Life's choices in a stark context

Today I was going to write about that fact that I've felt immersed in bad news this week, and I am therefore looking forward to seeing Mamma Mia! rather than The Dark Knight over the weekend. But this morning I read an newspaper article that shed some light on our local bad news in a relevant way. So I am going to go ahead and dive in to the real-life darkness.

I've been immersed in rewriting the Mojo Mom chapters about relationships, work and money. I have worked on these three topics simultaneously because to me they form three strands of the puzzle knot at the center of our lives.

So with this on my mind, a local tragedy has hit me on several levels. This week in Cary North Carolina, Nancy Cooper, a mother of two young girls, went missing. After a massive two-day search, she was found dead, not far from her home. Cooper was remembered as a fast friend who was at the center of a tight-knit circle of young families.

"The ease with which she bonded and made friends was amazing," said Brett Adam, [a friend's] husband.

Even children flocked to her. She'd lead gaggles through the neighborhood on a hunt for frogs, even though the creatures made her squirm.

Cooper seemed to revel in motherhood, but she had hoped to go back to work after her daughters, now 4 and 2, got a bit older, said friend Damia Tabachow. In Canada, Nancy Cooper had run a clothing boutique and an information technology company, friends said.

Though she spent her days chasing after two young children, friends say Cooper always looked glamorous, somehow making even a baseball cap appear fashionable.

"Everything just came naturally to her," Tabachow said. "She made it look easy."

Life is rarely that easy once you look below the surface. Police have not named a suspect in her murder, but today's newspaper reporting looked into the details of the Coopers' marital troubles. Nancy and her husband Bradley were both Canadian. They moved to the United States for his job and that effectively made Nancy "stuck" in the United States. She had wanted to go home to Canada with her two daughters this spring, but her husband hid the girls' passports.

Nancy was here on her husband's immigration status. He had applied for green cards for both of them but they had not arrived yet. So Nancy could not get a job, and she could not go home to Canada. An immigration lawyer was quoted as saying "Whatever her status she had is dependent on his status and his willingness to include her."

As I have been rewriting my book the idea that choices are made in a context keeps going through my head. (Lisa Belkin recently said this in the NY Times and that phrase really stuck with me.) Nancy Cooper's life illustrates that starkly. Choosing Bradley's transfer from Cisco in Calgary to Cisco in NC may have seemed like a great opportunity for the family. Choosing to embrace staying at home with her kids was making the best of her available options since she couldn't work in the US. But the element of choice doesn't make the context any less important:

To move to the U.S., Nancy Cooper shelved a budding career in the tech world and left a clothing boutique she ran in Calgary, her friends have said. Here, friends said, Nancy Cooper's visa didn't allow her to work, so she raised her daughters full-time.

"We had talked about how difficult it could be to be confined," said Adam, a friend of Nancy. "But it was a reality that she chose and knew -- for Nancy being a mother was everything." (from the Raleigh News & Observer, "Family: Cooper stuck in U. S.")

This is an evolving situation and I don't even have a take-home message yet. Just sadness and anger about Nancy Cooper's tragic death, and the fact that mothers are so often put into vulnerable positions.

Wake up and smell the money

"Will you regret staying at home with your baby?" Author Leslie Bennetts pushes this emotional button to get women to wake up to the financial risks of giving up a career. Bennetts makes her case in her online Glamourarticle and in her new book, The Feminine Mistake.

Deep breath here. This is a tough topic and Bennetts' approach is designed to stir controversy. But she is getting at important truths about marriage and motherhood. It's very tempting to live in denial of these hidden risks of financial dependency, but by the time a crisis happens, it is too late to prepare. One of her interviewees says, "It's very nice to believe, 'I don't have to worry, I can have someone take care of me. But you never know when he's goign to stop wanting to take care of you, or lose his job, or drop dead. There are too many what-ifs to be lulled into a sense of complacency like that.'"

I devoted a chapter to this topic in Mojo Mom. Rather than telling women not to take time away from the workforce, in "Keeping Your Resume Fresh and Financial Future Secure" I emphasize the skills and strategies women can use to stay competitive. I encourage you to take a life-long view of your career. Becoming a stay-at-home Mom should not be a one-way street and it's unfortunate that we tend to view it that way. The Opt-Out narrative has certainly been overwritten. (The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent article on "The Opt-Out Myth." Thanks to Cooper for pointing out this article to me.)

Mojo Mom's strategies for a healthy financial future:

1. Take charge of your financial life. Be a full participant in your family's financial planning--do not delegate this responsibility to your life partner! Make sure you know how much money your family has, what your joint financial planning strategy looks like, and what your credit scores are. Do you know whether your bills are all paid on time? How much credit card debt and other liabilities do you have? Make sure you have credit cards and a few household bills in your own name to develop your own credit history. Start saving for a 3-months-expenses emergency fund in your own name.

2. Keep in touch with your professional contacts. Set up regular meetings or lunches with your former colleagues. Show up in your professional persona and talk about your expertise, not just your kids. Look for opportunties to stay active in your field and keep building your resume, even while you are out of the full-time paid workforce.

3. Continue developing new interests and skills. The "stay-at-home" period can be a chance to reinvent yourself. Take short courses, online classes, or enroll in a degree program. Many jobs these days require a Masters' degree, and even if you don't intend to return to work for years, you may be very glad that you made the effort to get those qualifications under your belt now. I have known semi-retired women who had to go back to the workforce full-time when they were suddenly widowed. Even with decades of valuable life and work experience, they found themselves shut out of many job opportunities due to the lack of an advanced degree.

