens lack access to real sex ed.

Second, read the story of Devorah Gartner. Does she really deserve to suffer her "difficulties" (or, I'd say, tragedy) simply because she chose to have a child? Shouldn't we have better laws and policies so that no-one risks poverty and overwhelming debt simply because of the need to take care of another person?

Finally, this theme kept coming up last night: it is in our collective interest that children be raised well. Katrina Alcorn writes beautifully on the theme in a recent post at MomsRising.org.

The Paradox of My Karma

While reading TheOrganicSister's response to a recent kerfuffle about unschooling (about which I was otherwise unaware), I felt again the paradox of my karma, which has some 98% of my income generated via my editorial contributions to educational products that, for the most part, I cannot endorse.

We live in New York City, and so educational options for the Critter abound. On the other hand, with Mayor Moneybags and Joel Klein in charge, public schooling in this city has meant testing, testing, testing. And so for us, the unschooling option is definitely on the table. Except that to choose that path, I would need to continue to work mostly at home, which would mean continuing to work on those educational products that support the practices that are the reason why we would keep the Critter out of school.

Unschooling or not, gotta find a new line of work.

PB&J Revisited

Should you ever plan to do something crazy like take care of your child (or, yikes, children!) while working from home, my advice to you would be: get organized. Would that someone had advised me so before I set forth on this path!

Exhibit A: Work at home with child

OK, things have improved since I took that photo last November, but still too often I find myself either pumped up with adrenaline, stressed about an impending deadline, or in a scattered haze of uncertainty about what I should be taking care of just now. The late nights don't help matters.

Writing up a weekly menu and doing the grocery shopping on Sundays does help matters, and most weeks I do manage to do so, though I go through spells, like now, when I honestly can't remember what I know how to make for dinner other than pasta dishes. (I aspire someday to create something like this meal calendar, but first I would have to come up with twenty different easy-to-make meals.) Even when I can remember what I know how to make for dinner, though, lunch tends to be the big mystery. Writing up the weekly shopping list, I tend to list the needed breakfast staples first, then the ingredients for the dinners I've planned, and then the needed staples for Beckett's lunch ... and then, I draw a blank.

But not this week! For lunch this week we have PB&J for grown-ups! Not that limp, peanut-butter-and-white-bread-soaked-with-grape-jelly sandwich that I loathed when I was a child! You see, I've figured out the obvious: that if you use good fruit preserves on good, thick, whole wheat bread, the sandwich doesn't get soggy. Plus, for less than what I have been spending on take-out lunches on Fridays (when I usually go to a client's office for work), I can have a whole week of sandwiches with almond butter. Yum, yum!

Traps

A long time ago, I promised a post on commitment mechanisms. At the time, I was reading Kidding Ourselves, by Rhona Mahony, who applies economics and game theory in an attempt to give women the tools to negotiate for a better deal in their marriages. For six months, I did not write the promised post. I was too busy, and I was too angry.

Why so angry? As it happens, the anger and resentment that I tend to foster against my husband (try try try though I do to let it go) has to do with the two commitment mechanisms that function with the greatest force in our family life: his studio and my working at home. A commitment mechanism, writes Mahony, "is anything that makes it very expensive for you not to do something that you want to do.... That is, it traps you into doing what you want to do." So, we're trapped: he into making art (otherwise we're paying the rent for his studio for no reason) and I into being the primary Critter caregiver.

I want Beckett to make his art. (For one thing, I have no interest in being married to an embittered ex-artist.) But his art-making commits him to hours elsewhere, in addition to the hours he spends at his job, and I want him here. Meanwhile, to what am I committed? Hours on my own with the Critter, during which I marshal us through a routine of diaper changes, meals that end up on the floor, bundling him up for the necessary daily trip outdoors, settling him down for the necessary naps, nursing and then nursing and then nursing ... and then doing most of my work at night, while the Critter sleeps, beginning with a few minutes to work on my own writing before I turn to the job, which usually keeps me up well past the time I should have gone to sleep.

Of course, this way of looking at my life is only one way of looking at my life. Yesterday, while Beckett was away at the studio, I stayed at home and passed most of the day on our bed, cuddling with a lethargic, moderately feverish Critter. I read, he slept, we listened to music, and eventually the honeyed sunlight faded from the bedroom. It is a day I will remember for the rest of my life.

How Do You Do It?

