Penny Wiseacre

Why "Whiny Modern Parents" might actually have cause to complain

Normally, I love the Motherlode, but today's post, "Hey, Whiny Modern Parents, Tell Us What You Love About the Gig," sent me on a bit of a rage bender. You can credit the good, old-fashioned cocktail of generational myopia and current affairs ignorance this commenter displays:

I would be interested in some discussion of why today’s parents complain so much. No previous generation has made so many mountains out of molehills, nor do I ever recall my peers, relatives and forbears having so much difficulty with the chores of daily life. All my friends with children work, as did my mother, aunts and both of my grandmothers. They were fun and vibrant. Now all you hear is “sleep-deprived,” “too busy to shower,” “too frazzled to cook — get takeout,” “kids are sooo expensive,” etc. etc.

On the Internet, the mommy bloggers, “parent confession” and discussion sites heavily focus on the negative as does Motherlode. And in real life, most of the under-35 parents I know are in a constant hand-to-brow state of self-pity. It’s rather irritating esp since there are far more safety nets and handouts for parents today than for previous generations, not all of whom lived like June Cleaver.

Why might today's parents complain more? Because the America in which we are parenting hosts a much more challenging economic environment than the America of even 20 years ago, much less 40 or 60. Let us count the stressors that a) reduce all that vibrant fun and b) puncture the myth that the America of yesteryear was some dystopian hellscape lacking social safety nets:

1. Young adults are grappling with rampant unemployment and/or a permanent, long-lasting lag in earnings or financial well-being. Per David Frum, a family headed today by people between the ages of 35 and 44 will be on average nearly 70 percent -poorer than its counterpart in 1984. I would hazard that it's easier to be vital and joyful when your household earning power goes seventy percent further.

2. Perhaps women are less vital and joyful because the persistent salary gap between men and women means that women have a significant retirement savings shortfall relative to men. This after a lifetime of earning less. And bear in mind, women who are mothers face systemic salary discrimination. Still feeling that zip-a-dee-doo-dah about being a working parent in the 21st century?

(Side note: You would think that men, who are increasingly unhappy and stressed about conditions in the U.S. workplace, would be a lot more vocal about how equal pay benefits the entire family. In a country where two-thirds of families are either helmed by a woman breadwinner or co-breadwinner, you'd think that dudes would be into fair pay for all, because it benefits them too.)

3. Pregnant women and caregivers face discrimination and harassment on the job. So you can see where a worker may find it hard to be joyful about, say, a parent's broken hip or a baby's ear infection when she goes from that stressful and unpleasant situation to a boss who will punish her for it on the job.

4. As moms in the workforce get older, the gender pay gap worsens. So, you know, right around college-paying time. So, are parents allowed to start whining yet?

5. Although U.S. productivity has surged, so have hours worked -- while salaries have stayed flat for nearly 15 years. So parents are spending more time at work for less money. Think they might be taking that stressor home with them?

6. Not only do working parents face long hours for less (actual) pay, they face the terror of a wildly unregulated day-care system where the costs for having someone else watch your child can exceed a year's college tuition.

7. Did anyone say student loans? An entire generation of young professionals -- if they're lucky enough to be employed -- is struggling with $1.2 trillion in student loans. While it's delightful that today's young scholars are referred to as excellent revenue sources, what on account of how they can never, ever, ever discharge those loans in bankruptcy and they pay interest rates far, far higher than bazillion-dollar banks have to on their loans, the fact is: Student loan payments can seriously damage your career and love prospects.

Now try being all zesty and peppy about raising kids when you have loan repayments flying out the door on top of the daycare fees that cost more than your college tuition.

It bears repeating: People who are raising children in today's America are facing financial and societal pressures that parents did not have 20, 40, 60 years ago. We are shorter on money and time and opportunity.

To me, the real miracle is that anyone is still taking that tremendous leap of optimism and saying, "Yes. I will do this. I will raise a person in this world,." There's joy in that commitment to the future. Even if it's not the vital, fun type that others would prefer we display.

The great thing about having three kids this weekend? I don't have to keep two of them

We had three kids under one roof this weekend, and it was pretty awesome.

My niece had her sixteenth birthday party at her family's cabin up in mountains in Calaveras county. (No frogs, jumping or otherwise, in attendance.) Her brothers sensibly said, "A weekend trapped in the snowy woods with six tenth grade girls and one bathroom? No thank you." And thus it came to pass they stayed with us.

