"Premature Politics"

Back when I used to teach undergraduates, I was floored by how many had never been exposed to any discussion of politics before. Several said they didn’t even know their parents’ political party registration. Clearly lots of people don’t talk politics with their kids.

So the article in the current (Jan/Feb 2008) issue of Mothering magazine on whether to introduce children to politics felt familiar. Despite the wheeny liberal “on the one hand, on the other hand” framing, it was clear from the first ‘graph where the author came down (duh—the article is called “Premature Politics”). Bolstered by opinions from such experts as a “mother of five and children’s program expert in California’s state legislature” and a Waldorf teacher-trainer, she says not to talk politics with your children until they’re like 30 (okay, she said wait until adolescence)—it might damage them. They might find out bad things happen in the world! They might get discouraged and overwhelmed.

My experience teaching undergraduates with whom nobody had ever discussed politics before showed the reverse was true. They knew the world largely sucked, but they figured that was just the way it was and the way it always would be. “One person can’t make a difference,” they always said. When I heard that, I always wanted to beam Odetta down to the classroom and have her sing, “One man’s hand can’t break the color bar. Two man’s hands can’t break the color bar. But if two and two and fifty make a million, we’ll see that day come ‘round.” But Odetta didn’t show, and since my singing is, ahem, nothing like Odetta’s, I didn’t try singing myself.

Clearly, nobody had ever told them the million inspiring stories out there about people together creating tremendous change. They had no concept of anything more than individual action. That is, they had no concept of politics. That’s disempowering and discouraging, and it was hard to reverse so late in the day. Waiting until adolescence to suddenly introduce politics is like never mentioning right and wrong until then—indeed, politics is right and wrong in a larger context. The Mothering author’s attitude that morality comes first, politics much later is like that infuriating label given to right-wing religious voters, “values voters”—as if the rest of us lack values.

The author says she “tried to show my kids the big picture, insisting that things are improving overall.” That sounds Pollyanna-ish to me. I don’t know if things are improving overall—ask the folks in Iraq. What I do believe is that some very important things have gotten better, sometimes quite suddenly (prime example: the feminist movement), because people created movements to make them better. And I plan to raise my children to be inspired by these stories and feel a sense of responsibility to do their part. As the rabbis say, it is not your responsibility to finish the building, but you must do your part in continuing to build it.

Update on that divorce ruling

Update on that divorce ruling I wrote about: Various respectable publications editorialized in support of the court decision, noting with horror that if people were granted the right to state-supported divorce attorneys, all us taxpayers would have to pay for it. The Seattle Times raised the specter of huge costs—without providing any information on exactly how much it would cost. Finally this week came a well-supported op-ed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer effectively debunking this argument. Lawyers involved in the Equal Justice Coalition pointed out that there are costs involved in not offering people lawyers—court cases go on longer, because the judge has to slow down and explain everything to people representing themselves. At the same time, they pointed to actual evidence that the costs of offering divorce lawyers to those who can't afford them would be minor. Yet the gains would be great.

There is no alternative?

I’m haunted by a story a friend told me the other day of her sister-in-law who dropped out of the paid workforce. Joanne (not her real name) had been a lawyer until her children came along. Now she doesn’t work for pay and has no plans to do so ever again. Cynical me says half of marriages end in divorce. Add in the possibility of the husband losing his job or dying or being incapacitated and are those odds you want to play?

But that’s not the part of the story that got to me. Joanne told her sister-in-law that her law degree and her practice had been a waste. She should never have bothered, because you just can’t have it all. If you want to be a mother, you can’t have a (paid) career.

It’s the powerlessness and hopelessness of Joanne’s perspective that gets to me. In this grim vision, motherhood as practiced in our culture is an iron lung from which there’s no escape. It will always be this way. As Maggie Thatcher said, There Is No Alternative.

But here’s the shred of hope: My friend asked her sister-in-law about her daughters. Should they not bother with careers and degrees? Should they face up to no choice but unpaid mothering or no children? That stopped Joanne cold. She said no, she couldn’t accept that for her daughters. Some faint corner of Joanne’s mind insists there must be an alternative, if not for herself, then for her children.

If that’s true, why defer the dream?

Campaigning for parents' votes

Now this is a smart campaign tactic: Darcy Burner, running for a suburban Washington State Congressional seat, has been sponsoring events to test toys for lead, phthalates, and other toxic ingredients. Burner starts from where mothers are at—worried about the safety of their children—and uses it to get them engaged in politics. At Christmas time, no less. Very savvy. Still, Burner faces an uphill battle against Republican incumbent Dave Reichert, who beat her last election cycle.

Surrendering Babies

I want to keep shameless self-promotion to a minimum here, but I’ve reviewed a book that deserves much wider notice than it has gotten. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade is, in my judgment, one of the most important books of the last couple of years, perhaps the decade. Check out my review of it, originally published in the Iowa Review, now available online at the Mothers Movement.