4. Develop an entrepreneurial spirit. Your life is your "start up" company! What do you want to make of it? Yes, it can be hard to re-integrate into an inflexible workplace with a family. But more flexible options are opening up and starting your own business is one way to make that happen. I don't mean to be overly optimistic about these possibilities but I truly believe that a "results oriented" work approach that is freed from rigid schedules will become common in the near future.

5. Take advantage of the opportunity to make progress when you are in calm times. I have learned this lesson the hard way! Over the past year my family has faced several unexpected crises. If I hadn't stayed on track to finsih Mojo Mom when I did, it would have been hard to get it done over the past year. Always keep your own projects simmering, and turn up the motivation when you have the chance. If you stay focused you can get a lot done. I finished a novel and wrote a screenplay when I only had 6 hours per week to write, while my daughter was in a toddler preschool program. I valued that time like a hidden stash of gold and I didn't squander it.

Leslie Bennetts brings up excellent points about the financial penalities of taking time out of the workforce. I look forward to reading her book as a bracing wake-up call. Women do face a serious financial burden by becoming mothers. Ann Crittenden has famously said that becoming a mother is a top risk factor for women being in poverty in old age. And college-educated women can expect to lose a million dollars in lifetime wages when they raise kids. But this isn't just our individual responsibility, it's a societal issue. This is one of the problems of the Opt-out narrative. As E. J. Graff says in the CJR piece:

"The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to Caryl Rivers, as saying, 'Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.'"

So my final appeal to you is to get involved in advocating for pro-family social policies, and to work to fight employment discrimination against mothers. This is a huge societal issue. This is why I am so excited to work with MomsRising.org. There are many groups and individuals working on these issues, and MomsRising gives us a mechanism to work together to give mothers a strong political voice.

Money, power and housework

Many thanks to blogger--and dedicated Mojo Mom Podcast listener--Adena for pointing me to a recent Boston Globe article "The Job Without Benefits" about the complex relationship between men, women, money and housework.

Adena's blog posting is well worth reading along with the original article.

Kudos to reporter Kris Frieswick for taking an unusually throrough look at the structural and invidivual factors that could explain why women still do more housework than men, regardless of, and sometimes in spite of, their outside work.

Frieswick reports the sad paradox that some breadwinning women do more housework in an attempt to neutralize their guilt about working and "deviating" from established gender roles. (Paging Caitlin Flanagan?)

I address many of these issues in my book. My Mojo Mom mantra is: "make the invisible work visible, and then divide it fairly."

It's up to each family to define what "fairly" looks like to them, but it's safe to say that it helps to be able to take guilt and resentment out of the equation. If everyone is contributing and no one feels like they're being taking advantage of, you are on the right track. Easier said than done, but a worthy goal.

Work-life balance: Our ladder is up the wrong tree

All the research I have done as Mojo Mom has led me to a conclusion that I really need to share with you. As mothers trying to have an integrated life with many facets, have set our sights set on the wrong goal. Our ladder is up the wrong tree in a major way.

I am talking about “work-life balance.” This idea is everywhere, and has become a watchword for my generation, Gen X, which has put “work-life balance” on the map as our highest ideal as we negotiate with our hard-charging Boomer bosses. Although it is usually presented as a positive ideal, “balance” is a trap. I argue that rather than being our highest goal, “balance” accurately describes our current situation that asks families to do it all…on our own. Until we change our thinking on this issue, we are going to be stuck with the same set of unappetizing work-life “choices” that we are faced with now.


Think about it. Who needs balance? Jugglers, tightrope walkers….and Moms. Picture the iconic cover of a chick-lit novel, showing a woman struggling to “balance” a briefcase, cellphone. and pacifier. In real life there would most likely be a dog and stroller involved too, in addition to an actual baby. When we tell women to strive for balance, we’re really telling them to keep dancing as fast as they can. We are telling them that they are failing to keep it all together without asking for help.

“Balance” is in fact a telling metaphor for motherhood. Balance is the underappreciated sixth sense in our brains. Our sense of balance is active, dynamic, and takes a constant hum of processing and adjustment to achieve—yet this vital work barely registers in our conscious mind. We only notice it when our system fails and we are thrown into disequilibrium, left dizzy and unable to function. We couldn't get out of bed to stand up straight and walk, much less work and lead productive lives, without our sense of balance. But when is the last time you thought of your vestibular system, not to mention stopping to thank heavens for the vital job it does?

This is just like the work that mothers provide: unpaid, uncounted, and invisible labor that forms the foundation of family life. If it were counted, women's unpaid household labor would add an estimated one-third to the world's annual economic product, more than $4 trillion.

So if our balancing act is a farce rather than a lofty goal, what should we be aiming for?

Support.

This needs to become our new ideal, our North Star, our guiding metaphor. The motherhood movement should aim for creating a real support network that involves everyone--employers, communities, men and women. We need a team approach to holding up the world, one that recognizes the contributions that all family caregivers make, a system that does not just expect us to make the pieces fit all by ourselves on an individual level. My Mojo Mom Mantra is to "make the invisible work visible and then divide it fairly." We are still at the beginning of that first step, increasing awareness about what mothers and fathers contribute to society, through the sacrificial giving that is required to raise the next generation of children. Support and teamwork need to trickle up from the grassroots to a policy level. We can use this context to explain the motherhood movement to our supporters and skeptics alike.

I learned a lesson about support recently. I had ordered a giant beanbag chair called a Foof Cube for our home. My 7 year old knew a good thing when she saw it. Within a day of its arrival she had commandeered it for her bed, and she’s been sleeping in it every night since then. Kids are great at taking what they need.

I am also ordering another one for myself. In the meantime, I sneak into her room during the school day and sink down into the foam cube to remind myself what support feels like. I am cradled in a snug nest. I let go, and nothing falls.

I could get used to this.