So, here’s a quick quiz: What does the United States have in common with Swaziland, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea?

I’ll wait. And no, it’s not because those nations’ governments have just named pizza a vegetable, as the U.S. Congress just has.

Got an answer? If you were thinking that the U.S.’s maternity leave policy (which is to say, lack of a cohesive, mandated one) is the answer, you win.  We’re are in fine company with those three countries for offering working mothers no mandated paid maternity leave.

This, despite the fact that we talk a very good game about family values. Goodness, but do I distrust that phrase. What sort of family values are at play when a wage earner has the choice between hobbling back to work after six weeks’ “recovery” from childbirth in order to feed herself and her family — or quit her job altogether and risk either a temporary or permanent dip below the poverty line?

I rant about this today because I just read this piece on AOL Jobs, by Claire Gordon. The article starts with what’s supposed to be “good” news, that according to the latest Census Bureau data, a smidgen more than half of first-time mothers who worked would receive some sort of paid leave. (That “smidgen more” adds up to 51%). Then, of course, one has to take into account the fact that without mandated paid leave, these moms (I was among them, when I had my first son back in 2002) are at the mercy of their companies’ policies and precedents, and are statistically — big surprise here — more likely to get paid leave if they are professional women. Younger, less educated, and lower-paid workers are the least likely to have any sort of paid cushion, post birth. As the article notes:

Eighty-two percent of employed new mothers without a high school degree did not get paid leave, according to the census. These women are less likely to have jobs with good benefits, and they’re more likely to be very young. The lack of any mandated paid maternity leave also exacts a much greater cost on the single mothers who raise a quarter of this country’s children.

This is meant to be good news, right? The fact that the number ticked up from 42% at the last survey to that whopping 51% now? I’m not impressed.

To me, mandated paid leave would be one sure way of getting behind true family values. It would define family values, in a literal way, because if you value families, you help them get by as a family, right? But — again, as the piece points out — America is nothing if not conflicted over its definition of family values. In light of these kind of stats (that are supposed to be “good news” but instead mask the same-old bad news), it becomes clearer than ever that, in this nation, family values and working mothers are mutually exclusive. Enemies. Opposites. Two magnetic poles that repel each other. Overstating? I don’t think so.

I’ve been a working mother from the start. I’d have loved more paid leave, or more leave full stop, but I didn’t get it, and that’s a shame. For the record, I took 12 weeks off from a full-time job after the birth of my first son, four weeks on full pay, 8 weeks unpaid. After baby #2, I went freelance and “gave” myself a whopping 2 weeks “off.” Of course, women like me with professional careers can, at least in theory, dip in and out work, swap full- for part-time, ratchet back and then ramp up. We have that luxury. Other women have no such luxury.  But to me this is far more than a class issue (though I agree that the class issue is often ignored or brushed aside).

To me it always comes down to this dichotomy between family values as broadly defined in this country, and the reality on the ground. Why shouldn’t my effort to keep my career humming — and to support my family  — be the very definition of family values? Why, instead, should I feel guilty (I don’t, by the way; as I’ve said before, I think I was born without that gene, and thank goodness) in order to be a “good” mom? Why should I have to keep my mouth shut when others (on TV, in the media, casually all over the place) define moms who aren’t working outside the home “full time mothers.” News flash: Once that child is in your life, you are a full time mother, with “time” defined as “the rest of your life,” not 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.

No matter what we mothers do, we’re wrong, let’s face it (we hover too much, or not enough; we’re soccer moms or harpies in shoulder pads, etcetera and ad nauseum, through the ages). But working mothers are the majority of the workforce — when are attitudes going to catch up with reality? I’m not conflicted one bit about my role: I am a mother, and I work.

Those, my friends, are my family values. What are your thoughts?

Our pencils are all sharpened -- let's go!

