A vacation from parenting

In the Newsweek issue that featured Oscar Confidential on the cover, there were interviews with a handful of actors that are up for Academy Awards. In that piece Kate Winslet (at least I think it was Winslet) said, "When you're a parent, going to work is like being on vacation."

I think that is a really interesting comment. As a writer, when I flex my fingers on the keyboard, it's like being on vacation from my regular job as a parent too. Writing is my escape, just as acting is Winslet's escape. It's not a bad thing to enjoy it, or look forward to it, and it doesn't make us bad or uncaring parents. Who doesn't like a vacation, even if it's just a mini, 20-minute vacation every now and again? Winset added that in her vacation "someone does your hair and makeup."

As a writer no one does my hair or makeup, not even me on most days. And perhaps a manicure would be a more appropriate way to pamper or prepare someone for a day in the life of this finger-frenzied profession.

Her comment just got me thinking about what things are treats when we are parents. There's no doubt that watching your child marvel at the world is a treat. But for parents, those moments of pure parental bliss are typically peppered between tantrums, and poopy diapers, and food wars. It sure isn't bliss all of the time. So needing an escape seems like a normal and healthy desire. And I guess that brings me full circle to why I'm here in the first place. Working and contributing feels good.

It's a healthy and constructive way to stay sane as an individual. When we have babies, that line between individual and extension of tiny new creature becomes blurred, especially if we're nursing.

When I think back to when I was working full-time, a vacation was a vacation from work. Sleeping in late, long walks at the beach with the dogs, dessert with every meal. That was a vacation. But now that I'm home, working is a little treat. It's a little glimpse into my former life. And I'm hanging on with all my might.

Who would go to NY in February?

Most sane people would avoid New York, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire and most of the Eastern Seaboard during the wintry months, unless of course you live there. Or at least most thin-blooded Californians, like myself, would avoid such cold places. (For full disclosure purposes, I did grow up in Buffalo and lived in Boston for five years, so I have much experience with the cold. I just don't like it).

Anyway, sometimes you can't avoid such climates. So the family is headed to South Jersey today for three days for a family thing, and then we head north into not-so-tropical NYC for four days. My nipples can hardly wait.

So for the next few days, Mother in Chief will likely be as barren as the maple trees along the I-90. I'm hoping for some Internet access, but I think it's as likely as 60-degree weather.

Child care isn't for chumps

I know a lot of people out there pooh-poohed Judith Warner's cover story in Newsweek, but if you just focus on the women pining for the "best camps," and the "right ballet class" for their kids, you miss a very important part of the article.

Jody over at Raising WEG did a thorough job of summing up the activity around Warner's article. Jody's round-up points to blogs that accuse the article of featuring "overparenting," "superparenting," and "mommy stupidity."

Many of those posts were so focused on those women trying to be super moms, like the anchorwomen who leaves for work at 3:30 am so that she can be home by the time her daughter is waking up. However, there were two points to the article: 1) Women are going insane trying to be the best moms possible, and 2) there is a problem with child care in this country.

Finding good, affordable, and reliable child care is a ongoing struggle for parents. During the winter, every day it snows is a craps shoot for parents. If a child gets a snow day or if a child is sick and needs to be sent home from school, what do working parents do? It often forces parents "to juggle a host of unpalatable options - stay home from work, bring kids to the office, foist them on the neighbors, hire an unfamiliar sitter," wrote Maggie Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe earlier this month.

Finding good backup care is the bane of working parents, and by some yardsticks the picture's getting bleaker. Although parents lose an estimated five to eight days annually due to child-care breakdowns, just 9 percent of companies offer backup care, down from 14 percent in 2001, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

We need corporations to be more family-friendly. And if it takes government tax incentives to make companies offer flexible hours, telecommuting, more part-time work, and on-site child care, as Warner suggested, then I'm for it 100 percent. We need affordable, quality child care, so that women can work and not have the cost of child care be more than what they can earn working. We need to offer part-time workers affordable health insurance benefits. That way they don't have to choose between working full time and getting benefits, but having their kids in daycare full time, or being at home with the kids, without benefits if their partners don't have coverage, or if they don't have partners. These are real issues that affect lots of women.

