Sunday, June 11, 2006

Staying at Home

Yo, happy monday, blogsylvania.  Hope you had a fulfilling weekend.  Mine started early when I went home sick from work on friday.  I did have the energy, however, to go to our friends’ house that night and be hosted for a fabulous supper.  Added bonus: they gave us about a jillion great items of babywear that their baby can’t wear anymore, with a few awesome toys to boot.  I spent most of saturday cooking and cleaning, and most of sunday doing laundry and going out to the park for the free Cake concert.  I do like me some Cake, but it was a summer day in san francisco, which meant it was cold, foggy and windy.  We had the baby along and left after about six songs - even though they launched into our favorite song of theirs (is this love?) just as soon as we were too far away to turn around and go back.  Whatever; I definitely got my money’s worth.  We had tasty viet take-out for supper and now it’s now.  The baby is asleep, I think, and it’s time to reorient myself for the workweek. 

...which leads me to think that it’s time to post this little bitta drivel about going to work.  Hope you enjoy it.  I didn’t at the time, but I do in retrospect.

I needed that bus ride.  Morning came too early, and I was not at my sharpest.  Forty minutes of meditative isolation was the prescription, music in my ears and landscape scrolling past me, the details of my life fading away so I could focus more sharply once I disembarked downtown.  But such was not to be.

At the stop, I encountered my occasional transit pal.  She worked near my office, lived near my home; we rode the same line frequently enough to have introduced ourselves and had a few conversations.  Not much more than that did we share in common, but for some reason, that morning she felt compelled to capitalize on it and strike up a conversation. 

We rarely had much to discuss – her roommates, my family, our respective jobs.  But today she seemed pensive and our conversation steered toward a particular friend of hers.  “Old friends – friends from college,” she explained to me, though she was barely in her late 20s and college wasn’t that far back for her.  “We studied feminism together, wrote articles together.  She was a real radical.” She cast herself back into her past, on bygone dorm rooms and classes from another era.  “After graduation, we stayed in touch.  She fought for a satisfying career and for wage equality; we’d send books back and forth and have those long phone conversations about paradigm shifts and gender roles and the EEOC.  And I was really happy for her when she told me she’d gotten into a relationship with a guy who shared all this with her.  She said he could talk with her about all the things that were so important to us both.  She told me he could really support her in all those things we’d worked together to achieve.”

She sighed a little, watched the storefronts flash past through greasy smears on the broad window.  “He wanted to go to law school. The best one he got into was in Oregon, so they moved.  He started classes and she got a job in retail, and worked hard – on the corporate level, and on the political level too, till she was the store manager.  And it was a good store,” she assured me, turning her wide eyes on my bleary ones, “with an excellent socially conscious product line that was protective of worker economic interests and gender equity.  Anyway,” she continued, her gaze shifting forward, into the sea of riders sitting ahead of us, “she said she liked it.  It was a good job.  Fulfilling,” she gravely intoned.

And then, a hollowness crept into her voice.  “Her husband – well, they got married.  About two months later she was pregnant.  But she didn’t let it slow her down; she stayed at work through her seventh month.  And then she took off on leave and had a baby shower, and I went up to be there for her.  It was a couple of weekends ago.  I got her a book,” she told me, flashing a glance my way, “on feminist mothering.  What to ask the doctor, how to deal with sexist expectations, breast feeding rights.... It’s a really good book.  I guess.  I mean, I’m not a mom, but it’s by a really well-respected author.  Anyway, she was really tired at her shower.  She said she just didn’t have any energy; she didn’t feel like doing things and she slept all the time.”

“Pretty standard for the third trimester,” I ventured, but it didn’t really slow her down.

“Then she told me that she wasn’t even interested in going back to work.  She was ready to leave her job, her whole career.  She said her husband was going to do really well in law school and make a lot of money, and he could take care of them.  She was ready,” she concluded, “to be a stay-at-home mom.”

And with this, she looked squarely at me, to gauge, I suppose, my response.  Her voice was like a hole out of which she peered at me with abjured loneliness, waiting for me to offer her a rope or a ladder or a strong-armed hand.  All I was able to tell her was, “Typical, I suppose.” It was not the answer she’d been hoping to hear.  Then again, I wasn’t the person she needed to hear it from.

Well, back to work with you then.  I was wrong, the baby is entirely not asleep.  My work begins now, I suppose.

I’m of two minds here: the independant part of me is itching at the thought of not being responsible for my own path and having to rely on someone else for so much. the other part of me chafes at the fact that people think choosing to stay home to care for your child is such a tremendous sin. if and when i ever have a child, i’d love to be in the position to be able to stay home for at least a year or two, even though i know i’d probably go crazy in the process. but, eh, a little crazy is healthy right?

happy monday.

I cannot improve on P’s comment, but I can wish you feel better soon!

P, that’s very much the way it felt to me, too.  Especially on mondays, when I get to spend the morning at home with the Zakster - it’s so much more fulfilling than sitting at my desk and plowing the paperwork.  I think (here comes the cliche) that most people have no idea what it really means to “parent” till they do it themselves.

And J, thanks, I think I do feel better today (but it’s always better in the a.m. and gets worse as the afternoon wears on) - but let’s both hope that P’s chafing goes away!

First things first. I love CAKE. CAKE is hilarious, and right-on awesome. Graeme will love it when I tell him you saw them live, for free, and in a park setting. What fun!

More importantly, though...How wonderful that your busmate’s friend chose to become a parent, and has chosen to stay at home and (ideally) raise a healthy, bright, happy child. And how sad that your busmate thinks that choice is a disappointment.

Feminism, for me, is the right to CHOOSE, because choice indicates a level playing field.  Which has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongess of being a stay-at-home parent.  So yeah, push your busmate out the door.  It’s people like that who make the rest of the world hate San Francisco for its smugness and, paradoxically, its lack of compassion for others.

Don’t get me started! I totally agree with Greg here; except for the part which described San Francisco as hated by the rest of the world. I do not believe everyone in all of San Francisco is smug; just the “typical” ones… I think the lady whose husband is going to be a lawyer, able to care for her, and their child financially, should take joy in the fact that she will be able to watch every step of her precious child’s development first-hand; instead of through the views from someone else’s lenses! She can always return to her career at a later time; however, she wouldn’t be able to get back those precious, tender moments of her child’s early years.

Yeah...Greg hit it...the whole point is choice.  There isn’t a right one or a wrong one, it’s only what each person needs to do for themselves.  It doesn’t surprise me that a young woman in her late 20’s might not quite get that...yet.  The last couple of decades have been all about men and women trying to adjust to all the possible choices when it comes to careers and families.  The great thing about that is that it has been happening, not that the choices have gone one way or another...but that everyone has more choices available to them.

it’s interesting what we all seem to feel about choices - they seem like a good idea, but it seems to be turning out that social expectations turn every choice into a challenge, and they together become an overwhelming burden to many moms in the US.  Whether they choose to work out of the home or on family matters, or both, they are in competitions they can’t win - with peers, with televised paragons, and with their own expectations.  It’s brutal.  Here’s an excellent book on the topic.  It’s one of those things that gets more complicated the more you look at it.  All I can be sure of is, nothing like an answer has emerged yet, regardless of how “liberating” third-gen feminism tries to be about it.

Dude, she needed a date ... you could have at least set her up with someone instead of shutting her down cold.  You are a cruel, cruel man.

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