Those of you who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve entered my usual, hair-tearing, mid-to-late-August, why-is-summer-vacation-so-long phase of the summer. We’ve actually had a nice summer this year, even given that last year included our Disney vacation and this year we’re not doing much in the way of leaving town. The boys spent their usual six weeks at the YMCA day camp, which sounds like a nice, long time, right? That’s because it is a nice long time, and after that, what more break do they need? A couple of weeks to just chill at home without having to pack up and smear themselves with sunscreen daily for camp? Sure. Maybe. But they have, after camp ends, four-and-a-half weeks more of summer break before school starts up again.

It’s too long.

There are things I could do to fill in the time — for one thing, I could have signed them up for more camp (they did two, three-week sessions at the Y; there’s a third session that just ended last week). Or I could have tried other camps — certainly, there’s no shortage of sports camps, arts camps, science camps, theatre camps. Notwithstanding the fact that they aren’t into any of those activities enough to warrant it, I’m out of money for camp, quite frankly. Which also means I’m out of money for a vacation — last year was a big treat for us, and I’m so glad we did it. So, more camp, more structured activties, or a splashy vacation (though to be fair, we are going away next week, to a local spot, for two days) is out of the question.

What is not out of the question is the fact that both of us, my husband and me, have to work, so while I could spend these four and a half weeks loading up my kids’ days with museum and beach trips, movies, lunches out, shopping excursions, and so on, I can only do so much because a decent part of each day does still have to be spent right here, at my computer, working. Yes, yes, I know I’m highly fortunate in that I can juggle my work time as I see fit, and to be sure I’m doing just that, doing more work in the evenings and on weekends then I’d normally do. But for me, as with most freelancers I know, the juggling freedom is a double-edged sword. I can take whole days off, and I have, to spend with my boys — but the more time I take off, the less money I potentially earn, because not only do  I have to meet the deadlines already etched in my calendar, I also have to (or should, always) spend time marketing myself, beating the bushes for more work to put in that calendar so that a few months from now, checks will come in. That’s a long-sentence way of saying, I get no paid vacations.

And again, that’s cool. I understand and appreciate the trade-offs, the pros and cons of my self-employed work/lifestyle.

But it also means summer is too, too long.

I read a hilarious piece by The Daily Show‘s Samantha Bee in the Wall Street Journal online. She’s a comedian, of course, so her take is probably exaggerated for the laughs’ sake, but she goes on and on to great, coffee-spewing-out-the-nose effect about how when she was growing up in the 1970s, kids just wandered around, subsisting on candy and cartoons, their brains slowly rotting until school started again. Now, by contrast, she says, we’re supposed to enrich our kids’ IQs to prevent the summer backslide. And she’s having none of it:

I just don’t have any more energy to dig in and renovate my children into super-intelligent reading cyborgs for the first day of school. I can’t do any more rainy day activities with dry oatmeal in a cardboard box. I simply will not sing the “Fruit Salad Salsa” even one more time; if the children can’t get behind Neil Young that’s their problem until school starts up again. And my stern warnings have become completely senseless; “I’m warning you—if you don’t eat all your Gummy Worms you’re not getting any Sour Patch Kids! I am tired of wasting all this good candy!”

Frankly, from now until September the only learning we will be engaging in will be movie-based. I plan to let them watch “Star Wars,” and will continue to play it in a constant loop until they can imaginatively explain to me what it might feel like to “make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.” It’s all I can do to stave off the pandemonium that could be.

Ah, the pandemonium that could be: I hear you, Sam. Right now, my boys are in front of Boomerang (I think; I’m not actually with them at the moment) on TV, which is apropos considering it plays old-school cartoons (Tom & Jerry, anyone?). Later we’ll do the enrich-y thing, with a trip to the library and the bookstore. We go to the beach, usually in the afternoons after I’ve spent the morning alternately breaking up fights and interviewing experts for stories (it can get confusing; I am careful not to shout into the phone, “I don’t care who started it!”). They see movies with the grandparents and get together with friends.

