Joy restored

I spent the last few months in a funk. Hiding from the telephone, telling my kids to leave me alone, burying myself in my iPod and the Internet. I felt like I was in mourning, but I didn't know what for. I felt like I was never going to be really happy again.

Tonight I broke out of that for a few hours. I don't know how long I can hold onto this feeling, but my heart is moved and my soul is full. I sang Bach and Mozart with my choir for two hours, after sharing a German meal with them. I could feel every cell in my body; I was alive to my core.

We had been on summer hiatus since May, when we had our annual Festival, our 99th. I didn't realize how much I missed it, how much I missed the people as well as the music, until I was there amidst it all. It had seemed like work that first week in May, with rehearsals every night, seeing my family only for a couple of hours each night, coordinating soccer practices and scout meetings with my rehearsals and concerts. But now, it's all just magic. We're learning new music (well, new to this particular group, and some is new to me), and it's Mozart, even though we're a Bach choir.

We began by singing his Ave Verum Corpus, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written (see more here and here). It is beautiful in its simplicity and reverence and brings peace to your soul. We then moved on to the Coronation Mass. You can hear Mozart's mercurial personality in the music. The arrogant boy, puffing out his chest with disdain for lesser composers, followed quickly by the awe-struck servant of God who is humbled by his gift. The Agnus Dei is reminiscent of the Ave Verum, but the Gloria breaks out in joy and contagious enthusiasm. I imagine Mozart as a very passionate and charismatic man-boy, someone whose supreme self-confidence made it impossible to take one's eyes off him, but, like so many geniuses, someone whose basic needs had to be taken care of for him because he just didn't register such nonsense. I feel in his music that he lived for it, that God began and ended with it, and that he had time for nothing else. Perhaps that's why he only lived to not-quite-36.

It is a miracle that we can feel the force of one man's personality 215 years after he died. Bach wrote truly great music, but, perhaps because I know it (well, the sacred choral stuff) so well, the force of Bach's personality doesn't hit me as hard as Mozart's. I may have become inured to its effects after almost 20 years of singing it (though the B Minor Mass still moves me to tears even after some 45 performances of it), but I think Bach's relatively long and happy life makes his music more straightforward, with less ambiguity. Not passionless, but passionate within the context, without the huge ups and downs of Mozart.

Music is a language -- really the only world-wide language. We don't all know the great composers of every country, but the universally-acknowledged masters, like Bach and Beethoven are known by all, even if peripherally. Imagine sitting down with a stranger from a foreign country and trying to convey one's feelings. All you need to do is find the right piece of music, and even if one's counterpart hasn't heard it before, s/he can get an inkling of what's going on in your head. It's Tower of Babel stuff! It's basic to our humanity, something that binds us as common inhabitants of Earth.

Douglas Adams said it best: "When I listen to Mozart, I understand what it is to be a human being; when I hear Beethoven, I understand what it is to be Beethoven; but when I listen to Bach, I understand what it is to be the universe." I think that's it -- it isn't that Bach's personality is less forceful than Mozart's. It's more that Bach's music is a basic ingredient of the universe; we're permeated with it, it feels like part of us, like it's always been there and always will be, like a force of nature, timeless. Its ebb and flow is our ebb and flow. Whoever the composer, communication is happening on a very basic, visceral level, and it can bring intimacy to strangers.

Joy restored. That's what it feels like. It was missing from my life, and now it's back. Listening to music is for me too far removed; I need to be part of the music, inside it, making it happen. I can't go to concerts because I want so desperately to sing or play myself. I like to sing alone sometimes, but sharing the joy is the real key. There is nothing like singing beautiful music with people who love it as much as you do. It's better than any drug.

Putting my money where my mouth is...

Well, now that I've vented my spleen about what I think is wrong with the current marketplace, let's get down to some solutions. Hey, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, right?

To recap, the family is so disrespected in the workplace that parents have trouble finding jobs, especially if they demand flexibility. Parents, mostly women at the moment, who choose to stay at home with their children pay the price in their careers, even if they choose to go back to work within a few years of leaving their jobs. Unless the string of employment is unbroken, it is difficult to break back in, more difficult than it was trying to find that first job after college or grad school. What is the solution to this?

Well, I have a couple of ideas. One has to do with anyone going back to work, the other refers to women specifically.

Health benefits for all
First of all, every family faces pressure to maintain at least one full-time career. Why? Benefits! How many part-time jobs offer full family benefits, or even individual benefits, at a level that will cover the basics without breaking the bank? At the same time, unless one pulls back from full time to part time without taking any time in between, it is impossible to find a part time job that uses one's skills; any professional job posting I've seen demands full time work. Part time jobs abound, but they are generally limited, at least in my area, to secretarial, clerical or health care.

These two problems go hand in hand, but they pose a chicken-egg problem: separating health benefits from employment would allow workers to explore job sharing and part time work as long as they could afford it, and a growing pool of qualified workers would allow employers to expand their part time job offerings without paying a price in quality of work. Imagine the possibilities! My husband and I (our fields overlap somewhat) could, in theory, share a job, or, failing that, work two part time jobs, making sure that our family's needs are met and the work gets done well. We would each have the intellectual stimulation and peer interaction we need, and we would each have roughly equal family time, leading to less resentment and more equality at home and at work.