Or, Life as a Work-at-Home Mom

I work while the Critter naps and at night, after he has gone to bed, sometimes until 1:00 or 2:00 or even (two or three times) 3:00 in the morning. By then, the Critter usually has joined Beckett in bed, and so my favorite time of the day is at the end of it, when I creep quietly as I can into the bedroom, lie down, and cuddle in the darkness with my two boys. More weekends than not, I work as much as I do during the rest of the week, though I try to keep at least Saturday evening free for a Netflix video with Beckett on the couch. Between naps and before dinner is the time for grocery shopping, getting and returning library books, Music Together, playdates, and trips to the tot lot, park, or Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I make dinner, keep track of our budget and spending, and try to manage the tides of clutter that wash through the apartment. Beckett washes the dishes, takes out the garbage and recycling, keeps the bathroom and litter box clean, and (usually) does the laundry. I vacuum when I can. Piles of paperwork, bills, and who knows what else drift from my desk to the top of my bureau to the dining table and back again. My to-do list is four pages long.

The sitter comes for a few hours on Tuesdays, and now we have two full days each week at the day care center for the Critter. Friday was his first full day there. I went to the office (my client's) and called the day care center at 2:30, just after nap time. "He's eating well, slept a little, crying some," I was told. I almost cried myself. Why was I at the office? Why was he elsewhere?

The Artist in the Office

Yesterday, a conversation with writer and artist Summer Pierre on the Brian Lehrer show. Her book is The Artist in the Office. Of particular interest was her insight that the office job is not necessarily a soul-sucking affair; it can actually be a source of material.

As for me, I create my art at the office, which is in the bedroom and next to the nursery. I'm working hard at Rule #1. In a photo taken yesterday, the ugly truth.

Today, a little better.

The Critter at the office.

Keeping the Shitbird at Bay

I've passed the last six months working too much and too hard. I would like to say that in the meantime, I've forgotten who I am, except that I have always worked too much and too hard. In truth, I've forgotten not who I am, but who I'd like to be. The self-defeating part of me, which my writing teacher calls "the shitbird," would like me to keep busy, keep forgetting, keep going through life as though life were something to get through. Meanwhile, over the past several weeks, even while I was working, I watched myself and my usual ways of writing and not writing, and I discovered my rules for being a poet. Though they are obvious, I do forget them. I'll be posting them over my desk.

1. Keep your desk clean.
2. Write every day.
3. Keep a journal.
4. Read poetry.
5. Read about poetry.
6. Write a shitty draft and trust the process that follows.
7. Create a persona.
8. Be aware of the emotional core of the poem.
9. Remember that no-one wants to hear you complain.

Maybe Mom Was Wrong

As I wrote earlier this week, Rhona Mahony’s book Kidding Ourselves has gotten me thinking about my power to bargain with my artist husband. Mahony argues that women will not achieve economic equality until the cessation of the sexual division of labor, in which fathers tend to be the primary breadwinner in their families and mothers tend to be the primary homemaker and parent. Though Mahony does not argue that every couple should evenly split the “second shift” of unpaid labor—she rather envisions a future in which labor is evenly distributed between men and women across society—she does hope to give women the tools to negotiate for a better deal in their marriages.

According to Mahony, marriage is itself a kind of negotiation, which she defines as “any situation in which two or more people are interdependent, have some perceived conflict, can use strategic behavior, and have room for agreement.” Partners cooperate to create value—money, time, security, and happiness—and also compete to claim that value (which is not to say, by the way, that they don’t also share some of that value). In competing for that value, partners can stick tight or make trade-offs between and among interests, needs, and positions, and one partner tends to have an advantage over the other in this competition. In heterosexual relationships, the partner with the advantage tends to be the man, because the man tends to have the better “BATNA”, or “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”. To put it bluntly, men tend to have less to lose by leaving the marriage, which gives them better bargaining power within the marriage.

Before the birth of the Critter, I clearly had the better BATNA than Beckett. Even as a freelancer, I earned more than he did; plus, my potential for earnings are greater, my vocation (unlike his) does not tie me to living in or very near an expensive urban center, and the costs of pursuing my avocation are much lower than his, which include the rent on a studio and the need to purchase expensive paints and other materials. With the birth of the Critter, however, as happens for most women in heterosexual couples upon the birth of a first child, my threat point went much higher. In other words, any threat that I might leave is now much less credible than it might have been before: I am unlikely to leave both Beckett and the Critter, and leaving with the Critter would be way, way, way more difficult than it would be without him. The current economic downturn has also raised my threat point; my income just isn’t what it used to be (whose is?), and for the first time Beckett is bringing home more than I am (though we’ll see where things stand by the end of the year).

