Are Mothers Opting Out of Careers to Care for Children?

A lawyer with a good shot at making partner quits. A picture shows her cradling a baby close to her breast. Since the publication of a New York Times story titled the “Opt Out Revolution,” the press has frequently reported anecdotes of high-powered, educated women who have decided to “opt out” of work in favor of full-time motherhood. The angle is that women in their thirties had mothers who fought for the right to work and raised their daughter to believe they could do anything, but it turns out that these successful women cannot balance a stressful career with childcare.Feminist Economics, which is the academic journal I work for, has published a new study on this controversial question.

The new evidence from scholar Heather Boushey refutes the idea of an opt out revolution. Boushey shows that the number of women leaving jobs to take care of children has decreased dramatically over the past two decades. The article, “Opting Out? The Effect of Children on Women’s Employment in the United States” counters media portrayal of “any exit from employment by a mother as about motherhood, not other factors, such as inflexible workplaces, labor market weakness, a decrease in men’s contributions to housework, or other reasons why women may not work outside the home.” She points to changes in the labor market, not children, as a cause for somewhat lower rates of women in the workplace more recently.

“Highly educated women, those with a graduate degree – those who the media claims have been opting out of employment for motherhood – have not actually seen a statistically or economically meaningful decline or increase in the estimated marginal effect of children on their employment,” Boushey writes. Furthermore, the effect of children on women with a high school or college degree and for single mothers has sharply decreased.

Using data from a nationally representative survey of the US population, the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) from 1979 to 2005, Boushey did not find any evidence of an increase in opting out. In contrast, she finds that especially for women with a high school or college degree and for single mothers, “the estimated marginal effect of having children at home has decreased sharply over the past two decades.” She finds that the ‘‘child effect’’ on women’s employment has fallen since the end of the 1970s from 21.8 percentage points in 1979 to 12.7 percentage points in 2005.

“The US’s 2001 recession was exceptionally hard on women workers,” writes Boushey. “They lost more jobs than they had in prior recessions, even though they lost fewer jobs than men overall.” Boushey suggests that “the opting-out story” may be simply due to the lower employment rates for workers overall since 2000.

At the time of writing the article, Boushey was a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which is a progressive think tank. Now she works for Congress as a senior economist. Her work focuses on the U.S. labor market, social policy, and work and family issues.

I think that Boushey’s work is a crucial intervention in the debate about support for women entering the workforce. Discussions of mother’s choices should be backed up by real evidence and Dr. Boushey’s article offers a rigorous, peer-reviewed analysis. The point is not that parents can easily balance their work and home lives. But we should not assume, on the basis of anecdotes, that privileged women reject the opportunities feminists have struggled for. We do need to talk about ways to support parents and enable more people to be able to choose the lives they find most meaningful.

My goal is to include more summaries of and interviews about work published in the journal or presented at the panels I attend so readers of this blog can learn from and respond to the latest scholarship. Hopefully, this will be the first of several reports.

The Month in Pictures

So we're heading to Montana, tomorrow, to spend time with my aunt and uncle in their cabin just outside Missoula.  (I know, I know: if we bought carbon offsets, this year, somebody would be very rich and we would be very poor.) I thought before I get a store of a whole new set of photos, I'd do a little photoblogging to make up for the long lapse of no posting:

After Greendaddy's parents left...and we didn't get any photos when they were here...we had a few regular days.  Greendaddy and Grasshopper tooled around in the cool bike seat my friend Jbrd gave us.



And Greendaddy experimented with taking over my old job (or my boob's old job) of putting Grasshopper to sleep...



...then he perfected it.



After a couple weeks of moseying and snoozing, we hopped on the plane with our irate toddler and went to Virginia, where Grasshopper got to bond with her cousins Katydid (who is five) and Cricket (a little older than one).  This was taken right before we went to a Pumpkin Patch:



This is the picture that shows how Grasshopper was the one little cousin who really needed a nap, but refused to take one:



At the farm with the Pumpkin Patch we spent about twenty minutes lounging in this pile of corn. Greendaddy wanted to make his own pile of corn, right in the back yard, because it was so comfortable and refreshing.  Really, on both accounts.  This is Grasshopper:



And Cricket:



And the whole bunch of us:



When we got back home, my mom came to visit, and it was Halloween.  Grasshopper appears here as a Lion.  She's wearing her friend Willy's costume, homemade by his grandmother the year before.  She won $10 at WholeFoods later on, in the costume contest my mother quickly discovered and entered her into:



And she was also either a Boohbah or Rodney Dangerfield:



I didn't think she knew how to open up candy by herself 
since we never give her any candybars.   But my baby is no fool.



Here's my mom, Greendaddy, and Grasshopper -- the only proof mom was here, as I keep aiming the camera at the baby and my husband, and nobody else.  Got to get better at that:



Mom took us to the Renaissance festival.



Grasshopper was sitting on a giant, fabulous cement pig that my mother didn't think was nearly as intersting as we are:



We went to Galveston with my mom, but we went too late to get in the water.  The weekend after she left, though, we went to Surfside and it was still warm enough to get in the water.  Two weekends ago.



Montana, where I'm going at five a.m. tomorrow, will be tough medicine for this subtropical family, but I hear we get to go cross country skiing...

Wanted: Daddy Friendly Playgroups

I received an email today from someone I don't know. A common friend referred her to me. Here is what it says:

Hi! You don't know me but I'm a student at UH working w/ Dr. B- on a thesis. I mentioned to her that I had a pair of friends doing the stay-at-home-dad thing and they were having a ridiculous time finding a playgroup for their youngest (about 16 mos.) that would allow Dad to bring her instead of Mom. Dr. B- recommended you as the man to ask about such matters. If you do have any leads on father friendly playgroups in the Houston or Baytown area, it would be a great help.

First, does anyone know of father-friendly playgroups around Houston?

Also, I would like to congratulate those fathers for taking a lead role in the care of their children. Staying at home is a big risk for any parent because it can lead to a lifetime of difficulty. Once you have a gap in your resume, it will always be there. The journal I work for, Feminist Economics, will be publishing a study next year that shows how caring for children lowers women's income over their lifetimes. I hope that these fathers will not face the same employment difficulties that mothers have. Perhaps with men taking time off, or going part-time like me, the gender norms that create the conditions for income gaps will change.

The Big L.I.

I'm going to use my favorite BabyG names in the next few posts to see which ones feel the most like our little sweetie pie. Today's name of choice: Verdita (and variants).

GreenDaddy and I have been very busy the last two years doing all sorts of little things to make the world better for Verdita: we learned to compost, planted a garden, switched to 100% wind energy, joined a food co-op, searched out local and organic foods, turned more to buying used goods, got rid of one our cars and didn't buy a new one, we started avoiding petrochemicals, stopped using shampoo (usually), switched to nature store deoderant, joined freecycle to lessen our junk load in the dumps, & continued recycling, even our glass which means driving it to the recycling plant off Highway 59 and Westpark.

There's a lot more obviously green things out there we're not trying yet, but we're working toward: I want rain barrels and solar energy and a xeroscaped lawn and a meadow on our roof and less energy sucking cracks in the home and less time in the car and more efficient fuel and all sorts of things, these are just the first that come to mind. I think we'll get around to most of these things, as our life progresses.

But there are some difficult things you have to do to make the world better for your children, and you can't twiddle your thumbs and do it when you're ready.

First thing sounds silly, but it's on my mind a lot: we have only planted one tree in our yard, and we've cut three down. Choosing where to plant a new tree, what kind to get, thinking about how it will grow, whether or not it'll bump into the neighbors' trees...we keep getting caught in this indecisiveness that means there are three years of tree growing we have wasted in this house. I feel bad about that.

But I feel worse about the big L.I. Life Insurance. And how we still haven't bought any. Even though, like a tree, it's something you need to have planted last year. Once, GreenDaddy's work was going to send over a man to give him a checkup, and we totally forgot. That's the closest we ever go to it.

We're caught up on questions the way we are with the tree: how much should we buy? from whom? what kind is best? how will we know we have the best deal? Basically, we just want to have already had it. The rigomorolle is daunting. But daunting in this way we have no business of actually acceding to. Because there's this little former baby, Verdita, who needs us not only to do what we can to save the world, but also needs us to provide her some kind of security in case we don't survive the world long enough for her to grow up in it.

Our whole parenthood we've struggled in accomplishing legal and financial issues, the way I think a lot of people who don't want to be materialistic do. You don't want money to matter. You want the way you raise your baby to be enough. And I do think the way you raise your baby is a lot. But then, you, meaning I, I really want to make sure GreenDaddy and the baby, or just the baby, can recover as gracefully as possible if I kick the bucket. Money isn't all they'd need to do that, but having no money, and being short a parent, or two, isn't what I want for the baby either.

We did finally get around to writing a will, and we got it notarized, a few months ago. So our next hurdle as financially and legally responsible parents is the insurance thing. I wasn't sure this is something that belongs on Green Parenting...but it's a parenting issue we're grappling with and I wondered what other people are doing, how other people are faring on this front, and what other perspectives on the issue people have.