We can pretend that problem doesn't exist, but that doesn't make it go away. Women want to work. Women want to contribute. Even at-home moms (and dads) want to work and contribute. There were pieces of the article that were called out and attacked, but in the process, a lot of people missed the bigger picture.

Good feelings all around

There was a little spike in my traffic the past couple of days and since I've been slacking (a.k.a. trying to meet my deadline for the magazine piece I'm working on), I was a bit confused and self-conscious since there were extra eyes checking out my blog.

So thanks to Ann Douglas over at The Mother of All Blogs for calling me out as one of the new "treasures" she recently added to her blog roll.

Douglas is the author of a slew of books on pregnancy, parenting, and child-rearing, and more, including "The Mother of All Pregnancy Books", "The Mother of All Baby Books", The Mother of All Toddler Books, and several others.

Seeing the traffic numbers go up is a thrill in itself, but I'll admit that examining the data is one of the little pleasures I get from writing this blog. I'm always totally fascinated as to how people in Israel and Spain happen upon my writing. I know the Internet is viral, but it's still just so interesting as to how people end up here. So to the folks in Butte, Montana; Livingston, New Jersey; Independence, Oregon; Mililani, Hawaii; and Hinesburg, Vermont, and everywhere else... Welcome! I hope it feels like home.

I also wanted to thank Kevin Koperski of The Daily Writer for the mention as well. It's just so nice to not be alone.

Less time, even less money - not always

So often it seems that mothers get the shaft, especially when trying to make a part-time schedule work. As a result, women get a semblance of what they want or deserve. Mostly that comes by way of a smaller paycheck.

We already know that women earned just 77 cents for every dollar men received in 2002, even when we have similar education, skills and experience, according to the AFL-CIO. And when it to part-time work there is the extra disadvantage of "schedule creep," according to an article in the Wall Street Journal called "Making Part-Time Work A Little More Palatable," which was published on Feb. 18. For part-timers, schedule creep typically means that employees actually work more than they are supposed to and get paid less than they should be. "It's a big problem for people on part-time schedules in particular, who often find themselves working 100% time for 75% or 80% pay," wrote Sue Shellenbarger.

And this problem likely affects women and mothers disproportionately because they are more likely than men to be working on a less-then-full-time basis. Some law firms are at the forefront of combating this problem facing part-timers and women, especially because it is affecting attrition, and replacing employees who quit is very expensive. "Dismayed that a half-dozen attorneys who quit the firm one year were all women, McNees Wallace suspected that lack of flexibility may have contributed to the brain drain and vowed to improve its policy," said Helen Gemmill, an attorney with the 105-lawyer firm McNees Wallace in the WSJ article.

Instead of paying part-time attorneys less, (McNees Wallace) pays them more per hour. Part-timers with two or more years with the firm receive three-quarters pay for working two-thirds of normal hours. If working part-time helps keep them with the firm and avoid the cost of replacing them, 'you're still making money for the firm,' says Steve Weingarten, managing attorney. The firm also allows part-timers to progress on the partnership track at the same rate as full-timers. The quit rate among women attorneys has plunged, he says.

So now part-timer attorneys at some firms are at least getting paid for the hours they work, but it wasn't clear if the firms are working to ensure that these part-timers aren't working more hours than they are supposed to. Family-friendly companies, and law firms in particular, were called out as offering some of the best maternity leaves in Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For, when the list was published earlier this year.

Now we can only hope that more firms, across more industries, will follow suit and bring parity for part-time workers.

24 hours disappears faster, faster

The crunch is here. My deadline for the 1,800-word magazine piece I'm working on is days away and I'm heading out of town for a week on Thursday. This means lots to do in not so much time. Sadly the blog gets pushed down the priority list. I'm no superwoman.