Below: The Critter, raising our threat points to new heights, despite having the worst BATNA of all

Despite my newly higher threat point, Beckett is gamely taking on an increasing share in the household work, and often (though hardly always) without my having to make much of a fuss. Maybe my BATNA, and thus my bargaining power, is still relatively good, or at least not that much worse than Beckett’s; maybe he’s just a great guy. But I shouldn’t fool myself. For one thing, by far the majority of the Critter care falls to me—more on that later. And for another thing, we’ve been “dealing with” a good part of the household work by doing it less frequently or not at all, which troubles me (and therefore costs me) a great deal more than it does Beckett.

Analyzing one’s relationship with a beloved spouse in terms of economics and game theory is probably not all that appealing to many (most?) people, but I must confess that I’m taking great pleasure in Mahony’s book and the insight it has given me just to see what changes I want to make and what obstacles might be in the way of making those changes. And anyway, I’m taking the economic analysis of our relationship pretty lightly, because the one thing that gives both Beckett and me a lousy BATNA has nothing to do with either our earning power or the costs of making our art. The truth is, both of us were pretty darn unhappy until we met each other.

Coming soon: commitment mechanisms and Critter care …

The Third Shift

My mother once told me I should marry rich. Alas, alas; instead, I married an artist.

I have tended to think of Beckett’s artistic ambitions both as in conflict with my own and as a financial burden on our relationship. However, I've been reading Kidding Ourselves, by Rhona Mahony, and am now reconsidering many of my assumptions about my unconventional life. Although marrying an artist has thus far resulted in high financial costs for me, it has also given me unusually good bargaining power, which I am probably not yet fully wielding exploiting using.

But, more on bargaining power later, I hope. I started to write a post about it this weekend, and some 750+ words later I realized that I needed to think things through more thoroughly before posting any conclusions. Meanwhile, I've learned that about a month ago at a conference on human resources, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch bluntly stated, "There's no such thing as work-life balance." Hem. Really? Maybe not if you want to be a CEO, but what about the rest of us? Are we all supposed to work as though nothing really matters but the job? I could say more on this angle, but much has already been said on other blogs, such as The Daily Dish (with Conor Friedersdorf filling in for Andrew Sullivan), 11D, and GeekyMom.

My take on this topic is a little different. First, let's be clear that the term "work-life balance" is a misnomer. Actually, what needs to be kept in balance is the time devoted to paid labor—one's vocation or job—and unpaid labor—homemaking and child care, or the "second shift" that falls disproportionately to women. So plenty of work is being done at home, and really the whole thing is one's life—paid labor, unpaid labor, and, one hopes, some time for leisure. Except that in my case (and in Beckett's case, too) the time for leisure is the time to take care of the "third shift": the artistic work. And so I tend to feel that discussions of work-life balance—or job-home balance, or whatever—don't satisfactorily address my situation. I imagine that I'm not the only woman who feels as I do. For one thing, whereas these discussions tend to assume that one's ambitions lie in the realm of paid work, for me, my job is really just a job. My ambitions lie elsewhere. And for another thing, the balance I must find is between not just the time and attention my job requires and the time and care the Critter and our home require, but also the time and care my writing requires.

The Loneliness of the Work-From-Home Mom

I sit in the darkened nursery, the curtains drawn, the Boards of Canada on the CD player, the Critter asleep on my lap: this is when I get my work done. There are days when the only other adults I see besides my husband are the strangers on the street and at the grocery store. Otherwise, I connect with other people mostly through the screen: e-mail, Facebook, this blog. I have the telephone numbers of a couple other local mothers, and I'm hoping to get over my natural shyness, call them, and make some "dates," however awkward they may be. In the meantime, this isolation cannot be good for the Critter. It's certainly not good for me. When did it happen that the workplace became the main nexus of community and companionship? In my first several months as a freelancer, I often got lonely, but nothing compares with the loneliness of a work-from-home mom with a Critter depending on her and deadlines to meet.

Like many other breast-feeding moms, I've thought a lot about this confused article against (or sort of against) breast-feeding that appeared not-so-recently-anymore in The Atlantic Monthly. Among the many things I have wondered in response to the article is where the judgmental attitude that the writer accurately perceives toward and among mothers—about all kinds of behaviors, not just breast-feeding or bottle-feeding—comes from. My sense is the villagers are anxious now that the village is gone and we're all out here on our own, creating whatever communities we can at the tot lot, through the Web, and over the phone.