Notes On BabyG

Who is, by the way, no longer a baby. She is a full blown, prancing, squawking, bluffing, bossing bundle of toddlerhood. And toddlerhood is an incredible thing – I realize now that the old doctors and aunties who write books about how to be parents were not even slightly exaggerating when they talked about the extraordinary smarty-pantsedness of these little tykes. In fact, I swear to moss and emeralds and all things pretty and green that if you put your ear to my baby girl’s ear the same way you’d put your ear to a seashell, you will actually hear the gurgling and bubbling of rapidly developing human brain. (Unfortunately you won’t be able to test this fact since my baby would bite, claw, climb, stuff an elbow inside of, yank the hair above, or kiss your ear long before it reached her ear for verification.)

Proof? In just the last few days I taught her to kick! Kick! Kick! in the pool. She's mastered the difference between her arm and her elbow. We’ve taught her to sleep without breastfeeding, to carry her potty to the toilet after she’s gone (she’s not ready to dump…) A chasing game I improvised the other day has been transformed, by her, into this: she: pulling a little ball toy behind her; Mommy or Daddy: follows her while pushing the ‘popper’ toy. Sounds harmless but it means hours of minutes ‘chasing’ the baby from room to room, in a circular fashion. The whole time we have to shout: Weeeee! Weeeee! Weeeee! And if we stop, she drops her toys and shrieks! (The twos are coming on strong)

More charmingly, I taught her to open her eyes and to close her eyes last night, in hopes it’d help when it was bedtime. Only it backfired, because she makes this hilarious effort at closing the eyes. Instead of just letting her eyelids fall normally, she expends all this effort and ends up in this fluttering eyelid state. (It reminds me of that exercise where you sit in a pretend chair, and your muscles shake and buckle, and your body’s saying: don’t tell me you’ve gone and forgotten how to sit down on the floor, because if this is the best you can do, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble…)

Living the Three Quarters Life

Yesterday, I switched to a three quarters full-time schedule for my job. I negotiated this arrangement eight months ago, but the switch depended on a new person joining the office staff and training that person to take over some of my responsibilities.

At first when I wrote out my new schedule to share with my co-workers, I felt disappointed. After all the patience and bureaucratic legwork it took to make the part-time switch, I realized that thirty hours is not dramatically different than forty hours. I will still go to work five days per week and during most of the daylight hours I will be sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen. Instead of starting work at eight, I am to start at ten the first three days of the week. Thursdays, I will leave at one so I can take a course towards my doctoral degree. Fridays, I will work a full day.

But those two hours yesterday morning were precious and wonderful. I left the house when I normally would in the morning, but instead of going to my office I wrote in the library. The whole day I felt more cheerful and energetic. My work and family life felt more balanced. It is not that I spent more time with MaGreen and BabyG, but when I got home, instead of crashing on the couch and slogging through the evening, we all went to the university outdoor swimming pool. BabyG seemed to enjoy the pool. She climbed up the small slide and slid down it about twenty times in a row. Even though the absolute quantity of time I spent with my family did not change, I think the quality of the time was better.

In order to arrange this three-quarter schedule, I had to give up a quarter of my pay, which was used to cover part of the new staff person’s salary. We could not be able to pull this off oeconomically if MaGreen did not manage our finances as carefully as she does. She keeps track of our expenses using a computer program Quicken. She spent several days earlier this summer switching us to an internet bank, turning off our landline, setting up a good Skype account, and doing various other things to save us money. Also, even though my total income will decrease, our taxes will be lower so the cut in my take home pay is less than the total cut in my gross pay.

I hope I continue to feel good about the three quarters life and that it also helps MaGreen and BabyG feel a good balance in their lives too.

Families Rising

I know it is a little late to share a father's day e-card, but this one really gets at Green Parenting issues. It was released by Families Rising, which is an effort by MomsRising to open to men. I encourage all the US folks out there to add their names to the email list so we can all put childcare issues at the forefront of the national agenda. (Please share info about similar efforts outside the US if you know of any.)

Tale of a Fateful Trip

I am yankering to begin this story about our camping trip to Bastrop State Park by assuring you readers that it really taught the Green family a lot about what we should do better on our next trip. Which you know means one thing: everything went wrong.

It did. Wrongness was the most confident and reliable member of the camping party GreenDaddy, BabyG and I set off on with our friends Gemini, Araf and their five year old daughter, Maha. I’m fairly certain none of us would deny it.

But just in case somebody would, I’ll make my case, which begins by explaining how the site we had planned to visit, Huntsville State Park, just an hour away from Houston, was filled. Garner State Park and the clear and cool Frio River, where I really, really want to go was too far: four hours away. So we drove to Bastrop State Park, which we knew little else about except that it had a swimming pool and pine trees. I could not dismiss a forboding feeling when I heard the park (was so lame) that even though it had two lakes, it also had to have a pool.  Something seemed amiss.  

But Bastrop is two hours from Houston and had a spot open: who cares about amiss? GreenDaddy and I spent hours Friday night amassing gear...so long we skipped breakfast and were two hours late meeting up the next morning. Then, though she didn’t scream the whole two hours, our child refused a nap and earned high high-maintenance marks.

Bastrop Park was hot. Our site was hilly, BabyG tripped, and this made her cry until daddy took her for a walk. We forgot ice. When Gemini and I went to buy some, I asked the cranky old lady in the park store where we could swim, and she told us nowhere: the pool was closed and no wading or swimming was permitted in the lakes or creeks. Since we were planning to paddle, I asked if water-contact was prohibited because the water was somehow dangerous, or if it was just a protected ecosystem. She said it was an ecosystem, and wouldn't say more. When an old volunteer guy carried our ice to the car, I asked him how to cool off. He said drive five miles to the lake in the neighboring park. We eventually did: it was a crowded, swimming-pool-sized, fairly shallow area in a lake otherwise meant for water skiers and that, Maha said (dismissivley) smelled like ketchup: otherwise it was perfect.

That night, BabyG peed the bed. Twice. It was blistering cold outside, for Texas, and we were serenaded by the continuous humming, honking and buzzing of cars passing on the nearby highway. Half the pan of oatmeal fell into the fire, that next morning. BabyG started saying bye-bye to everybody, which meant: okay, I’m ready to have been back in Houston three hours ago.  

Instead, we headed to the lake you couldn’t swim in, to kayak and fish. It turned out we were missing GreenDaddy’s kayak oars, so he and Araf rented a canoe and then Araf went fishing. It took forty mintutes to put the Klepper kayak together, after which, Gemini, Maha, BabyG and I climbed into the canoe. I took one oar as Gemini had never paddled before, and GreenDaddy took the other in his kayak.

Maha, almost immediately, wanted to go fish with her dad, and BabyG was unabashedly unimpressed with her life-jacket. She performed her best shrieking raptor imitation, non-stop, until I stopped paddling and breastfed her. Gemini didn't want to take the helm as the canoe thing was new to her. She thought she'd kill us. She didn't though: she caught on to paddling nicely.

When we reached Araf, he said he’d like a ride. GreenDaddy jumped waist deep in the water to help moor us as we transferred vessels. When Gemini’s family came back, we all decided to picnic on what ended up being waterlogged veggie burgers. Yum. After eating, we packed up and headed to our respective homes.

Fast forward twelve hours and note how GreenDaddy’s body is a minefield of flatworm infestation. It looks like countless mosquito bites. Initially, I felt sorry for him, but didn't pay much attention. When the bites seemed to multiply, I searched the internet and discovered he has swimmer's itch: bites made from a parasitic worm that cycles through snails and ducks until humans stupidly offer up their, apparently, duck-like skin. Its itch is severe (like poison ivy) as opposed to mild (like insect bites) according to the Center for Disease Control. He has over 74 bites.

So, it’s like I said, we learned a lot about what to do better, next time.

But it's also like what I didn’t say, but what GreenDaddy and I talked about half the way home. As BabyG slept peacefully in her Aloha carseat, and we were following the wildflower drenched highway back to Houston (and there were dozens of varieties of wildflowers out this weekend: in purples and reds and yellows and golds and whites and lavenders...) we talked about how we both felt toatlly relaxed. Stress-free for the first time in months.

And it occurred to us, as it has occurred to all campers at one point or another, that the swim in the grass-filled and pondy bottomed lake, the making due with imperfections, the passing of intensely intimate time with another family, the learning to wash two pounds of spinach in a plastic bag, the witnessing of somebody learning to steer a canoe, the blossoming friendship between BabyG and Maha, even the little part of beauty evident in the presence of motorhomes with their sewage systems, Christmas light pollution, and satellite televisions: the power of camping is that all of these tiny things come together and trump the obvious wrongs. And no matter how annoying the wrongs were at the time, by the ride home they seem to be integral parts of camping fun (except for those worm bites.)

I mean, I wrote all this just to say: we had fun. More fun than we've had in ages and ages. It was nice to spend that time with our friends and each other. And though next time we’ll be sure not to wade in shallow lake water we’ve been told not to swim in, and we’ll remember toys for the baby, and we’ll make simpler meals, and we’ll get up earlier and swim in cooler water…something else unexpected will happen. And we’re looking forward to finding out what it will be.