The Maniacal Mother and the Madness of Blogs

Judith Warner's emotion-plucking piece in Newsweek spawned a flurry of postings. Some commiserated and empathized with, while others swore at her notions for why women are going insane as they try to find themselves in the slushy sea of parenting.

All the negativity out there surrounding this Newsweek article reminds me of the New York Times piece a couple of weeks back about Mommy blogs and how they are basically a bunch of self-absorbed parents writing about their kids. Well, now people are jumping at Warner's piece, because she is writing about women who choose to stay home with their kids. The key word there is "choose."

I relate to the article because I'm stressed and overwhelmed and wanting something that isn't easy to latch on to, but I don't relate to the keeping up with the Joneses part of it. I think there are so many valid points...our society just doesn't make it easy for women to be people and mothers, etc. Then again, a lot of the negative comments say that's what sacrifice is. That's what putting your kids first really means. I don't have the answers.

What I got out of it was that women everywhere are stressed out in motherhood. We've "surrendered our better selves--and (our) sanity--to motherhood." I definitely feel insane a good portion of the time. My kid goes to playgroup with his buddies twice a week. Lots of women I know cart their kids all over town to every type of activity you can pay for. But no matter which end of the spectrum you're on, there are stresses. Maybe people don't agree with them, but that doesn't invalidate the premise of the article: Women are often flailing in their quest to do what's right for themselves and their families.

Maybe I choose my insanity. Maybe I choose my depression. And maybe I choose to be torn over who I am and what it means to be a mother, a writer, a person, a wife. I know that my insanity and depression is not because I'm running my kid everywhere. And it's not because I resent my kid. I love being a mom, but I just wish that I could be a mom and also be other things too.

Anyway, Elizabeth over at Half Changed World did a great job of summing up some of the finer points of the article and pointing out some of the interesting blogs written about it.

I was hoping to read more of the comments--both positive and negative--but Technorati seems to be failing me and I'm too tired to keep searching.

The Magical, Maniacal, Mythical Mother

Thank you Judith Warner.

Warner penned Newsweek's fabulous February 21, cover story called, The Myth of the Perfect Mother: Why it Drives Real Women Crazy."

When the issue landed on the table alongside my husband's cell phone and wallet, I scooped it up and was suddenly covered in a warm, reassuring bath of commentary that validated what I've been feeling and writing about; the plight of mothers. Thankfully Baby in Chief was already in bed or he surely would have been thoroughly neglected for 10 minutes while I powered through the article. And as I was reading, I couldn't help but shout out passionately. "Hallelujah!," and "Right on Sister!, spurted from my mouth after every couple of sentences.

All our lives we believed that having it all was attainable and worth attaining. Holding onto that notion has been the grown-up equivalent to believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. Like those childhood icons, "It" does not exist. So instead of finding "It" or making peace with "It," we end up feeling inadequate in so many ways. We also feel like failures, even though we have made choices that have brought us to where we are.

I have let myself down for not working (at a job or on another degree). I have let my kid down for feeling that being his parent isn't enough by itself. I have let my husband down because I don't have much to talk about outside of updates on our kid's latest accomplishments or what household projects I'm working on. I have let my dad down because I didn't go on to get my master's after getting my undergrad degree. I have let my sister-in-law down because I've become one of those women who worked just long enough to get married and have a baby. I have let my mentor down because I'm not contributing to my fullest potential. I have let a friend down for wanting to work when I don't have to.

It's one big game and I always lose. My family and friends don't think I'm a failure and don't think I have let them down. Each and every one of those failures lives only in my head. My husband is proud that he can give me the freedom to be at home and knows I'm a kick-ass writer, an amazing mother, and an overall fabulous person, with or without a "real" job. My parents know that raising a family is very respectable job. My sister-in-law knows I didn't have a baby so that I could stop working. My mentor knows I'm smart enough to find a job that compliments my job at home. My friend has a bit of sour grapes and loves me anyway. My whole family respects what I am doing as a parent, as a writer, as a woman, as a person. They all love and respect me. I wish I could manage the same for myself.