Meanwhile, they’ve all but forgotten how to read, and to write (and I make them do it, believe me!), and I’m basically handing their piano teacher money every week so we can not practice piano all week, or not without grumbling and complaining that their mosquito bites make them too itchy to do the C-major scale more than once, halfheartedly.

Yeah, I’ve had it. Even what Ms. Bee says, regarding her 70s summertimes, is hazy becuase it’s probably not quite true:

…my childhood summer vacations were spent languishing in front of the TV watching Phil Donahue and eating Boo Berry until my skin turned purple. Nobody cared if I read. Nobody cared if I wore sunscreen, or pants. I was like a house cat; my parents barely even knew if I was still living with them or whether I had moved in with the old lady down the street who would put out a bowl of food for me. In the ’70s, parenting was like a combination of intense crate-training and rumspringa, so I would typically spend June through September burnt to a crisp and wandering listlessly around the city, verging on scurvy.

I bet her parents did care, and did want school to just start up again.

Our supplies are bought, our backpacks and lunchboxes are cleaned up and ready, Grandma bought the new Sketchers (thanks, Grandma!). We are ready. I am beyond ready.

T-minus 16 days…

[photo: Everystockphoto.com]

So I know I’ve been ever so slightly M.I.A. lately. I beg your indulgence, but a couple of things are going on. Kids, for one — it’s mid-winter break right now, which means I’m even more pulled between my double existence of stay-at-home mom, and work-at-home mom. Sometimes, seriously, I wish I was one or the other, or the kind of working mom who, because she’s out of the house most of the day, unapologetically relies on a sitter or an au pair or after-care at school, on lovely things like grocery delivery, a cleaning service (bonus points if they do laundry). But because my office is cozily ensconced in a room in my home, and my work can theoretically be done anytime, my work-self and my mom-self are so wound up I feel like Chang and Eng, those famous Siamese twins who never were separated.

But — as usual! — I digress. I came here today, in between a looming work deadline, trying to keep my sons from spending their whole day in front of some screen or another, thinking about grocery shopping, and arranging some playdates, to make an exciting announcement:

I’m going to be writing a book! After a year of trying, my wonderful agent has sold my book proposal, Mean Mom, Good Mom: Why Doing the Hard Stuff Now Makes Good Kids Later, to Sourcebooks, to be published in Spring 2012. Seems like a long way off. But it’s not. It’s 10 chapters, an estimated 65,000 words, due in July. Or really, end of June, because it’s my goal to get it done before school ends, so I can spend the summer (at least, the six weeks covered by daycamp) plotting how I’ll sell the heck out of this thing. See above about being pulled in 17 different directions.

But it’s all good.

Now excuse me while I pry my children away from the TV/computer/Wii so we can hit the library and Trader Joe’s before this afternoon’s playdate.

Well, here we are again. By “we” I mean my family; and by “here” I mean with one of us out of a job.

Several years ago, my husband left a job that was literally sucking the life out of him (thanks to a bullying boss and a badly-run organization, he lost: 15 lbs. and his natural, glass-half-full outlook. What he did not lose, thank heaven, was his remarkable, resilient, family-forged work ethic). Anyway, though he made the correct decision to leave that job, he had no way of knowing that smack on the heels of it would come the first rumblings of the great recession, or Great Recession, or whatever we’re calling the most recent economic downturn. He was out of work for a year and a half.

Now he’s once again out of work — I’ll spare you the details because every time I try to explain his odyssey of the last few years it starts to sound like I’m defending something indefensible, or worse, whining on his behalf. I whine all the time, sure, but he doesn’t. Suffice to say, and notwithstanding the fact that I’m his wife and have that love-and-fidelity bias, he was making the very best of a bad situation, and ended up being forced out for not-good reasons.