Economics for Humans by Julie A. Nelson

I was surpised a few years ago when I found out that economics comes from the same root as ecology. The common root is oikos, which is Greek for home or household. Back in the seventeenth centure, if you read a book of oeconomics, you would find dinner recipes, home remedies, and advice on managing expenses. Green Parenting is a 21st century blog of oeconomics in a way. The archives of this blog are largely dominated by our documentation of how we cook, what we throw away, what utility companies we use, and our struggle to share responsibilities. Then all of a sudden, we post about the World Bank or Global Warming. You see, we're harking way back to the oeco- in economics and ecology, like we're ancient Greeks. Call me Aristotle, baby. We're erasing the modern boundary between the public and private, the domestic and the civic, the personal and the political. Agoramania in the blogosphere!

A book called Economics for Humans helped me think through what it means to question the separation of what goes on inside a home and what happens in the global economy. Published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press, the book moves from economic history to the challenges people in the United States face now. I think what's most interesting about the book is that Nelson takes aim at right-wingers who think the marketplace solves all problems and "her friends," who believe that corporations are intrinsicly evil. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Probusiness, neoliberal zealots firmly believe that the economy is a machine. They assert that any direct concern with ethics or care is unnecessary because a market economy automatically serves the common good. Antimarket critics also believe the economy is a machine. They assert that ethics and care are impossible within capitalism since the system automatically runs on the energy of self-interest and greed. Either way, the metaphor forces us to divorce the "body" concerns of economic provisioning for our lives from the "soul" concerns of social responsibility and caring relationships. The economy-as-machine metaphor has blinded us to the real-world qualities that make humans work and care and organizations run.

Non-profits, she argues, are not necessarily the instruments of good. Nelson gives examples of corporate hospitals that provide better benefits to their workers than non-profit hospitals. She's extremely critical of lefties who think of non-profits, churches, and volunteers as mop-up operations for the inevitable destruction of mega-multinational corporations. She's also critical of those who insist that government has no place in making sure everyone has access to childcare, eldercare, quality healthcare, and paid leave. She argues that the first step to addressing the caring crisis - a crisis I believe most parents are acutely aware - is to jettison the economy-as-machine metaphor. Then we'll be able imagine pragmatic solutions that involve corporations, non-profits, government, and individual responsibility.

I talked to an economist who specializes in the study of big corporations about Nelson's arguments. This person said, "We know the economy isn't a machine, that's Introduction to Economics stuff." Maybe that's true, but it's that Intro to Econ rhetoric that actually drives the public debate. Most of our politicians and journalists didn't get past that intro class. So I would recommend this book, along with The Invisible Heart by Nancy Folbre, for anyone who wants to learn a humanist and feminist economics.

Must Green Parents Be Rich Parents?

Before BabyG was born, MaGreen and I saved a little each month like a good bourgeois couple. Even though we didn’t make huge incomes from our teaching and editing jobs, we were paid decently. We lived in moderation but did not have to count every penny. Right after BabyG was born, the balance of our income and expenses did not change much. I took all of my vacation days and my supervisor allowed me some flexibility. Though it was stressful, MaGreen and I managed to care for BabyG without any substantial extra expense or loss of income. After two months, I had to return to the regular schedule for my full-time, five days per week desk job. And MaGreen had to kick her own studies into highgear. So we started to pay for childcare and we went from saving money to barely breaking even.

According to the 2005 US Census statistics, our income is thoroughly average. We make about 125% of the median family income for a 3-person family in the state of Texas. (In the US, the disparity of wealth is huge. A relatively small number of people make way more money than we do. For this reason, the average income is a lot higher than the median income.) In terms of income, our family is the representative American family. We’re the 21st century Cleavers. So if we are barely breaking even that means families below the median income – half of the families in the US – are probably not barely breaking even. They’re just breaking. Despite the high GDP per capita here, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ranked the US second to last for child well-being among economically developed nations. The US was at the bottom or near it for nearly every category including income poverty, reading levels, aspirations, and child mortality. Check out the full Unicef report (1.5MB pdf).

Unlike a very large percentage of our fellow Americans, I think we have the minimum “capabilities and functionings” to call our lives dignified. Our incomes, education levels, assets, and status allow us to raise BabyG with enough attention that she won’t have a childhood of deprivation. We don’t deprive ourselves either. But I want more than the minimum. I don’t just want to attain the lowest threshold of dignity. I want to spend less time at my desk and more time with BabyG. I want to have an exercise routine. I’d like to write my novel. I’d like to do more community organizing. So I asked my supervisor to get my workload reduced to 75%. Instead of working 40 hours per week on average, I would work 30. And it looks like my request might go through by August. I am very excited. Even though I haven’t even started the new schedule yet, I feel a tremendous sense of relief. The problem is that if I work a 75% schedule, I will make 75% of my previous salary. We will go from slightly above median family income to below the median and from barely breaking even to going into debt.

So I decided its time to count the pennies. We need to cut our monthly expenses by several hundred dollars! I logged into all of our accounts and compiled all the expenses from checks, cash cards, and credit cards. Then I assigned the individual expenses to one of the following categories: childcare, education (tuition and books for MaGreen and me), professional development, rent, miscellaneous (gifts, clothes, toys, etc.), groceries, eating out, telecommunications, transportation, energy, health, cash, bank fees, and entertainment. Finally, I made a table showing monthly totals under each category so I could get a sense of what stays the same and what varies.

Out of our expenses, childcare, education, and rent account for 65% of the total. Those are fixed costs. We can’t change those arrangements without hurting our quality of life and our future. Groceries are a whopping 8% of our expenses. Buying organic vegetables adds up. We thought eating out would be the obvious “culprit,” but even though we go to restaurants two to three times a week that’s only 4% of our expenses. We spend more on our telecommunications (phone line, cell phones, internet connection, and webhosting) than we do on eating out. Since I bicycle to work and MaGreen drives our old Mazda about ten miles per week, our transportation costs are low. And even though we buy our electricity through a windmill company, our utility bills aren’t that high. So it’s not clear to me what we can cut without sacrificing our emerging green lifestyle.

MaGreen went over the numbers and we talked about them over dinner. We decided to eat out less and cook more with cheaper ingredients without giving up on organics. We’re going to look for cheaper telecommunications deals. And we’re hoping that by tracking our expenses more carefully, we can generally rein them in. I’ll post how we’re doing the next time we do the calculations. Wish us well!

The Innies and Outies of Interpreting BabyG

BabyG has become an expert at identifying her favorite words in the world around us. She spots miniature cat ornaments nobody else notices and screams: “Baicy! Baicy!” since she calls all cats after our own, Percy. In other people’s homes, she giggles wildly if she comes across a stuffed dog before addressing it: “woof woof!” or if she sees a picture of a cow: “moo! moo! moo!”

If you say, “BabyG, where’s your belly button?” she opens her mouth like you’ve reminded her of the most incredible idea in the world, hitches her dress up and points. “Bay bay!” she croons, hanging slightly on each of the ‘y’s.

In her picture books, she points at babies and says, “baybay.” Faster than a belly button, but the same word.

When she’s on the potty, or she has to go poo, she says, “bay bay,” only this time, the ‘b’s are very slightly sharpened…not quite ‘p’s yet, but on their way.

Finally, there is the word which, when she's in an enunciatory mood, may come out "bye-bye" or "bye" or "bay-bye" – but just as often comes out "bay-bay."

I figure she’s determined to use words to their full potentiality at this tender age. That she wants to reuse, renew and recycle syllables in order demonstrate the innate connection between the words we use and the way we use the world. And I am very proud of her for making such an intelligent stand at such an early age.

The only problem is that sometimes she drops whatever’s in her hands as if she’s been suddenly shocked by something she sees, points her tiny finger, and says, significantly, as if she’s introducing somebody to the queen: “Bay bay!”

And then you have to figure out what she’s pointing at: the potty, a baby, a belly button…or, God forbid, some new thing she’s decided should be signified by her favorite two syllables. Because not only does she want to point it out for her, she wants you to agree that she’s right by looking at whatever it is she’s found, pointing at it yourself and saying, “Yes, BabyG, Bay Bay.”

The other morning she was sitting in her highchair, eating some of her coveted frozen blueberries, when she began frantically pointing at the closed closet door and chirping: “Bay Bay! Bay Bay!”

“No, BabyG, there’s no Bay Bay, there,” I said, when I walked in from the kitchen to see what the commotion was about.

“Bayyy Bayyyy! Bayyyy Bayyyy! Bayyyy bayyyy!” she insisted, making the ‘y’s as distinct as possible.

By this time she was doing her best to jump up and down in her high chair, leaning as far out of it as she could (thank God that Svan is so well balanced). I stared into the door like you do at those 3D stereograms, and noticed she was pointing specifically at the closet’s missing door knob...

Which is, you will note if you take the time to move your mouse over the picture below...

quite clearly, an "innie."

Blogger is not Green

This might work. I have hacked into the html code, and will upload the whole blog.