"Forgoing Technology" in Birth?

MSN’s health section has a cool department called (creatively) “Birth Stories.” Cheers to this, given that way too many books and articles on birth erase the actual perspective of the person birthing, reinforcing the assumption that it’s the doctor (and all the technology) who delivers the baby, rather than the mother who births. Hilarious example: a book my partner bought for our daughter to prepare her for our second child’s birth explained that the baby would come out “when the baby gives one final push.” Ha! I’m the one who gives that final push, let me tell you.

Less hilarious example: Atul Gawande, writing an otherwise fascinating article for the New Yorker on birth, opens and closes with a woman named Elizabeth’s story, by way of illustration, yet throughout the rest of the piece she completely disappears, replaced by quoted doctors. The passages describing birth, even the bits about Elizabeth’s labor and delivery, are all from the perspective of the doctor, and we’re left in the dark as to what it feels like to give birth. I’m a fan of Gawande’s, but could the editors not in all the world and with all the prestige and money of the New Yorker behind them have found a woman who had given birth to write on the subject? Gawande seems to have some sense of this warping when he describes C-section: He describes C-section as “one of the strangest operations I have seen.” In the process of cutting and then pulling the baby out of the womb, “You almost forget the mother on the table.”

Even less hilarious example: The only place the experience of women appears in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, aka What to Get Anxious About When You’re Expecting, is in the brief descriptions of ailments, worries, and queries that preface the authoritative answers of the authors. Those answers always involve many repetitions along the theme of “Obey your doctor.” When I glanced at the book to check its advice on flying while pregnant, I read “Get your doctor’s permission.” Excuuuse me? Not “discuss it with your doctor.” Not “Get your doctor’s advice.” Get his permission. That’s when I threw the book across the room. (My unasked-for advice to pregnant women: Chuck What to Get Anxious About and get yourself a copy of Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. It’s full of birth stories and it’s inspiring.)

This authoritarianism has dangerous consequences. There’s a high rate of poor childbirth practice in hospitals (The “Listening to Mothers” survey found that only a minority of women were treated with all the practices science has found to promote mothers’ and babies’ safety), a high rate of unnecessary and harmful interventions, and especially a high rate of unnecessary C-sections. (The World Health Organization found that C-section rates above 12 percent result in increased maternal mortality and harm, yet the U.S.’ C-section rate is a whopping 30-plus percent—and rising, along with our maternal death rate.) This means a woman giving birth in a hospital had better stick up for herself to ensure she receives proper care. Passive obedience is dangerous.

Back to MSN: The birth stories are a good thing. But they focus solely on highly medicalized birth. The one story I’ve found labeled “natural childbirth” isn’t. Headlined, “A Birth Story: One Mom's Tale of Natural Childbirth,” the subhead reads, “Why one woman forgoes technology to experience the pain (and joy!) of natural birth.” But the woman gave birth in a hospital, where she received an IV and continuous fetal and maternal heartbeat monitoring (which, by the way, have been found to provide no medical benefit and to result in unnecessary interventions). Hardly forgoing technology.

I don’t care to fight over exactly what counts as “natural childbirth,” and I think the term should be dropped because it’s so vague and loaded. But I do think amid all the stories of C-sections and heroic interventions it would be nice to hear a few about normal, non-technocratic birth. It does exist. For that, check out Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. (And especially check out the statistics about her deliveries at the back of the book. Non-technocratic birth not only exists; it works.)

Dumbing Mommy Down

"Motherhood is the great unfinished business of feminism"--Ann Crittenden

Blogher is great and I just registered with them, but why was I forced to choose one category to list my blog in and why is their category about motherhood called "Mommy and Family"? I want my blog listed under feminism AND parenting and why on earth would that be surprising? The crosslisting part may be my bumbling--maybe I haven't figured it out yet. (Gentle readers, don't hesitate to instruct me. I will admit to newbie-ness. But what I will not do is what I've seen too often on get-help listserves--women attributing their difficulty in using some piece of technology to their femaleness, or as one poster did, to her blondness. And never never to pregnancy or PMS. Gack. But I digress...)

The mommy part is them. Mommy is a word children use; why should grownups use it about women writing on parenting? The effect is infantilizing and dismissive. Mom isn't much better, as Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels discuss in their terrific book The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women.

I love Broadsheet, and its predecessor, Mothers Who Think, but these names are demeaning too. Okay, so the pun in Broadsheet is cute--I'll leave that one alone for now. But as if all mothers don't think. As if mothering didn't itself involve a lot of thinking, if done right. Yeah, yeah, there's irony intended in all of this, but I'm sick of irony being a sort of get-out-jail-free pass.