I’m of course nervous and heavy-hearted at the prospect of going through what we went through before. It wasn’t pretty. The fun included going to the bank to close the boys’ meager bank accounts to squeak us through another month. I’m not sure if I was crying because of what I was doing, or because the teller didn’t even blink as she cut the check. Another bright spot? Dropping our health insurance when the choice became that or the mortgage; thank goodness we’re knock-wood-healthy. But despite knowing what might be ahead this go-around, I’m not upset. In fact, weirdly (or maybe not so weirdly as I’ll explain), I’m feeling both upbeat and optimistic right now.

My optimism stems from a couple different places. One, put simply, we did this before and we can do it again. Two, my husband is now closer to figuring out what he really, truly wants to do with his life, his passions and his talents. It’s his time — and it’s my job as his partner to help him figure that out. It’s what we do. That feeling — that it’ll be hard but ultimately rewarding; that we are in this together — is, to my mind, the very best part of having a good marriage. Go team, and all that.

But another reason has to do with how we work here in our humble suburban home, in our nearly 10-year marriage, in our thus far eight-year-long foray into parenting.

A month or so ago, I was listening to a segment of the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC.org (yeah, that’s me; NPR radio streaming on my computer is the soundtrack of my working life), in which Lopate was interviewing Joan Williams, author of the book Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. Here’s the interview, if you care to listen. Many of the points Williams makes were riveting (I love this stuff), and also puzzling (because it just doesn’t work this way in my home.)

Williams brought up stats we’ve probably all heard before, about how even as mothers have entered the full-time workforce over the last several decades, they still do the vast majority of housework and childcare. She also mentioned something that really made me take notice, about how much time fathers spend with their kids as a function of socioeconomic class. Here’s essentially what she notes:

White-collar fathers are more likely than their blue-collar counterparts to “talk the talk” about being around for their kids day-to-day, but end up not walking the walk (whether that’s because when push comes to shove they don’t want to play “SpongeBob Operation” or coach the soccer team; or — Williams’ main point — because they are under enormous pressure at work to perform like serious, career-minded men are supposed to, which does not involve skipping out at 5 or, heaven forbid, actually taking paternity leave. More on that later). Meanwhile, blue collar men may not be talking the talk about equal care for and time spent with their kids (possibly they don’t even know the lingo — this is me editorializing — not having been schooled in the gender-wars zeitgeist). But, they do, in practical terms, end up being more apt to walk the walk. To change a shift so they can be there for the recital, for example, or to show up at the elementary school for career day.

The issue seems to be, to my mind: Who do you feel more sorry for — the corporate lawyer chained to expectations that “real men” don’t skip out after a mere 80 hour week to get LuLu to her ice-skating competition? Or the union truck driver who’ll never make it in the circles of power (but can coach Little League)?

I tell ya, I feel sorry for all of us modern moms and dads in these scenarios. Another thing Williams points out, and is also nicely discussed in this recent Newsweek article entitled “Men’s Lib,” by Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil, is that overall workforce expectations and set-ups are woefully inadequate to the ways today’s families, or many of them, strive to make a living and raise their children. As Williams pointed out in the radio interview, the typical corporate entity/company still sees the ideal worker as someone who gets a job, works full time, full tilt for 40 or so years, and then retires. The only people who are able to do that without losing all their marbles are men with stay-at-home wives. For everyone else, it just works better when it’s fluid. And the American economy and workplace norms (all the nods to paternity leave and so-called family friendliness and the precious few places with subsidized or on-site daycare and — in rarer cases — nice, pleasant places for working/nursing mothers to pump breastmilk to one side) are not fluid. In most cases, moms suffer for taking time from their careers, dads suffer when they try to be more family-friendly, and kids just…suffer.

Which brings me back to our little family. When we first had Daniel, my husband had just finished graduate school. I had a well-paying editor’s job, and downshifted my position and salary to a three-day week. He taught a couple of college classes, had a couple of personal-training clients, and a part-time job in a hospital weight-management clinic. We had a babysitter for the three days I worked. Most of the time, my husband was long gone by the time Daniel and I woke up, and I handed off the baby to the very capable and loving Maggie. And much of the time, though Maggie was able to be there until I got home at 6pm, I’d arrive home to find Robert starting dinner while our happy, fat son bounced in his babyseat or munched on a Zweiback in his high chair.