We aren't ignoring the world. We switched to the new and "better" "Beta" "Blogger" but so far it has only been new. It won't let us upload any files. It won't register that you've commented, although if you click on the comment links (0 comments), you'll see any comments left. Anybody publishing via ftp & vdeck is, as the teenagers used to say, screwed.

We are using vdeck and publishing via ftp.

So since GreenDaddy's last post, we haven't been able to regularly publish. One post got through on a glitch. And I'm hacking this one in to see if it will work.

Muy deflating.

Highlights You Might Not Expect From the Holidays:

• 
  
• My stepmom thinks I'm Caroline Kennedy. Really.
• She thinks my father is four different men named Lou.
• We like my sister's fiance, and he works for Homeland Security.
• BabyG made her happy, and vice versa.
  
• BabyG got some plastic electronic toys from the family that she ADORES.
  
• BabyG hung out with all her grandparents and started feeling comfortable around them.
  
• BabyG and I saw our friends' Julie and Jeff's incredible property, filled with Redwoods,outside of San Jose.

Introducing our New Line of Blog Action Figures: GreenDaddy, MaGreen & BabyG

Last week GreenDaddy suggested that we'd have to kill Green Parenting for when I go out on the job market next year, because if people Googled my name something might spook them. So that night I painstakingly changed all our names to fit the others in BlogLand. It’s only half done…the rest will soon follow. I had been considering doing it anyway, because I can’t stop worrying about the saftey of posting both pictures of BabyG and her name. I figure I can get away with one or the other, safely. I love the sound of her name, I love writing it…but I would rather post photos.

This issue brings up what I can already see will be a great challenge for me as a parent: naming boundaries in the name of BG’s safety. I’m not a real rule-maker sort of person; I don’t want to be over-afraid. But because of mistakes I’ve made in my own life, I know I error in the direction of not-enough-consideration-of-possible-dangers. I want to be more thoughtful, more wise in choices I make for BG.

This choice making comes up in so many different ways. In the simplest of ways, it’s just letting her explore. The other night we were at a restaurant, and she was standing up on the booth, holding onto the edge of a cement table. I worried she was going to slip and hit her chin on the cement edge, even though I was right next to her and she couldn’t fall far or hurt herself badly. But I wasn’t hovering over her, I wasn’t that vigilant. If she slipped I knew it would hurt, but I thought it was better to let her explore, to stand there, to be a baby. And then she slipped and banged her chin, and she bit her lip and she howled. And I felt so stupid and terrible. The woman sitting next to me said, “I was waiting for that,” and gave me a tsk tsk look.

I tried to explain that it’s so hard deciding what to let the baby try. Or how hovering you should be. But she just looked at me like I was insane.

A much more complicated issue of choosing boundaries and dangers your child your face is in discussing immunizations, an issue we somehow missed discussing on Green Parenting. There are three camps: 1) Don’t immunize because the shots might be detrimental to your childrens’ health (especially if they contain Mercury, though are made without Mercury now; you can ask your doctor what kind of shots he/she gives); 2) Pick and choose what you’ll give the baby…some might give babies shots for the most serious diseases, but not “mild” ones, and others might not give babies shots for sexually transmitted diseases; 3) Immunize completely because you don’t want your baby at risk for a preventable disease for the rest of his/her life and because the older they are, the more difficult it is for them to take the shots.

For me, this issue is about choosing between two evils nobody wants to think about: poisoning your baby accidentally or not preventing their susceptibility to a potentially life-threatening disease. You hope neither will happen, and probably neither will. I prefer the possible accidental poisoning, because I think it’s less likely to happen than the other. But I don’t know what is in the shots, exactly; they might have had adverse effects. I just don’t know, the way I don’t know exactly the effect of a medicine on me twenty years from now. But I take it. It is risky. I know they've changed vaccines because of the protests of parents over the last two decades -- they're much safer. And vaccinating BabyG means she won't be spreading diseases to other peoples' children. Also, BabyG will probably be traveling in countries where there isn't a vaccine blanket, like there is in the US. I'd also rather know now if something goes wrong, than spend my life afraid I've set her up for a gigantic disaster. What if she got polio? How would I explain that to her? I'll always remember my grandma's description of caring for five babies with whooping cough, two of whom nearly died…because her sister convinced her not to vaccinate them. It turned her completely off to "natural" parenting of any kind.

I really worried about giving the vaccines, and luckily, they didn’t bother her at all. I cried when she got them, though. It was so frustrating to do tons of research, and to find no clear-cut answer. Proponents of either side of the issue implied the parents on the other side were negligent or worried about the wrong thing. But many of my friends swung the other way, and didn’t vaccinate at all. They were just as worried about their choice as I was. There wasn’t an easy choice. This choosing the better danger; this choosing the boundary business in the name of a defenseless baby’s, my defenseless baby’s livelihood is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Anonymizing on the internet is another aspect of these boundaries. We chose, at first, not to be anonymous. I was always worried about that choice, though. It’s less clunky to use real names; it’s more ‘real.” But I always felt slightly uncomfortable. The gamble is that no crazy freak will come after the baby we named and posted photos of on the internet. Probably none ever would have.

But how would I explain to my child that I just felt safe...oops…if all this backfired? Or explain it to myself if something went even more wrong? It’s easier for me to be experimental with things like her falling and bumping her chin. And the funny thing is, it’s much more likely she’ll fall and bump her chin in a certain scenario, than she’ll get a disease or she’ll be bothered by a crazy internet viewer. And I allow her more leniency to fall in situations where the fall is likely; my fear is greater in these things like immunization or random crazies, they’re so much less likely, but the stakes are so much higher.

So now we're named like a superhero family, which I guess we can handle. I still have more names to change, and then it’ll probably be several months before you can’t find this website through our real names.

If it hadn’t been such a pain to change so many names, post by post, I would have had a contest to choose the best names for our family. I didn’t think of that until too late. GreenDaddy did think of choosing names similar to our real ones…Roy, Myra, and Lola or something. But in the end we both preferred being obviously anonymous to being secretly so.

This post is all over the place, I know. I’d love any advice on how to make good boundaries. On when to know if you’re loopy with ridiculous fear or loopy with ridiculous fearlessness. And does anybody know if there’s a find and replace feature that can be attached to Blogger?

I Love My Poetic Husband

We've had a very stressful last week or so...BabyG got strep that turned into very mild scarlet fever...and was understandably, vociferously, and persistantly aggrieved...GreenDaddy got an unknown, draining sickness and a headache...I tried to study every spare moment...GreenDaddy's hardrive crashed with an already-three-days-late joint project on it...I started making the stressed-out grimace GreenDaddy hates...it rained inside my car which smells like rotting corpse breath, now...BabyG was too sick to do her favorite weekend-at-the-pool-with-Daddy routine...

And now my comps are a week away! I study every night until 2am because I get at least three, sometimes four hours of absolute alone time.

In all this muck, GreenDaddy wrote me a poem...And I wanted to post it because my concept of Green Parenting isn't just about junk mail, overgrown gardens, and the general lifestyle of dirty hippies: it's about relationships, and supporting not only the children in the family, but the grown-ups...and I feel so lucky to have a poetic, caring, supportive husband at this juncture that I could cross the street with my eyes closed.


A Great Vibration

When I took courses in physics I learned about particles
about the resonance of benzene rings
about the supposed measurability of all things
as if a meter exists for all phenomena
and if a given meter does not exist
it will be invented.

In philosophy courses I learned about limits to knowledge
about the failure of metaphors to describe the electron
about the difference between the wavelength for red
and the lived experience of redness
as if the connection between consciousness and the world
will never ever be understood.

And yet, at midnight last night,
when I walked out of the bedroom
there was a great vibration
not in the air
but in the substratum
in the ether
in the layer of the universe that Michelson and Morely
proved does not exist
and I could sense that it was coming from your head.

Your books were spread across the table
-- the classics, the masterpieces, the cannon! --
and you had turned them into something shimmering
like a thin layer of water
spilling over a dark stone.






 

A Male Primary Caregiver Tells All

A few months back, I heard from my old friend Darragh. He had seen our blog and found my email address. During the time we hadn't been in touch, he had become a dad too. His wife, who I went to medical school with before I quit, is training as a surgeon. She is half Chinese, half white. Darragh, who is from Ireland, is staying home as the primary caregiver, or PCG as he likes to put it. I'd like to share a mini-interview we did by email.

What's it like being a male PCG?

We are in a small town in Ohio called Gallipolis. Jocelyn is two weeks into an eight week rotation in a rural hospital. We love it here, the town is on the Ohio River and so is the small house we stay in. There are great hiking trails in the area. I use a Baby-Bjorn when hiking; both Meilyn (the baby) and Deckard (the dog) love it.

Being a male PCG, I obviously have a strong bond with Meilyn due to the time we spend together. We have exclusively breastfed her since birth, with the help of an electric breast pump. When Jocelyn feeds her directly from her breast it keeps the physical and emotional bond strong between them.

Another observation I have is that I will dress Meilyn with comfort being the primary concern and the child will stay in these clothes until they are dirty or no longer comfortable. Women in general tend to inflict their habit of constantly changing what they wear onto the child. She is not a doll. Men rule O.K.