I've known my nephews since they were fetuses, cuddled them as toddlers, delighted in observing every new personality trait that emerges and shapes them. And one of the most awesome things about these guys is how patient they are with their small cousin. Will and Aaron will spend hours playing with Trixie, redirecting her with their blunt hammer of enthusiasm, pushing her to do things that she'd never do on her own. The kid I have wouldn't have decided it's fun to climb an eight-foot ladder and dance the robot in an attic -- not on her own, she wouldn't. But guess who now loves scrambling up and down ladders? The great thing about 10 and 12 year old boys is that they don't read parenting websites, so they don't really worry about things like safety or developmental appropriateness.

This is how the weekend went: We picked up the boys at 6 p.m. on Friday, and we basically did not have to do a thing with any of the three children for the rest of the weekend. I mean, I left out big bowls of sliced fruit and kept two pitchers of ice water in the fridge, but all I saw all weekend were two blond blurs and a small ginger one, then a door would close as my daughter shrilled, "We need our privacy to play!"

(At night, we made a big deal out of the boys having the run of the TV as a reward for being so patient with their cousin. They elected for Batman the first night. The second night, they saw Liberace's star turn on the Batman TV series. I am not sure whether or not we have become enshrined as a fond childhood memory or if we are going to star in an article on childhood trauma.)

The boys made towers out of Duplos and Bristle Blocks, knocked them down, and made more towers. They played hide-and-seek for hours. They played dress-up. They read books -- at one point, chasing Trix around the house to read her the unfortunately long-winded Larry and Friends*.

It was so weird having wide open tracts of free time without having to elaborately rearrange my schedule beforehand. I read two books. I bought a flat of strawberries and made ten half-pint jars of jam. I cleaned the refrigerator, cooked two casseroles, collected chicken eggs, worked out, had brunch with my girlfriends, napped for two hours yesterday ... I write it all out and it's like a beautiful, boring dream.

Of course, after the beloved cousins went home this evening, my daughter stood on the porch, sobbing, "Take me with you! I want to come!"

I feel for her. It's hard to come down from a great weekend and return to reality.

 

 

* I purchased this book after reading about it on Brain Pickings, and boy, do I regret it. There is no plot beyond "Larry has many hipster arty friends, and you are going to get everyone's biographies in excruciating detail." Also, it is vaguely racist. My daughter likes the book if each page is boiled down to two sentences. When poor Will tried to read the whole thing, there was a point where Trix said, "I need to take a break and read another book in the middle."

In retrospect, taking a child's book endorsement from someone who a) does not have to read to a child on the regular, and b) makes a living by gnawing on the thinky books of the day was probably not going to work well.

Scooping up the dust in the space of the selah

While it is alive
Until Death touches it
While it and I lap one Air
Dwell in one Blood
Under one Sacrament
Show me Division can split or pare—

Love is like Life—merely longer
Love is like Death, during the Grave
Love is the Fellow of the Resurrection
Scooping up the Dust and chanting "Live"!

-- Emily Dickenson

Basic bitches just can't win

I dragged myself into the pool on Friday morning, and while I was in there, I was thinking about two pieces I ran across this week: "The Basic Bitch: Who Is She?" and "How basic are you?"

I was mostly thinking that the worst crime the so-called Basic Bitch commits is being unabashedly girly. She likes Pinterest, and pumpkin spice lattes, and the Barre Method, and scented candles. The Basic Bitch has mainstream pop culture taste: romantic movies, The Bachelor, Taylor Swift, Coachella. She wears the Tiffany return-to-sender bracelet and calls herself a "daddy's girl" and reacts to trends; she doesn't create them.

There is nothing wrong with any of this.

I am sick unto death of how quick we are to immediately denigrate girly things as somehow inferior. When that Goldiblox commercial ran, the thing I found the most off-putting about it was not the intellectual property foofarah, but the implication that pink, girly toys are somehow inferior.

True, there's no need to shove girls into a pink, princess-shaped pigeonhole, and I'm no fan of how Lego's gotten all gendered in recent years. But I don't think the answer is to reject commercial, girly culture wholesale. Why not? Because plenty of awesome children like wearing sparkly dresses to soccer practice, or they decide to be Queen Elsa In Space, and the last thing those girls -- or boys --  need to is internalize the message that their love of sparkly, feminine aesthetics marks them as culturally inferior.

This is, of course, the flip side to the cool girl phenomenon. The cool girl, as elegantly described by Gillian Flynn and elaborated upon by Anne Helen Peterson, is cool precisely because she appears to embrace the entertainment tastes and preferences of the men around her ... without appropriating any of the social privilege the men enjoy. The cool girl is like a flattering mirror that makes men feel better about how they choose to spend their time.

By contrast, the basic bitch lives in a pink, floral-scented bubble where the language, values and power are all defined and reinforced by women. There are no cool-girl analogues for men who want to embrace the basic bitch world.