By the time we moved from the city to the suburbs, my husband had taken a different job, ditching the multiple-part-time schedule that had seen him through graduate school for a full-time, but at home position. Again, the juggling resumed: I welcomed the nanny, he drove me to the train station, then returned to his home office. Later, when I switched to freelance life after James was born, we were both in home offices (Daniel would say, “Mommy works upstairs, and Daddy works downstairs,” which I think is a pretty cool thing for a kid to say, not because my son’s particularly clever, but because it was actually quite cool that he had no experience or memory of it being any other way.) We did wonder what the neighbors thought, when we’d return from dropping them both off at daycare. (“So, the kids are gone, but they’re home…”)

I wish that weren’t so odd a situation.

Eventually, my husband left that job for the one with the evil boss, who very nearly robbed him of his enthusiasm. One thing about this woman — and she was a woman, a mother of a teenager — that he found incomprehensible was how dismissive she was of men in the office, like my husband, who would routinely leave before, say, 7pm. She was not just dismissive, in fact; she was derisive and scornful toward men who had such inconsequential jobs that they were home to make dinner. She was speaking not of my husband in this instance, who in those days never got home in time to make dinner, much less eat it with us, but of her own husband. (I’d tell you about the time she kept my husband late to fruitlessly and humiliatingly harangue him for a mistake he’d already corrected, while her own daughter was waiting for her to pick her up from an after-school job — “eh, she can wait. Or call her father” — but I’d just get depressed).

That’s just wrong.

As I write, my husband is on his way to a job interview. I hope it gets it, of course; I hope this or whatever other plans and schemes he’s working out for his next career step make him feel good about himself, as a man and a husband as well as a father. But am I wrong to admit that, absent thorny realities of paychecks, retirement savings, and health insurance, I wish he could stay home, too? Because when we’re both working productively, but also both parenting equally (or equally-ish; he still isn’t quite sure of the pediatrician’s phone number or what goes in the lunchboxes) we’re all happier.

The subtitle of the Newsweek article I linked to above reads, in part, “Why it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home.”

Couldn’t agree more. Because that, my friends, would really constitute some honest-to-goodness family values.

I’d love to hear what you think about men and women, work and family, class and (in the case of certain ex-bosses), the lack thereof.

I feel my temperature rising...

I’m going to make a major admission here: I’m not very good at being at home with my kids. I’m not looking for either condemnation or sympathy; it’s simply a fact of my personality. And knowing this fact for sure has been what’s made me able to create my working-and-family life “balance” (which I put in quotes because as any parent knows, there’s no such thing as balance; it tips back and forth maddeningly) with a minimum of guilt.

So I work and my kids go to school (and before full-time school, I relied on daycare, which I still kinda miss because they had longer hours there than they do at school now). I realize I’m extraordinarily fortunate that I have a career I can fit (better word: stuff, or shoehorn) into school hours, with random extra hours at night or on the weekends if need be. I’m also fortunate that when I did have them in daycare, I found one that was both excellent and affordable.

I’ve written about my determination to not be a guilty working mom before, and I stand by that. Sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness, telling anyone who will listen that I don’t feel guilty, that a working mom is the woman I am, not a forced situation or an uncomfortable compromise. I don’t feel that making my work a priority (for the money, yes, but also because it’s who I am) automatically makes my responsibility as a parent less of a priority. My children are top of mind, and consume the majority of my heart, all the time. It’s just that that mind, and that heart, exist in a person who must, must, must work for a living, and must feel free to derive personal and professional enjoyment and satisfaction from that work.

All of this is my long-winded way of saying this:

I am terrible at being, just BEING, at home with my children. Which I am right  now, on Day Two of a viral illness my younger son James is suffering. Naturally any mother (or father) isn’t going to love their child’s sick days — that would be, er, sick. No one, whether they work or stay at home, enjoys the disruption to the household, or the drudgery and helplessness of caring for an ill child.