What are your thoughts on childcare as an Irishman living in the States?

My biggest fear of raising a child in America is the quality of the public education system here. Ireland, although not flawless by any means, has an excellent public education system. All social and economic classes educate themselves together as private schools are virtually non-existent. Ireland also offers free third level education across the board (not means tested). This system not only reduces the poverty cycle but helps cement a singular sense of community that has a greater social conscience. A far less abrasive class and social system exists in Ireland than in America, in part because of this. I believe high quality education exclusively for the wealthy is immoral.

What do Americans take for granted that they should question?

As a guest in this country I am always uneasy criticizing America, especially in these overly patriotic times. The blind patriotism is diminishing slowly but surely and giving way to a more subtle blend of undiplomatic international arrogance. Despite my preceding statement please note that I do not want to convey the notion of a sinking hell that is America and Ireland or anywhere else for that matter as a shining beacon of social moral virtue. We are not concentrating on the imperfections of Ireland (of which there are many) or elsewhere, at this moment in time.

A society that cannot constantly examine its flaws, re-think, re-position, renew itself militarily, socially, and economically is a country that is not evolving, a country that is doomed. I am glad to say that America will always be a country that has a disgruntled public voicing their opinions. I say to all these people whether they are the minute men (with whom I disagree) or they be the anti-war protesters (with whom I do agree), "Shout louder, keep kicking the elephant or the donkey whomever it may be."

To live in a time that quells these voices, such as the firing of Peter Arnett by NBC, uncontrolled wire-tapping, and every other violation of civil liberties that hides under the disguise of the Patriot Act or the “war on terror,” has lead this country down a blind path. This leads me to Abu-Grab, one of the greatest single unanswered injustices in the Iraq war. I have heard celebrities on late-night talk shows make light of these horrors, to the cheering of the live audience. It is at times like these that I can understand how some German citizens took the path they did in WW2 (blind, ignorant patriotism). Am I over-reacting? Can I see the woods for the trees? Please tell me.

Urban Nature Skills

This morning I woke up as our baby tossed and turned next to me. She poked me and whined in my ear even though she hadn't quite woken up either. I picked her up, walked over to the living room, and got the potty out. Once I put her on the potty, she cried briefly and then focused. A few minutes later, she shook her fist and evacuated herself. Then I put her back in the bed next to MaGreen and got ready for work.

I had to walk to work because I left my bicycle there yesterday. Now, over the past ten years, I have lived in Chicago, New York, and Houston, three of the four biggest cities in the US. For six out of those ten years, I have not had a car. Most of the time, I have walked and used trains to get where I need to go. When I lived in Brooklyn, I spent two hours everyday underground riding the subway, crushed in those metal boxes with the city's teaming humanity. And yet, during this decade of big city living, I have never mastered the bus.

How they confounded me, the buses. I was in awe of them. How they rushed by like beasts so big my flesh did not interest them. Even so, I often imagined them hopping up the curb, consuming me, and moving on without stopping.

Buses also symbolized to me a low rung in the socioeconomic ladder that I have never had to cling to. When I grew up in Mobile, Alabama and I read about Rosa Parks refusing to give her seat up to a white man in Montgomery, my first reaction was, "What was a white man doing on a bus?" During the thirty years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and my childhood, most white people got cars and moved to the suburbs. And like Alabama's other public institutions, the bus system went neglected and whatever remained was left to black folks. That idea of buses has stuck in my head.

These past two years, since I sold my car and have aimed to live responsibly while hoarding enough wealth for my family, I have tried to figure out the bus system when I can't bike. On Tuesdays, I commute by train and bus from Rice University, where I work, to the University of Houston, where I study. During my last trip, I saw a black lady spot a bus that I couldn't see at all. She just stood up and walked to the curb. About five minutes later, there was the bus. It was like those stories of Native American trackers who could detect animals and enemies approaching when they were nowhere to be seen.

Today, after I pooed BabyG and bathed myself, I started walking towards work. This time, I decided to keep a look out for buses. If I caught one, that would be great. But I wouldn't wait for one, because if I walk fast I can get to work in forty minutes. When I reached the Richmond intersection, I slowed down and peered into the distance. I saw something. It was small. A speck. A glint of a bus's wide visage. There were two people patiently waiting at the stop. A black man and a brown lady wearing a Chapultapec Restaurant uniform. They saw that I saw and looked for themselves. In the old days, I would have walked by the bus stop with my briefcase, trying to stride my way through the heat. Today I achieved a new urban nature skill – spontaneous bus spotting. It's a skill I want to develop and pass on to my child like gardening or thinking critically.

Call me the flexible urbanist. The city tracker. The master of Metro. I rode in the air-conditioned bus, the lovely 26, to the Richmond and Main transit center. From there, I hopped onto the Metro Rail which dropped me off at the main entrance of Rice University. I reached my office in prime condition. My natural, antiperspirant-free underarms were dry and my co-workers hadn't even gotten in yet.

Be the Change You Want to See…Or Not

When we first started this blog, I wrote about the Panamanian family we staid with during our honeymoon, a family in which the mother went off to take care of American children and only saw her own children once a month. I heaped scorn on the rich mothers in LA who employ poor Salvadorans so that the rich kids get the benefit of two mothers and the poor kids get far less loving care. I wrote about how I still wanted MaGreen to have the opportunity to do paid work without being on the demand side of the global trade in motherly love. I wrote that there must be some other way.

Now it’s time to either walk the walk or eat my words. MaGreen needs to take two major exams this Fall in order to keep making progress towards her Ph.D. She must read a book per day for the next two months. Until now, she has taken care of BabyG by herself every weekday except Thursday afternoons. That one afternoon, I leave my job early so that MaGreen can teach writing to children at the M.D. Anderson cancer hospital. At this stage, MaGreen can’t prepare for the exams and take care of BabyG on her own. BabyG demands more attention now. She expects to be played with.

So I called the daycare program I put BabyG on the waiting list for. They said there were no openings. I panicked. On my way home that day, I saw a dark brown Latina woman walking with a very white two year old.

“Hello,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?” The woman just looked back at me blankly and I added, “en Espanol?” She agreed and I approached her. “I have a seven-month-old baby and we need help caring for her, two or three days per week.”

“I can work for you part-time,” she said. Her “patrones” employed her three to four days per week and she said she could take on more work. She came to our home with her husband and we talked with them. They are Guatemalan. They have a seven-year-old son in Guatemala who is being taken care of by the grandmother. When we asked what wage she would want, she said eight dollars. She said she would talk to the family down the street about splitting her time and would come back in two days with a list of references. When she and her husband left, MaGreen and I felt torn about the possibility of hiring her.

“Is it right to hire her?” we asked.

No, we thought. To hire her would be to participate in an exploitive system that tears up families. We have opposed trade pacts like CAFTA and NAFTA that cripple the ability of Latin American and Caribbean nations to create a just distribution of wealth. We should also try our best to avoid supporting this exploitative system as consumers of caring labor and instead try to participate in alternatives.

Yes, we thought. It is right to hire her. The woman has agency of her own. She did not and we did not choose the economic system that brings us together, but she did make a choice to try the life of the domestic worker in America. It is naïve to think we can live outside of the economic order. For her, getting paid to take care of BabyG could mean the option of a more promising future for herself, her son, and her whole family. Not paying her wouldn’t bring her any closer to her son. She could have a comfortable working environment in our home and really help us provide good care for BabyG while MaGreen studies.

Then I heard back from the childcare center and they said we did in fact make it off the waiting list. So I scheduled a time to take a tour of the facility. I was feeling good about childcare. It looked like we would be able to choose between two decent options, either a daycare facility or a nanny.

We went on the tour today. Although the daycare facility looked like a safe place to enroll BabyG, the actual building was junky and rundown. MaGreen and I also thought the babies looked listless and unengaged. They were watched, fed, and kept dry, but otherwise not stimulated. Also, we’d have to drop many of the parenting choices we’ve made like using cloth diapers and elimination communication. I think both us had a bad feeling in our guts, beyond regular separation anxiety. Maybe the nanny thing will work out, I thought. The Guatemalan lady had said she would come today at 6pm with a list of references. She did indeed come, not with her husband, but with her cousin and her niece.

“I won’t be able to get enough days from my current employer so I brought my niece because she can work for you,” she said. Her niece claimed to be twenty-three, but she looked more like seventeen to me. Unlike the aunt, the niece did not seem sharp or experienced. I felt bad for the niece. She spoke Spanish in clipped and slurred phrases. She’d only lived in America for seven months and didn't have real references. I knew we couldn’t hire her, but I felt obliged to keep asking questions like we were seriously considering the proposition. I made small talk and danced around the tough questions.

“Do you have lots of family in Houston?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” they said, “Bastante.”

“In Guatemala is your family in the city or in a village?” I asked.

“A village,” they said.

“Do you speak another language than Spanish there?” I asked.

“Yes, we speak Quiche,” they said.

