I have neighbors who, although they are lovely people, often do something that makes me angry and fearful for the future of the global village and of the planet. They drive to the bus stop (or somewhere else in the neighborhood that they could walk to easily) and then sit there with their motors running, even in lovely, temperate weather.
Some other people will drive up to the bus stop, get out of the car to chat and leave it running. Now that really doesn't make sense to me. What is the point? It's not keeping you warm (or cool), you're not listening to the radio, so why? The other day another neighbor came over to drop something off. She left her car running in my driveway while she came to the door. We inevitably started talking about this and that, so her quick visit turned into several minutes while her empty car chugged away. As she left my porch, she bemoaned mildly the cost of gasoline. Sometimes, I want to just bang my head against the wall. Or hers.
Now, granted, I'm one of those people -- I turn off my car at long stop lights. I'm so worried about global warming that I hang my clothes out to dry until the temperature drops below freezing and I can't feel my fingers by the time I've taken them down. I sometimes take three times as long to do the grocery shopping because I insist on riding my bike to the store (when I have the time and the weather is half-decent -- I'm not a martyr). And my house is always cold because I won't turn the heat pump up over 65 in the winter (wear thermal underwear! put on a sweater! my children hear when they complain). I'm sure my neighbors think I'm just as much of an oddball for doing all those things, and, let's face it, they're not wrong.
But is it really asking too much for drivers to turn off an idling car for a few minutes while they wait for children to emerge from school? Is it a hardship to wear a warm jacket in the car so you don't have to keep it running for the heat? It's not impossible to turn off a car on a beautiful spring day when it's a perfect 68 degrees, is it? The exact numbers vary, but experts say that, if your car is off for ten to thirty seconds before you turn it back on, you've come out ahead in gas consumption. Thirty seconds, people!
Even if you don't believe the science about global warming, this kind of thing hits you in your wallet. Our electric bills went down significantly this fall when I started drying all our clothes outside. Given a choice between joining a karate school three minutes away versus 15 minutes away, we joined the closer one. Each decision is small, but they add up to an ability to live very comfortably on one income.
We don't deprive ourselves, either. We just prioritize, and we indulge the things that are important to us and jettison the stuff that isn't. Being mindful about other areas of our life has given us the wherewithal to pursue the things that are important to us, and that makes the small sacrifices worthwhile.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Greatness in the face of mundanity...
I read somewhere today that Einstein used to sit in a chair with his keys in his hand and let his mind wander. His keys would eventually fall out of his hand and wake him from his reverie.
This sounds positively luxurious to me. To sit in a chair and have no one bother me long enough for my keys to fall from my completely relaxed hand -- how many of us have that opportunity?
From the moment I rise in the morning until I fall into bed at night, my time is taken up with mundane things, laundry and cooking chief among them. I often wonder what I might accomplish if I were freed from such things, if I knew that someone else would take on their responsibility. Certainly the education I pursued with such alacrity was intended for intellectual pursuits, not just the logistics of handling simultaneous homework supervision, music instruction, and dinner preparation at the end of each day.
Tillie Olsen drew attention to this problem in the lives of women. She lived it, and she wrote about it. She herself had to fit her writing into the interstices of her family and work life, not to mention her political activism. How much more might she have published if she had not had such demands on her time? Would she have traded her large family for more time for contemplation?
If Einstein had had to take care of daily housekeeping, would we now have a theory of relativity? I doubt it. When one's mind is filled with the minutiae of child-rearing and housekeeping, there isn't much room left for higher thought. It's hard to switch gears from the goal-oriented list-making concrete stuff of daily life to the process-oriented, loosy-goosey wafty contemplation necessary for great leaps in modern thought.
And how does one justify it? Someone looking at my life right now would see me as a housewife and mother, nothing more. The cleanliness of my house and the behavior of my children are the yardsticks by which my life is measured by others. My messy house might be vindicated by the publication of a novel or even an essay, but I must first find the time to write the damn thing. It seems I can only justify quiet, contemplative time to myself if I sacrifice sleep to do it, and that has repercussions that affect all of us, especially as I get older. If I take it any other time, I feel like I'm cheating, like my time would be better used in the service of my family, washing their clothes, cooking their meals, managing their lives. It feels selfish on so many levels.
But that isn't fair! Did Einstein feel selfish or guilty about sitting in a chair, letting his keys fall? Of course not! What does it take to get to the point where sitting and thinking doesn't feel like cheating? Does one have to publish a certain number of articles or novels to find that feeling? Or is it more innate than that? Is it, as I suspect, somewhat related to gender?