But I suspect that some parents have the ability to just … be while they’re home. To suspend the devotion to schedule. I can’t. I can do all the things I’m supposed to do — take the boy to the pediatrician, administer medicine, make chicken soup, put Cars in the DVD player (again), build a train track on the living room rug. But I can’t do it with patience.

It’s not who I am. Am I alone here?

Last year, I wrote an article for American Baby magazine called “Can You Afford to Quit?” It’s a perennial subject for parenting magazines — how-to advice for making a smooth work-to-home transition. I remember when I got the assignment. On the phone, my editor and I batted around the details of what to include, and she asked me what I thought would make a good sidebar to the piece.

I hesitated a bit, but then I broached this idea: What about a sidebar addressing the case against quitting? My idea was, maybe moms who are sure they want to stop working haven’t considered the economic downside of giving up their jobs — income, of course, but also retirement savings, health insurance, and so on. At the time, it was a subject close to my heart: my husband, who is now once again gainfully employed, was at the time in the midst of a protracted period of unemployment. My freelance business was keeping us afloat, and I was as grateful (and proud) to have my income.

I don’t want to get into the should-you-or-shouldn’t-you about working moms — but let me briefly address it, just to get it out there. Whether or not you quit your job to stay home with your child (or how often you change your mind and your work-life situation) has everything to do with your comfort level, your financial reality, your career focus, and your family’s  needs, and nothing to do with anyone else’s ideas, choices, or judgments. I have no judgments myself. As much as I know my choice works for me, I also see how others’ choices fit their needs. Don’t get me started on the so-called Mommy Wars, with working moms pitted against their stay-at-home counterparts. I’m not going to go there, because in my opinion, it’s a made-up war, whipped to a frenzy at predictable intervals by a media that should, instead, be trying to expose inequality in the workworld, and dismal lack of support for working families in this country.

Rant over!

I went back to work 12 weeks after my son was born. At the time, I was a magazine editor. And I was lucky: I had a good salary, lived 20 minutes from my office, and I found a terrific nanny. What I never had, curiously enough, was guilt. I knew I had to work. It was a financial reality for us, yes, but it was also an inner necessity for me. I loved being home with my new son, but I also loved getting out of the house, doing a job I adored, and coming home with a paycheck. I remember my first day back very well. It was January, snowy and cold, and I felt weird at first, tottering on high-heeled boots, wearing makeup, and handing over my three-month-old to his nanny. It was hard to walk out the door, but with every step toward the subway, I felt more like me. I was running toward work, eager to reclaim my old self. But at the end of the day, I was also running toward home. (Literally, I ran home from the subway, I was so eager to get my boy back in my arms.)

And so began the push-pull of work and home that all mothers feel at different times. There’s so much to worry about, from childcare to career concerns to what’s for dinner, that there isn’t (or shouldn’t be) much mental energy leftover for guilt.

I believe the reason I don’t feel guilty working is that this is as much who I am as any other indelible aspect of my personality. It sounds like the classic working-mom cliche, but it’s no less true: if I were home all the time, I wouldn’t be as good a mom as I am. If being a working person is who I am, then why should it be any less true to say that being a person who works  is who I am as a mom?

But back to that sidebar to my stay-at-home American Baby article. That was written when the economy was still teetering; it hadn’t  yet collapsed to the point it’s at now. These days, more and more moms who’ve been out of the workforce for years are heading back out of necessity, not to stave off boredom or make some extra cash, but to pick up the slack. To pay the mortgage. To get by.

The New York Times published a piece about the new pressure on moms to work in response to the dismal economy. Turns out, the percentage of moms in the workforce always goes up when the economy turns down. Again, I ask, where’s the room for guilt? Ditch it, ladies. You don’t need it, and neither do your kids.

I’d love to hear how you feel about working, staying home, guilt, and high heels!