I was in awe. What sequence of events brought these Mayan Indians into our home? Had the US funded and trained killing squads that destroyed their communities? Had US multinationals squashed their local food sovereignty in order to make huge profits off cash crops? Are national investments in the infrastructure that would lead to improvement in the quality of life in Guatemalan villages restrained by provisions in trade deals with the US? Can we, like bitter old lefties, trace the story back through the Cold War, all the way back to the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup of President Arbenz Guzman, a democratically-elected Socialist.

Here in our living room. The great big world. Our little baby girl. Their struggle to escape history. Our ambitions. Can we be the change we want to see? I’m not sure.

Raising Children Toxic Free

I found a used book called Raising Children Toxic Free. It was published in 1994 by HarperCollins. The authors, Drs. Herbert L. Needleman and Philip J. Landrigan, are both pediatricians. Both of them devoted their careers to public health research and campaigns for the regulation of toxins, especially lead poisoning. Their work back in the 1970s helped to show that even low levels of exposure to lead could harm a child's mental development. As more and more research was done by non-industry scientists, the "acceptable" level of lead in the environment and in children's blood was revised downwards several times. In Raising Children Toxic Free, Needleman and Landrigan bring their expertise as pediatric public health scientists, and their experience fighting for policies to reduce lead poisoning, to helping parents keep a whole range of toxins out of our children. They are rational. Their claims are based on evidence. At the same time, they do not believe – as we are often encouraged to believe by advertisements and corporate propaganda – that we should assume a chemical is safe until giant studies prove otherwise.

Needleman and Landrigan give five reasons for children's greater vulnerability to toxins:

1) Children absorb more through their intestines and lungs than adults.
2) Children stick their hands in their mouths after playing on the floor and in the dirt.
3) Children breath, eat, and drink more as a percentage of their total weight.
4) Children's immune and detoxifying systems are, in many cases, less strong.
5) Children's bodies are developing very quickly, so anything that alters cellular growth can have far more dramatic effects than in adults. This is also especially true with fetuses.

Given that children are more vulnerable than adults to toxins, you would think that regulations of toxins would be based on child health. Needleman and Landrigan explain that, unfortunately, this is rarely true. The chemical levels that are defined as acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency are based on what adults can tolerate.

After their basic introduction to pediatric toxicology, they discuss several major groups of toxins chapter by chapter. These are lead, mercury, asbestos, pesticides, radiation, tobacco, solvents and PCBs, and air pollution. In the back of the books, there is a household inventory, which is basically a questionnaire you can go through to determine if your child is exposed to any of these toxins and what actions you can take to reduce their exposure.

The specific sources of toxins that they cover are leaded paint, lead pipes, asbestos-insulated pipes. basement living areas where radon can accumulate, inadequately ventilated fireplaces, wood-burning stoves, storm windows that seal pollutants indoors, termite treatments, gas stoves with pilot burners, kerosene space heaters, gas clothes dryers, electronic air precipitators, furnace humidifiers, lawn pesticides, flea repellant for pets, pesticides stored in the house, old prescription drugs, motor oil, alcohol, toluene, dry-cleaning, gasoline, home insulation, cigarette smoke, glues, toilet-bowl cleaners, room deodorizers, polishes, varnishes, and paint thinners.

I highly recommend the book to parents. For that matter, I think people without kids should be interested as well. The only problem with the book is that it hasn't been revised since its initial publication in 1994. It seems to be out of print, but used copies are widely available on the internet. Their more recent book, with its decidedly less optimistic title Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World, was published in 2002 but is very hard to find. I'll try to find a copy soon and write about it.

Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott

My wife and baby have been away for a month now in Utah. I did go visit them for one week, but that was nearly three weeks ago. I missed some big moments – being with them on my first Father’s Day, BabyG's six-month birthday, BabyG winning the cutest baby prize at a festival, MaG and BabyG riding on a float in a parade, and BabyG's first tooth poking out to name a few.

I tried to compensate by pulling out all our baby manuals and reading about six-month-old babies. We have William and Martha Sears’s big book and the American Academy of Pediatrics Caring for Your Baby and Young Child. But the book I read cover to cover is called Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott. I guess Lamott’s book does not really go with the first two I mentioned. It really is a journal not a manual. The chapter titles are dates and most everything she tells you about just happened on the particular day of the entry.

I read the book hungrily in three or four sittings although I’m not sure what I was looking for. Lamott is a dread-lock wearing, black-church attending, single-mothering white woman in her thirties living near San Francisco. She was also a recovering alcohol and coke addict. There’s this picture of her on the back with an open, white umbrella propped on her shoulder. It’s the right picture. She’s that hopeful. White umbrella hopeful. And yet, as every review has noted, she is "brutally honest," which tethers the book, keeps it out of the clouds.

For example, she wrote on October 6 at 3:45 am, “My vagina ached terribly. I kept trying to push his pacifier in, but his jaw was sort of gritted, the way you are when you’re coming down off cocaine. I just couldn’t get the pacifier in. I kept feeling like I was trying to push a bit into the mouth of a wild horse.” But then the next entry is about his first smile. Later she admits to having thoughts of violence. She even makes reference to saying out loud to her baby that she’d fetch a stick with nails poking out when he wouldn’t stop crying. I told MaG about that part over the telephone and she said, “Honey, I want you to know I never have those kinds of thoughts.” I never think about getting a stick either, but when BabyG won’t be consoled I do occasionally have disturbing flashes of anger. And it’s helpful to read a book that bears witness to those kinds of thoughts. You’re less alone if you know someone else has felt the same way and, probably, more able to cope with those kinds of thoughts.

One big thing that I realized when reading Operating Instructions is that the 1980s are definitely over. The entries were written between 1989 and 1990. The language, the mentality, and the liberal politics are characteristic of the 80s. For example, she makes reference to Leona Helmsley. I haven’t heard that name for years. And I don’t think a writer today could get away with the rather innocent way she writes about attending a Black church. She rants about George Bush, meaning the father, who, in retrospect, was a moderate in comparison to his son. No mention of the big alternative parenting methods that have since become more or less mainstream, like attachment parenting. And no internet. There were no parenting blogs, discussion boards, and listservs back then. Why buy a journal of someone’s son’s first year in this day and age? Granted Lamott is a brilliant writer. But if she were writing the same book today, she would have to try much harder to differentiate her diary from the thousands of parenting blogs available on the web, many of which are insightful and provocative.

But then why did I read the book cover to cover? Why did my computer remain shut all that time? I think I was drawn to her struggle as a single parent. MaG’s in Utah taking care of our baby without my help. I’m here alone. Lamott’s story of creating surrogate family helped me think about trying to do the same. Two-parent families may not be forced to use that strategy like a single-parent has to, but I think we should anyway. MaG went to Utah because her step-mother is very sick. She went to tend to her family, but I think the month she spent there gave her family and friends a chance to tend to her and our baby too. I didn’t quite identify with Lamott's perspective. (Her relationship with the Black church really bothered me, the way she'd let older, much poorer women slip money into her pocket. It was like she was preying on a support network when she had access to other wealth as a famous writer.) But her deliberate way of parenting with family and friends – I’m into that.

A Recent Interview with My Five-Month-Old Daughter

Me: Your mom and I have been having a hard time balancing childcare, work, and taking care of ourselves. I feel like I’m failing.

My Baby: Daddy, you’re not alone. The problem is structural, not one of your own personal failure. Capitalism has turned time into a series of opportunity cost calculations. You and Mommy have to “spend” time on me by not making money through market labor. Mainstream economic models assume that any time “spent” outside the market is leisure. Although I know that you enjoy my cuddly goodness, much of the childcare you and mommy do is not leisure. It is unpaid and unvalued work.

Me: This is exactly what your mommy and I were afraid of. That you will think we always want to be doing something else besides taking care of you and that you have to compete for attention.

My Baby: Don’t worry so much, it’s probably good for me to have the need to compete for attention hardwired into my brain. Odds are that the world I have to navigate on my own will be at least as competitive as the world is right now. Our society and economic system take unpaid, caring labor for granted. We’re supposed to believe the market will magically solve every social problem, but what’s really going on is that women are expected to do childcare, breastfeeding, eldercare, housework, and civic work. Since you’re committed to sharing responsibilities with Mommy and you want Mommy to contribute to the family income, you’re getting a taste of what working women have experienced for decades. The double shift. Watching you and Mommy struggle is a good education for me.

Me: Where are you getting this from?

My Baby: You know how you like to use me as a book holder? Do you think I’m just looking at my chin or something?



Me: Oh baby, my moochie foochie poo, you can’t take what those books say as statements of immutable facts. If I knew you were reading them, I would have talked to you about why I read depressing things. Writers try to document problems so that we can work for change. You’ll see when you get older, all the knowledge you develop will help you effect change. Government policies can change. Social norms can change. The structure of the family and whole communities can change.