"Most of us in this generation grew up believing that we had fantastic, unlimited, freedom of choice," wrote Warner. But instead of being able to choose a path that takes us to where we are trying to get, we are instead "faced with the harsh realities of family life in a culture that has no structures in place to allow women--and men--to balance work and child-rearing."

As a result, we feel helpless, not empowered. We feel self-hate and depression. We feel that we have lost ourselves on our way to the playground. This "learned helplessness" can get chalked up right next to our giant, cumulative case of depression, which affects 30 percent of mothers with young children, according to the article. I'm actually surprised that it's not higher.

In all our hopelessness, we can't think our way out of our diaper bags. We are so focused on creating the best learning environment for our kids by reading to them, taking them to play group, art class, swim class, the park, Germ-boree, music class, story time at the library, and Little Wonders, it seems impossible to figure out how to change things so that our worlds become a better, less insane place to live. As we drive to our kids' activities, we realize our attempts to create the best environment for our kids is a toxic place for the parents. There is no time left for the parent to be a person.

"We need solutions--politically palatable, economically feasible, home-grown American solutions--that can, collectively, give mothers and families a break," wrote Warner. Yes! We do need solutions, real-world, realistic solutions! And Warner has a couple of ideas that we need to read, be inspired by, and act on:

• We need incentive like tax subsidies to encourage corporations to adopt family-friendly policies.

• We need government-mandated child care standards and quality controls that can remove the fear and dread many working others feel when they leave their children with others.

• We need flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality part-time day care so that stay-at-home moms can get a life of their own.

• We need new initiatives to make it possible for mother to work part-time by creating vouchers or bigger tax credits to make child care more affordable, heath insurance available and affordable for part-time workers...

• In general, we need to alleviate the economic pressures that currently make so many families' lives so high-pressured...so that mothers and fathers could stop running like lunatics, and start spending real quality time--and quantity--time with their children.

Hallelujah! And right on sister!

Promotion in the works?

City-Planner Friend and I had breakfast two weekends ago and had a chance to catch up. She managed to score a sweet deal with her employer to work four days a week after her maternity leave ended last summer. She's been very pleased with her arrangement, especially because she lives close enough that she comes home for lunch daily to squeeze in a little mommy-son time.

She has been in her job for a number of years and would like to advance in the department. Even though no promotion has been in the works, she's always wondered if she would decline an opportunity for advancement if it presented itself. She doesn't want to mess with her part-time job situation. Typically promotions--along with a bigger paycheck and a fancier title--bring more responsibility which usually equals longer hours. And she's been worried that any postive lateral move would have an equally negative impact her current arrangement.

Well, City-Planner Friend had a talk with her boss recently about a possible promotion. It's not in the works, but they were talking about career paths and where she sees herself headed in the coming years. The best part was that the current, four-day work week was not mentioned as being a hindrance to making a vertical move.

Perhaps when the time comes and details are being hashed out, it might be a problem. But for now, all is rosy in the city.

Feb. 14 is more than just Valentine's Day

In addition to being Valentine's Day, February 14 is also Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Day.

Heart Defects are the number one birth defect, affecting one in every 100 babies, and is a leading cause of birth-defect related deaths worldwide. Sometimes a defect is diagnosed in utero, some are diagnosed at birth, and sometimes a diagnosis is not made until days, weeks, months, or years later.

The severity and treatment of CHDs varies. Some are mild and are monitored by occasional visits to a pediatric cardiologist. Others can be treated with medications or repaired with surgery or a cardiac catheterization. More complex heart defects, including the one my son Riley has, require several surgeries and will never be "cured."

What can you do? Donate to research institutions and organizations that provide support and financial assistance to families. Here are a couple I recommend:

• Lucile Packard Foundation for Children: specify pediatric cardiac research and care

• UCSF: specify pediatric cardiac research and care

• The Congenital Heart Information Network

(I do not recommend the American Heart Association because only 25 cents of every dollar donated actually goes to research. And no one at the AHA has been able to give me an answer of how much of that research money goes to congenital or pediatric heart research.)