Do you see where I'm going here? Universal health care fits like the last piece in the family values jigsaw puzzle. This promotes the family, helps the next generation see that both parents can have careers and still be available for them, and even helps to make the sexes more equal. What's not to like?

Equal pay for equal work
I promised you two potential solutions. It used to be that women were paid less, no matter what their jobs were, and no bones were made about it. Well, it's still true, but no one talks about it anymore; it's old news. It's gone underground. Women are still paid only about $.76 for each dollar a man earns, and access to management positions, which pay more, is still limited. Now, though, I think it is less due to the perception that women are incapable of doing the same work as well as men, and more to the assumption that every woman will, eventually, leave to have a baby. If she returns at all after that, it is further assumed that her commitment to her job will be compromised -- once again we see how parents, mothers especially, are penalized just for other people's assumptions. Men are still seen as breadwinners, while women's income is thought to be optional.

Then the demands of the family, whether children are involved or not, become burdensome. The sandwich generation can easily find itself between a rock and a hard place, and someone just has to stop working for money and deal with life. When a family has to make such a decision, which partner do you think is going to quit? Most highly-educated people partner up with other highly-educated people -- not universally, but more often than not -- so it's likely, everything else being equal, to be the woman who quits. (Yes, I know, there are plenty of exceptions, but I'm generalizing here. My mom always made more than my dad, so I hear you. Bear with me.)

Linda Hirshman's thesis in her American Prospect article is that this trend begins at home, that the inequality is due to imbalance in the housework. I argue the opposite: conditions in the workplace lead to a need for someone to be home to handle life while the worker puts in his/her 80-hour week. Because we can't afford to quit and lose our health benefits and 401(k)s (because, don't forget, companies don't offer pensions anymore -- we're on our own), women are more likely to leave their careers because they earn less, even if their jobs are similar to their partners'.

The solution? Universal health care unrelated to employment. Everything else will follow.

The Way We Live Now

(With apologies to the New York Times Magazine)

I have three children. Let's just get that out there right now. They're a big part of my life, and they dictate how I spend most of my time. I also have a husband, two aging parents and a mother-in-law. Now you know my dirty little secret.

All of my children are now in school all day, so I thought I'd go back to paid work. I worked part time for six years, running my own consulting business until I burned out from the exhaustion of caring for little kids all day, trying to get my work done at night, and, most importantly, my husband's attitude that my work came, at best, third, and my clients were supposed to understand that. It's been four years of SAHMing since I closed the business, and I've had enough of endless housework with nothing to show for myself at the end of the year. No raises, no respect.

Well, hah! Just *try* to find a job if you admit that you have a family that's important to you. Parents have gotten such a bad rap for taking time off for doctor appointments, school functions, and *gasp* family vacations that no one wants to hire us. Why hire someone like me when they can get a single, carefree recent college graduate to work longer hours, probably for less money and fewer benefits? They'll take longer to do not quite as good a job, but by golly they'll warm that chair for the right eight hours, and that's what counts.

Families are the new dirty little secret. Everyone has them, but no one dares acknowledge that they enjoy them or consider them important. Society would literally stop without them, but, hey, "it's the economy, stupid." If it doesn't help the bottom line, it's not going to happen. So, even though I could do a better job in a particular position, getting more done in less time, I won't get the job because I need some flexibility in my time. We're not talking about critical, fault-intolerant systems here, or bizarre work schedules. I don't apply for those jobs precisely because the hours are fixed and I understand why that's necessary. I apply for jobs where the work has to get done, but you don't have to be there 9-5 to do it.

I'm told that I shouldn't even mention that I need flexible hours. That seems disingenuous to me. I know that I want to be home for my children after school, which means working early hours -- not excessively early, just something like 7-3 -- and it seems reasonable to me to make that clear from the start. Is that wrong? Otherwise, I feel like I'm pulling a bait-and switch, and I hate those. But I'm expected to act like I have nothing else in my life but this potential job, like I live only for this company or that. Is that really what we've become??

This is a scary trend, with the Linda Hirshmans of the world telling us that caring for our own children is wrong and the child-free movement telling us that even having them is a bad thing. Just how does civilization continue if families and children aren't valued? And it's not a problem within the home, as Hirshman posits, but in the workplace; parents have trouble balancing work and family because their work environments don't value their families. They see families as a drain on our energy, not restorative. People in this country don't even take all their vacations anymore, largely because they're afraid of being dispensable at work!

Hirshman decries the highly-educated women of today who opt out of the rat race to enjoy their children. Who can blame them? When companies routinely lay off the employees that do the actual work in order to lavish bonuses on the top few, why should we give them our loyalty? Where is the real reward here? A paycheck, yes, but with a certain soullessness to go with it. You don't dare invest yourself too much in any job because it will just devastate you when you lose it. The problem isn't with staying home with your children when they need you. The obstacles come when you want to go back to paid work but you don't want to devote your entire life to it. That's when you find it impossible, and that's true across the board.

Most of the current "opt-out" generation hasn't found that out yet. They blithely think they can go back anytime, and perhaps many will, depending on their professions and their locations. But their children are still young, so it's on the back burner. What they don't understand is that they will always want to be there for their children, so going back to 80-hour weeks is not going to appeal to them, nor will it even be an option. They will be forever tainted.

They might as well wear a scarlet 'M'.