My Baby: You’re such an idealist Daddy. I love you.

motherhood, d'oh

last week was tough for me, which came as a huge shock.

people say having a baby is hard, and i hear that, and in the back of my head i say yes, having a baby is hard IF the mother has to have a c-section or IF the baby has colic or IF the baby is not healthy or IF the mom has problems breastfeeding or IF the spouse gets jealous of the baby or IF the mom can't stay home with the baby at least a few months or IF neither parent can stay home or IF the mother is doing it on her own or IF one of the parents is very young or IF there are two moms or two dads (so it's frowned upon by society) or IF the mom gets depressed and can't get out of it or IF one of the parents didn't want the baby at all or IF it's the second or tenth baby or IF there isn't medical help available or IF there isn't water to drink nearby or IF bombs are always dropping or IF ...IF you're not me, basically, who has it really easy because my baby is so sweet spirited and lovely and healthy and I am middle-class and in school and so get to stay home and try to raise the baby the way I always imagined I would.

whenever people ask me how its going i say: perfectly. i love it. because babyg is perfect and i love her. because greendady is a terrific, loving, supportive father. i deny being tired, i deny feeling overwhelemed, because i feel like i oughtn't feel any of these things.

so last week, when i was so sad and i felt so isolated, i couldn't figure out what was going on. because i love being babyg's mom and i love her smile and i feel so lucky, i couldn't figure out why i was so sad. and it turns out, i think, that it's simple. it really is hard being a mother. and really, being a mother is half being a mother and then half still being the you that was always a pain in the ass to be to begin with.

i feel a little like a person in aa: my name is magreen, and it is hard to be a mother. even though it could be harder doesn't mean it isn't hard. maybe just admitting it is important? maybe admitting it makes it easier because it takes so much energy denying that it's hard?

Updates

There's been a pretty long hiatus here, filled with my studying and taking my first (of three) comprehensive exams and caring for BabyG & GreenDaddy's superhuman efforts at working full-time and going to school.

So much has happened since we dropped out of blogdom. Here are some updates on old stories:

1. BABYG: started babbling (about saving the earth)
2. EC: We got so good at EC that we only had to wash diapers once a week, two or three weeks in a row...
3. EC: That phase ended and we're washing every four days, now. BabyG smiles through pees instead of screaming through them, which has thrown us for a loop.
4. NATURAL CLEANING PRODUCTS: The house has been spring cleaned with lots of vinegar and I have many updates on the home cleaning products which I am liable to share in a later post.
5. BABYG: Smiles and giggles and communicates incredible amounts.
6. GREEN LIVING: I am everyday more and more happy about the water filter a plumber attatched to our sink. That's the best green thing we've done.
7. GARDEN: Though squirrles killed most of our tiny garden, there is a giant chard that regrows everytime we cut the leaves off and eat them, there is a giant dill weed which is a fantastic looking plant, and there is a fairly twirpy looking leek doing its best.
8. CHRISTMAS TREE: Christmas holly is looking nearly dead because we never took it out of its bucket and planted it.
9. PRAIRIE, COMPOST: When we thought his parents would be visiting, GreenDaddy mowed the lawn & raked & put the scraps in the compost. Before that, I was fond of telling people that we were trying to reintroduce prairie into our back yard. In fact, I said that so much that I convinced myself it was the truth and was incredibly disappointed when GreenDaddy mowed.
10. COOLER THAN THOU: We're managing to use less than one kitchen garbage bag full of garbage a week...we compost, recycle, and use the Freecycle network to dispose of the rest of the would-be trash.
11. FREECYCLE: I have been stood up by seven or eight members of the Freecycle network who said they would come get my stuff. I called one a dip in an email to a moderater, and she acted like I wrote &#$%!, not "dip." The second round most everything was taken. I still haven't given up on Freecycle.
12. COUCH: Even though Kate gave us her couch, I didn't give away The Ugliest Couch You Have Ever Seen. Instead, I decided to use it as an experiment. I dyed one side of it by smearing shredded beets and beet water into it, then ironing it dry. It is a weird pink. I'm going to work on dying the rest of it in different vegetable or herb based dyes. Beet side looks pretty good.
13. GARDEN: One Christmas gift I gave GreenDaddy was some crystalized fox pee, to scare the squirrels away from the garden. I am excited to use it and I am aghast that I forgot to mention such an exciting acquisition earlier.
14. I HAD ANOTHER GRATUITOUS CHILDHOOD FLASHBACK THAT OSTENSIBLY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH GREEN: It involves kittens and square dancing.
15. BABYG: Can turn from her back to her side and can grab things.

16. BABYG: Has written a series of poems to the Boob. Percy the cat has written one snide little piece to it, as well.
17. PLASTICS: Woe are we who cannot wean ourselves from plastics.

Oh, Winsome Death: Ramblings

Last night while I was driving BabyG home from a local Vietnamese restaurant, Van Loc, an exceedingly cheerful song came on the radio.  Though the lyrics were in Portuguese, the tune and tone were reminiscent of goofy, go-lucky Hollywood music from 1940s.  Pina coladas, dancing, a thatched roof restaurant, the Caribbean, stars, outrageous declarations of love…I imagine the songwriter intended to conjure these sorts of images.  

Unfortunately, in this day and age a song so unconsciously blithe, so naively unsuspecting of disaster only makes a fiction writer like me exceedingly nervous.  In fact, the song probably made anybody who’s watched a movie in the last thirty years nervous, because everybody knows that unapologetically optimistic songs always equal convulsive sadness.  

So last night when that go-lucky song started playing I literally began waiting for some Hummer full of drunken club kids to come careening over and flattening me and my daughter inside our poor little Mazda.  There would be no steam coming from the grill, no screaming:  BabyG and I would be flattened and done for.  The only thing left of us would be the coming onset of sirens and devastation.  

I didn’t used to be afraid of dying.  For most of my life I have had a definate faith in death.  I’ve worked eight years at a pediatrics unit in a cancer center, and I’ve watched many of the kids I love die.  I’ve seen dying people skirting two different worlds.  Sometimes I’ve seen a certainty and calm overcome someone when death has become inevitable, and though I would rather all of my children survive their cancers, my faith in the strength and the peace of death has been shaped by my experiences with the deaths I have witnessed in the hospital.  Sometimes, I realized, death is a good thing.  And so for years, I thought I was at peace with it.  I wasn’t afraid of it.

I had believed I could handle death better than most people because of my special understanding of it, but after marrying GreenDaddy I started worrying he was going to be run over on his bike.  I couldn’t imagine how I’d be okay without GreenDaddy, or even, how the world would.  I had never though of somebody in this way before, and it unnerved, me, but my worries were fluttering and easy enough to quell.  

It’s only been with the birth of BabyG that I’ve become terrified of death and dying.  I used to think the world could go on without me, if it had to; now I can’t imagine thinking that.  I think:  I have to be here for BabyG, I am the person who looks after BabyG, only GreenDaddy and I can love her the way she needs to be loved in her childhood.  I know both GreenDaddy and I will protect her and love her and do anything we have to so that she has a good childhood.  We want to guide her into adulthood.  The only thing that seems worse than one of us dying is if anything at all bad happened to BabyG.  The other day she got shots and there I was, one of the mothers I never imagined I’d be, crying to see her get stuck with needles.  She is the most important thing in the universe, so far as I’m concerned, the most lovely creature on earth.  

So suddenly I’m afraid for me and for GreenDaddy and for BabyG.  I walk past the closet and think: those bedrails could kill fall and crush GreenDaddy, or somebody could run over BabyG and me with the stroller, or a crazy person might shoot one of us randomly.  Having a child, having the joy a child brings, feels very much like always driving around with an unabashedly cheery soundrack blasting on the stereo.  Which puts me a little on edge.  

It’s no wonder then, that through so much of my twenties, I was a diehard Tom Waits fan.  His music is the opposite of cheery;  its syrup made of all sorts of human tragedies.  Last night, it occurred to me that in the same way margarita music is a death magnet, Tom Waits’ music is a cosmic rabbit’s foot.  You can’t be smashed by a hummer when you’re listening to it.  No god could be that obvious.  

If there’s a universal force that goes around leveling unduly high levels of sadness or of delight by counterbaling them with opposing emotional states, I am in trouble.  To avoid the trouble, perhaps I can take up listening to Tom Waits again, in hopes that the cosmos will let me provide my own counterbalance to the bliss of being BabyG’s mother.  Or perhaps this isn’t a world of counterbalances, and all the movie directors are wrong.  Maybe it’s a mathematicians world, and I should seek out more positives to multiply with the ones I already have.  Maybe the world is ready for the ecstatic to kick the ironic’s ass.    

Perspective

I remember when I was a youngster, and I would catch some sort of glimpse of the world that I knew I couldn't capture in just the way I saw it. My eye would be an inch from a blade of grass, maybe, and in the background I might see a man walking, and I would hear a motor revving, and somehow the man in relation to the grass and the motor were perfect. And I despaired because it was perfect and so small, something so full of mood and unsignificant life, this tiny scene slipping into my brain and nowhere else. I understood there was no way for me to preserve and to hand that vision to the world. You couldn't take photos of these moments, there isn't the right shaped lens, there is, in the end, no lens like the eye sees.

I had forgotten all about this sort of despair until BabyG was born. I spend so much time breastfeeding, watching her face and expressions. Nobody sees them but me, and even though I try to convince GreenDaddy he should stare at our daughter nursing, since he doesn't have to be there with her and isn't actually attatched, he doesn't have -- or need -- the patience/desire it takes to just watch her.