Mothers happier having a (paying) job

Your average American apparently believes that moms would, and should, stay out of the paid workforce if only they could. Pundits love to cite the statistics saying that most moms who work full-time would rather cut back. Never mind the parallel statistics that say most stay-at-home moms would also like to work part-time. If you ask me, it all points to the scarcity of part-time work (more on my own experience with this in due time!) and the insane demands of the typical job. Never mind whether Ozzie’s wage-earning role fits modern-day Harriets; nowadays a full-time job means way more hours than Ozzie ever put in. Full-time working moms pine for fewer work hours, not to return home to do nothing but gurgle at baby (and feed and diaper and clean and ...).

Salon’s Broadsheet reports on a study that undercuts Caitlin Flanagan-type paeans to the idyll of staying at home. The study, from the British Institute for Social and Economic Research, finds that “mothers with jobs are significantly happier than their nonworking counterparts.” I hate to quibble with a sister, but I think the Broadsheet writer meant wage-earning mothers are happier than non-wage-earning mothers. Let’s not play into the media-created so-called “mommy wars”. We should all agree: Mothering is a job. Dammit. And, when you put it that way, suddenly the research seems like little more than common sense. Who wouldn’t be happier with some wages than without?

Money Trumps Caregiving

As I wrote for Crosscut.com, the Washington State Supreme Court recently ruled that there is no right to a state-funded attorney during divorce. (Some of the following appeared there; here’s what I’d have written if I had had more space.) I had promised my editor a breezy tone befitting a blog, but this didn’t come out breezy. More like grim. Remind me never to get divorced. Oh right, I can’t quite control that.

Brenda King couldn't afford a lawyer, but her husband, Michael King, could. No surprise: He got custody of the couple's children, even though she had provided the majority of care up to that point. The King case is typical. "The person who can afford an attorney, and a good attorney, in a custody case is much more likely to win," says Ken Saukas, founder of Divorce Attorneys for Women. And having more money itself makes a parent more attractive to a judge.

The result? Because of the wage gap between men and women—and the much wider wage gap between mothers and fathers—when a man asks for custody, the majority of the time he receives it.

Judge Charles Johnson, writing for the majority, said that although previous cases had found that “full access to the courts in a divorce action is a fundamental right,” access just meant a lack of physical barriers. Apparently because Brenda King could walk into the courtroom, even if she did so with no lawyer, she had full access to justice. Tell that to defendants in criminal cases—maybe Gideon v. Wainwright should be revisited.

Ominously, as the Northwest Women's Law Center wrote in its amicus brief supporting Brenda King's case, studies have found that men who have committed domestic violence are particularly likely to contest custody—and therefore to receive it. Brenda King claimed that her husband was abusive. (Michael King, in turn, claimed she was mentally unfit.) This made another strike against her: Ragen Rasnic, a partner at the Seattle law firm Skellenger Bender, who wrote the amicus brief, says that lawyers typically advise women not to allege abuse in their divorces, because it tends to bias judges against them.

Adding insulting injury to injury, Brenda King may have lost not only her kids but her claim to Social Security. According to court records, they had been married for approximately 10 years. Unless it was at least 10 years, she gets no Social Security benefits based on her marriage, and if she was out of the workforce while caring for those children, she wasn't accruing any Social Security benefits in her own right. The Social Security system needs reforming to give credit for caregiving.

The moral of the story? The official neutrality of custody law towards women results in discrimination and should be revisited. You wouldn’t have to write gender preferences into law. Instead, the law could give preference in custody disputes to those who have done the majority of caregiving, whatever their gender. It so happens, in our society, that’s mothers. Such a law would recognize the value of caregiving, and encourage fathers to do more of it, at least if they want control of their children.

I found one of the comments on my Crosscut piece revealing. The writer wrote that having more money was a genuine asset for parenting and it was only right that a judge consider it so. Set aside for a moment the question whether all things considered that’s really true. (Are the traits moneymakers must cultivate the same ones that make for good parenting? I wonder.) I think there’s a more interesting question: Why shouldn’t family money be treated as properly belonging to the child and therefore follow the primary caregiver? If we really care about the “best interests of the child,” give custody of the child to the person who will be the best caregiver—with past record as primary caregiver serving as strong evidence of this—and send the money with her to enable her to care best for the child, with a living standard unimpaired by the divorce.

Justice Johnson concurred in his opinion with Michael King’s claim that, like other civil proceedings, divorce is a purely “private dispute.” That reflects the prevailing view of children as private property. It’s past time to reconsider that view.

Why this blog?

I'm the daughter of a feminist, raised on stories about how dramatically feminism had changed the world and especially had changed motherhood. So it was a shock to me when I became a mother and realized how difficult things still were for mothers, and indeed that in some ways mothering had gotten harder in recent decades. This blog is part of my effort to figure out why and how we can change it.

Mothers are the heart of a culture, the force that shapes the future and keeps the whole thing going. Except that in America, we’re marginalized, isolated, and disempowered, with devastating results for everyone. Parents sense they’re trying to do something nearly impossible. But it doesn’t have to be so hard. You’re-on-your-own philosophy got us into this mess; working together could get us out of it. As the poem says, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Let’s get to it.