I don't get the appeal of the things basic bitches are alleged to like. But the thing is, I think it's even more despicable how easy it is to look at any flavor of feminimity and  turn it into a pejorative.

Lurid fantasies about what a sick day might look like

I knew there might be trouble last week. As I boarded the plane, I noticed that the row in front of mine was occupied by a child wrapped in blankets, flushed yet shivering, and coughing up a storm. Next to her was a man who looked as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Although I felt bad for the child, I felt worse for everyone else on the plane, since we were all trapped with Patient Zero and sucking in recirculated, virus-laden air for six hours.

And now I am on day five of the cough that won't go away. I've run through my supply of codeine-laden syrup from the last time I had a cough worthy of a rock opera about the refusal to shoulder the eminently unsurprising consequences of dumb decisions. I'm at the point where my head hurts every time I cough, and I had better be developing a six pack from the constant abdominal engagement, and I sound like Kathleen Turner.

Here is what is not helping this persistent, tiring malady: This is the week where our daughter has decided that sleep is for suckers.

I am so tired and so run-down at this point, I have begun imagining what a sick day might be like. An entire day where all I have to do is nap. No day job, no housework, no preschool wrangling, just ... a clean bed (that I didn't have to make after doing a few loads of linens), a hot cup of tea (that doesn't get cold because something comes up that has to be addressed RIGHT THEN), a lengthy snooze (that I can sink into without fretting about missing preschool pick-up or ferry pick-up), a clean and quiet house, a to-do list that is either empty or complete.

But the fantasies aren't going to help me finish the work I have due tonight. They're not going to get my tomatoes into the raised bed tomorow morning before work, or the load of clean clothes folded. So I'm going to beg your pardon, but I need to wrap this up and cough my way through tonight's to-do list. Make a bed for me, would you?

In which Ralph Fiennes and I tell you how to read a book

Before cracking the spine of Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's classic How to Read a Book, I had considered myself a good reader because I was naturally speedy, yet capable of retaining and synthetizing nearly all of what I had read. After reading Adler & Van Doren, I sat around thinking, "Entire new vistas of ignorance have stretched out before me! How smart I am to know that!"

If you have not yet read How to Read, pro tip: See the movie Quiz Show before you read, so the experience of reading the book can be gilded by the golden luster of Ralph Fiennes at the apex of his attractiveness. That will make passages like "Both inspectional and analytical reading can be considered as anticipations or preparations for syntopical reading" seem a lot more beguiling.(At left: "I've got your anticipation for syntopical reading right here." [swoon])For those of you who don't really see a need to heed the advice "Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally, be maintaine throughout" -- and why should you? -- let me break down why this book is worth wrestling with: Because it teaches you how to cheat like a pro.

Ut prosim -- that we may serve

Tomorrow marks the seventh anniversary of what has come to be known as the Virginia Tech Massacre. It is still surreal to me to have my alma mater linked so casually to the word "massacre."

At left is a picture of Burruss Hall. It anchors one side of the oblong Drill Field at the heart of campus. When I was there, the offices that made the university run were there too -- bursars, financial aid, admissions.

There's also a huge auditorium, so the hall used to host rock concerts and other events. I saw Stephen Jay Gould speak on the horrors of state-sanctioned eugenics. I covered a debate between Paul Tsongas and John Sununu. I saw Denis Leary, Kurt Vonnegut, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale ... if you want to listen to lots of smart, ambitious, creative and driven people speak, become a student reporter and get assigned to cover these events. I did it, and that's how I accidentally ended up with a liberal arts education and a science degree.

How you gonna get 'em back in the condo once they've been to the McMansion?

Back in 2001, Phil and I sat in the quiet courtyard of a boutique hotel on the edge of Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood. We had just spent a few days tooling around Seattle without a car -- which meant that we pretty much went where we could walk or bus -- and we had a great time.

"Let's never choose the life where we have to drive everywhere," Phil suggested, and something felt so right about that idea, we've never wavered from it. This is why we have spent our married lives living in small, pricey places. But we always think, At least we're not spending it all driving around.

A tale of two yard sales

THE FIRST SALE: A sun-baked corner lot, with four or six hulking old pieces of furniture out there plus the usual assortment of yard sale-y crap: old fitness props, the saddest holiday decorations, cookbooks promoting diets that have since been found to be profoundly lethal.

I had driven by the sale on my way home from church, and somewhere between executing a right turn and keeping up with my child's chatter about how she felt she ought to celebrate her half-birthday, I noticed a marble-topped dresser.

I go out walking after midnight

It was Phil's night to put the daughter to bed, and to expedite the process, I left the house and took a 55-minute long walk.