There are so many little movements of hers I want her to know about, to see, and again I'm despairing that they can't really be caught. I don't think even filming it -- even if I was Fellini -- would catch what I want her to have. I don't feel like the world needs to see these moments, I just despair that BabyG won't ever see how she was born into the world filled with desire, and with the lungs to protest when her needs went unmet.

I read that babies are vulnerable, adorable, cute, sweet, or maybe even fussy, but BabyG is confident and intent, especially in relation to eating. She looks like an expert just as soon as my breast appears: she's calm, she assesses it, she waits to take it. If anything gets in the way, even her own hand, it makes her so angry she can't calm down enough to suckle, which makes her angrier. She has a high pitched, girly scream of frustration she uses in this moment. She makes a little grunting/humming noise and shakes her head as she attatches. With all obstacles are out of the way, and she's calmed and suckling, she looks resolute & peaceful and purposeful.

At first she gulps so much that a tiny stream of milk escapes from the side of her mouth and soaks my shirt, or sometimes hers, if I forget to put a towel below her chin. Then she screams because she's eaten so much she can't eat more, and I burp her. Then she gulps a little more, and then takes five tiny, quick sips in a row, then none for five or ten seconds; then five or six more tiny sips. When she's done, sometimes she suckles herself to sleep and I have to decide whether I want to wake and burp her, or leave her to her dreams and risk a spit-up. Other times, as GreenDaddy has written, she throws her head back all at once, her neck is extended backwards, and she focusses on some point in the distance or closes her eyes to contemplate some unknowable vision.

All this describing gets me nowhere near the vision I wish I could give to BabyG. She is already a strong little being who knows what she wants and needs. I want her to know that the secret to her own contentment and desire lies in the very core of who she is, though time and experience might confuse and bury her ability to recognize it.

Never a Net Loss in Love

I was at a conference in Oxford where a woman presented a true-cost accounting model for the global trade in caring labor. Let’s say a poor woman from India leaves her children with their grandmother and moves to Dubai to help a rich woman there take care of her kids. She sends money back to India, the grandmother does the unpaid labor of raising her grandkids, and maybe the mother in Dubai works for a real estate agency. Lots of clear economic questions to consider. When the presenter got to the question of love – the love and affection the children in India did not receive – she said, “I didn’t need to include love in the model because there was no net loss in love.” The children in India, she argued, were loved by their grandmother like they would have been by their mother.

Many people at the conference were outraged. The No Net Loss in Love theory was widely discussed at the cafeteria tables in the lunch hall. How dare she! Love isn’t a commodity like shoes or oranges that you can model with supply and demand curves. Love is the stuff of poetry. Unmeasurable.

I think the presenter was brave enough to at least try to talk about the global trade in caring labor. The LA Times ran a story November 3, 2005 about an Salvadoran woman who leaves her kids with a neighbor everyday so that she can help a rich Anglo woman take care of her kids on the other side of town. She’s one of an estimated 62,000 Latina nannies in LA County alone. These stories of poor mothers having to leave their children behind, like Nuris who we met when we staid with the Navas family in Panama, are heartbreaking. I know I don’t want to be at the demand end of this trade in love. It’s immoral. Like buying baby shoes made by children in sweat shops. I talked to my friend Ruben and he said, “when we have a baby, it’s going to be raised by family.” But you know, my mom hired daytime nannies -- white women in Mobile -- to help take care of me so that she could work. Dorothy was so nurturing to me and having a career was good for my mom, my family, and for me as a child. So I'm already a benficiary in the unequal trade of caring labor and I experienced a net gain in love.

I just want there to be another way where we think differently about how we live in our communities, where extended families are reimagined, where poor women don't have to leave their kids behind to take care of rich kids, where the state helps, and where men and women have more flexibility to leave and enter the world of paid work.

Mr. Feminist

When we found out that our baby was going to be a girl, one of my colleagues at work said, “Oh good, you can raise a little feminist.” Then she looked at me, paused, and added, “not that you couldn’t raise a boy to be a feminist as well.”

I work for an academic journal called Feminist Economics. People are often surprised that I can, as a male, even work for a feminist publication. They imagine that feminists always want women-only spaces. Then people ask what feminist economics is. A feminist stance on reproductive rights or domestic abuse, a feminist reading of a novel, or a feminist critique of magazine advertisements – people are accustomed to these sorts of feminism. But feminist economics, why would feminism matter in a world of graphs, charts, and statistical models?

Feminist economists look at all kinds of issues like women’s participation in the labor force, pay gaps, wealth gaps, marriage law, inheritance law, unpaid work, childcare, eldercare, and informal labor that are often ignored by mainstream economics. They question mainstream assumptions which are collectively termed homo economicus or the economic man. They contribute to groundbreaking models for understanding poverty, globalization, diseases, and trade. And they try to use this understanding to improve the lives of men, women, and children through public policy efforts like gender mainstreaming.

I’m not a feminist economist myself, I work on the publishing side in the editorial office. The first issue of the journal that I helped edit was a special issue on lone mothers. The cross-country comparisons were the most eye-opening. Once you see how much state support can help parents and children, the situation in the US seems immoral. The numbers are really compelling. Access to childcare, paid maternity and paternity leave, and welfare can mean the difference between well-being and poverty. Yet generous state-mandated maternity leave, like in Scandinavia, can lead to really low rates of working women and discriminatory hiring practices. That issue taught me how profoundly parenting is shaped by social norms and laws.

What I have noticed in many of the parenting magazines and parenting books is that they focus exclusively on how to raise a healthy baby. The parents’ well-being is usually in terms of the baby. You need to take care of yourself to take good care of the baby. Yeah, MaGreen and I are consumed by the desire to raise our baby well in a nontoxic environment. But I want to be vigilant about falling into patriarchal traps. Being stuck at home without the engagement and financial security of work can be bad for mothers. Working all the time and becoming emotionally distant isn’t great for partners either. I don’t want to be trapped into the male-breadwinner, female-caregiver model. And I don't want to be trapped in the relentless life of the two-income, baby-raised-by-a-nanny-from-Panama-whose-own-children-are-growing-up-without-a-mother model either. I have hope, but I'm not sure what we will do.

Canned Spinach Beats Potato Chips: How Dorothy Saved Me

When my parents realized that I wasn’t growing, they fired my nanny and hired Dorothy, the first nanny I actually remember. I was two at the time. I was a shrimp of a kid, in the bottom tenth percentile for height and weight. My parents asked a doctor for advice and he told them to keep a careful diary of everything I ate for at least a day. It turned out that all I ate was sugary cereal, coke, potato chips, and cookies. My mom had taken a year off from work to breastfeed and care for me, but after that I was in the hands of the nanny. I don’t remember that nanny and how my parents fired her, but those first days with Dorothy are some of my earliest memories because the change in my diet was so sudden and dramatic.

Dorothy practically crammed scrambled eggs and toast down my throat for breakfast, canned spinach and grill cheese for lunch, and glasses of milk and apples for snacks. It sure wasn’t organic food picked fresh from a local farm and sold at a farmer’s market, but it was better than potato chips. I doubt anybody in Mobile, Alabama used the word organic at the time. It was the era of fake pine-board walls in the living room, TVs with dials next to the screen and no remote, and canned, processed everything. The canned spinach Dorothy fed me tasted bad and she had to persuade me to open my mouth.

“Popeye eats spinach and look how strong he is. Don’t you want to be that strong?” Dorothy would say. She had poofy, permed hair that I thought grew naturally that way on white women. Dorothy would sit down next to me on the floor by the coffee table and try to put the spinach in my mouth. “Come on, be like Popeye.”

It would be many years before I could sneer at clichés like the overeducated liberal that I am now, but even then as a kid, I knew Dorothy was playing on my desires and fears. To my own surprise, I found myself repeating her leading question as an assertion. “Mom, I’m going to be as strong as Popeye.” It was embarrassing to be played, but my resentment for Dorothy melted away. I would wake up at night and ask for her. She didn’t live with us. If it wasn’t yet late, as in grown-up people late, I would talk to Dorothy over the phone and she reassured me. Just knowing that she still existed, that she would force feed me with more canned food the next day, did the trick and I went back to bed.

It’s amazing that both my parents were conscientious doctors, but they still did not know how to control my diet, not until my growth had noticeably faltered. My older brother had been a glowing, chubby boy, but he was cared for in India for the first two years of his life, not only by my mother but by a house full of aunts, cousins, my grandmother, and servants. They fed him dal, yogurt, rice, mangos, shiro, milk, and chapatti. The disjuncture caused by moving from the middle-class life in India to the middle-class life in the United States contributed to my crummy diet.

Yet, I don’t believe that immigration is the whole story. Millions of kids in families that have staid in the same place for generations are living on cookies and potato chips. Women everywhere are working while trying to meet the same burden of caring for children and elderly without the old networks of support. The relentless onslaught of commercials and branding is everywhere. I was fortunate to have Dorothy. She saved me.