April 2008 Archives

Each spring I expect to be ecstatically happy, as the tedium of days inside give way to the wonders of a new spring. However, it seems each year that I just barely make it through the winter, and emerge, pale, irritated and desperate into the long awaited spring days, curiously out of sync with the explosion of life around us. I thought I'd be frolicking, but instead I'm irritable and aware of my own pent up neediness rather than embracing the external moment. I want to sip coffee and chat with adults at the park, not run around and remind my son of how we cooperate and share and use our words. I want to sit and watch him tire himself out, not run with him, or worse yet, fling him in the air in his much beloved rough housing. So our interaction is far from graceful, me (complaining, I mean talking, as rapidly as social custom allows to my fellow adults, and receiving gratifying stories of winter's exhaustion in exchange) ignoring him until he finds some way to make himself unignorable (grabbing the leg and pulling, yelling, getting into a fight, he knows the drill). Then I dash off and play (in the dazzling sunlight, which warms despite my self-pity) for a bit. Then he and a companion find the fun in looking at ants for a while, and I slip back to ask about a pregnancy or tell about a plumber or whatever.

At least we, like the bean plants my son planted at school, are rapidly transforming from our tired winter selves into tan, confident and fun parents again, with sleepy outdoorsy children replacing the irritated, cooped up indoor children of the last few months. (At least my kids get tan; I'm apparently in some radical fringe group that doesn't worry about the sun that much until high summer or until outings that are longer than 4 hours; I feel a bit of a base tan is good protection for the July days, and have never insisted on hats except for myself).

Thank God, I find myself gradually getting caught up on that apparent need of mine to talk to adults, as I get tanner and my son remembers the outdoor playing protocols, and rediscovers the great joy of finding new sticks, rocks and spiders (and continues to explore why we can collect sticks and rocks but not spiders). The tension gradually drains out of the days as the strength returns to our limbs, and we make ready for the great mulberry feast that nature is preparing for us.

See you outside; if I'm staring down with a frown, keep yelling until I glance up and smile a hello.

After my last bragging post, I've been thinking about the issue of changing the world a lot with courage.

I'd like to point out that Rosa Parks, having prepared herself and being a part of a community seeking to change the law, took advantage of a quotidian moment to resist a blatant and pervasive injustice in such a way that the sympathy of all the world was swung to her cause. She was prepared, and she had friends.

But more relevant than that, I have to say women's work is not respected in this society. For millenia, women themselves were disrespected as part and parcel of the disrespect for women's work. In this country at this time, forty years into the current wave of feminism, we have the possibility for women to be respected but only as long as they don't perform women's work.

And yet, as it has been for millenia, women's work is in fact important, and worth doing. Leaving aside, as I must, the most miraculous bearing of children, I say that the careful rearing of children and of tending to the hearth is the core of our civilization. And yet the women's movement continually is forced by the patriarchal structures to accept a dilemma between careers and children. It takes time to notice that this choice is only a choice for women alone if one accepts sexism. When we assume that the care of children is of importance to all persons, and persons of all genders, then many of the dilemmas of the mommy track and the mommy wars are seen as false dilemmas, merely examples of sexism in its current phase. I've lost track of how many NPR call in shows I've heard where people talk about the trade offs between having kids first and then having careers or establishing a career first, then pausing a bit, and having kids, and then trying to resume their careers. It is rare to hear a call for fathers to demand more flexibility and time from their workplaces. I know that not everyone even has that choice, but even in my very well educated, rich and powerful neighborhood, it's not common to hear child-care treated as the joint and mutual responsibility of the responsible adults. On the radio, I haven't heard people pointing out that when men lawyers demand time off for their kids, the women will have an easier time making partner (or whatever the specific translation is). And this is true despite the rise of stay at home dads as a conscious subgroup of parents, and despite the fathers around me being vastly more active and involved than I recall from my suburban youth in the 70s.

So those of us laboring in the trenches of diapers, tantrums, the teaching and learning of language, of negotiation, of the world's causes and effects, and of the utility of calmness and kindness, are in an unusual situation. Things are undoubtedly changing. Every one certainly gives lip service to the importance of kids. But at the time, we are raising kids and are not respected as workers. People say, "oh, that must be nice" and then five minutes later "what do you do with all your time?" People constantly say of a person spending their time and attention on child-rearing ("child-care" as the phrase goes) that they are not working. Fie on that.

So, after congratulating myself for being a man and rearing these fascinating but unruly kids up, I realized that I need to beg congratulations for all my fellow workers in the fields, playgrounds, and grocery stores. Anyone who is working hard to raise kids well is stating the importance of women's work; and as that work is valued more, the genders will become more equal in the wider world of paid work, and our society will become more peaceful and more able to care for all life.

Change a diaper and change the world. It'll be particularly useful for men as a group to embody this truth, but everyone currently rearing children is shaping a better future for our entire society, and they benefit from societal recognition of the utmost importance of their labor.

Thanks everyone, for populating my future and my children's future with kind and intelligent people instead of dumb mean people.

My daughter was recently studying about Rosa Parks at her school. I've always found the sort of courage which Rosa Parks epitomized to be the highest form of courage; the one form to which all people can aspire, and which if even 10% of us mustered the world would continue to transform in marvelous ways. However, I was taken aback at a question she asked me. She asked, "Dad, do you do any work like Rosa Parks, getting bad laws changed?"

My answer wavered between lameness and non-lameness, but I was ready with my answer, and explained how the part of the world I am trying to change is that women and men should be free to do whatever work that they are best at, and that for that to happen, more fathers need to be doing the work of raising their children. We've had conversations about how in the past, men had to do certain jobs because of being men and women had to do certain jobs because of being women, instead of each person having the full scope of human action open to them. In a way, I've been waiting for someone to ask me this question for years.

It was my son's question that really made me laugh. A few days later we were talking about him missing his mother, who was at work (which we've visited a few times, so he knows the building). He said, "Dad, when you worked in that building, where was that?" My daughter and I started telling him about the AOL buildings, and she told him about going to "boring" meetings there. So then he asked, "when you worked at that building, where did you wash the dishes?" He's heard the story of how I worked at a building similar to what mom does now, and he clearly has learned that a large part of my labor is washing dishes.

So after I finished laughing, I figured that my answer to my daughter was indeed true enough. We went on to a have a good conversation about cafeterias and how I wasn't allowed to wash dishes at AOL, but that I "did stuff on computers."

My daughter had been rather indifferent about riding bikes for a while. She had a glamorous two-wheeler bought by my mother for a few years, but has been rather steadfast about not having the training wheels taken off (since a brief attempt last summer). However, recently a neighborhood kid who is younger has mastered the two-wheeler herself, so it became urgent to be rid of the training wheels.

Unfortunately, both of us were fairly nervous about this transition. I didn't really learn how to bike without training wheels until I was eight or so, and I'm not someone that bikes currently (basically out of fear that I'd be killed within a year of biking in DC traffic). I actually asked my working beloved life partner to do the task of helping our daughter with the bike riding, but the neighbor kept riding her bike around and the urgency required us to take action. I also have had times when my daughter was nervous and I've gotten a bit exasperated or nit-picky ("Look, if you just pedal harder, you'll have an easier time of keeping your balance." This is a perfectly true statement, and it often has the effect of pissing my daughter off enough to give up the bike riding altogether for that day).