There is a classic Dilbert strip that begins with Alice the "brittle engineer" working at her desk, skipping lunch yet again because she has too much to do. She goes looking for Dilbert and finds him in the cafeteria with Wally and the other guys, eating lunch, and she blows up at them. "How can you sit here and eat lunch when there's so much to do?" she says (or something to that effect). "Um... we were hungry?" is the reply. That, my friend(s), is the nub of it right there.
When I was first married, my husband and I went about the usual task of divvying up the household chores. We moved into a fairly large house with a yard, and it was our first foray into homeownership -- even more so for my husband, who had lived only in apartments his whole life. It soon became clear that, regardless of our agreed-upon splits, my husband would do only as much as he felt able to do without giving up any of the activities he had done as a bachelor apartment-dweller. He felt no guilt about things that were left undone and could not for the life of him understand why I insisted on doing so much work around the house. Nothing got in the way of his afternoon nap, while I spent hours doing yard work. When I complained about all the work that had to be done, he would just tell me not to do it. Not that he would do it, mind you, just that I should leave it undone. This infuriated me.
Someone has to take responsibility for the day-to-day operation of life. That's the key word: responsibility. My husband knew that he could abdicate responsibility for the house because I was so gung-ho about it. This happened in my work life as well: my male colleagues, like Dilbert and company, would go off to lunch while my female colleague and I would work through lunch because we felt there was so much to do. Clearly, the women on the team felt an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for the work that had to be done, and the men took advantage of that, consciously or not. It's a recurring pattern in the world as I see it, and I wonder how much of it is nurture and how much is nature.
Do we teach boys that they don't have to take responsibility for their domestic environment? Or is it broader than that? Are boys somehow learning that someone else will cover for them? I wonder if this is something we're doing overtly, or unconsciously. Women don't get rewarded for this behavior (except perhaps with sisterhood and shared eye-rolling), so why do we keep doing it? It must have to do with biology: women are evolutionally (?) wired to keep family life humming along while the men go off and please themselves, going forth and multiplying, as it were. Is that too simplistic? Is it a sociological rather than biological phenomenon? I can't separate the two. Perhaps it's just a matter of seeing the big picture. Men just seem innately more capable of selfishness than women, speaking generally, anecdotally, and with absolutely no scientific facts to back it up.
In any event, it seems to me that accomplishing something great in the world of letters or science or just about anything contemplative requires some level of abdication of responsibility for everyday minutiae. If you're coordinating carpool while you're putting dinner on the table, answering homework questions in between, you're not coming up with profound ideas. Someone has to keep life running, but these days it is still an inordinate number of women doing it. We need to let it go, and men need to pick up the slack. That means equal senses of responsibility, which may require some evolution in both sexes.
This sounds positively luxurious to me. To sit in a chair and have no one bother me long enough for my keys to fall from my completely relaxed hand -- how many of us have that opportunity?
From the moment I rise in the morning until I fall into bed at night, my time is taken up with mundane things, laundry and cooking chief among them. I often wonder what I might accomplish if I were freed from such things, if I knew that someone else would take on their responsibility. Certainly the education I pursued with such alacrity was intended for intellectual pursuits, not just the logistics of handling simultaneous homework supervision, music instruction, and dinner preparation at the end of each day.
Tillie Olsen drew attention to this problem in the lives of women. She lived it, and she wrote about it. She herself had to fit her writing into the interstices of her family and work life, not to mention her political activism. How much more might she have published if she had not had such demands on her time? Would she have traded her large family for more time for contemplation?
If Einstein had had to take care of daily housekeeping, would we now have a theory of relativity? I doubt it. When one's mind is filled with the minutiae of child-rearing and housekeeping, there isn't much room left for higher thought. It's hard to switch gears from the goal-oriented list-making concrete stuff of daily life to the process-oriented, loosy-goosey wafty contemplation necessary for great leaps in modern thought.
And how does one justify it? Someone looking at my life right now would see me as a housewife and mother, nothing more. The cleanliness of my house and the behavior of my children are the yardsticks by which my life is measured by others. My messy house might be vindicated by the publication of a novel or even an essay, but I must first find the time to write the damn thing. It seems I can only justify quiet, contemplative time to myself if I sacrifice sleep to do it, and that has repercussions that affect all of us, especially as I get older. If I take it any other time, I feel like I'm cheating, like my time would be better used in the service of my family, washing their clothes, cooking their meals, managing their lives. It feels selfish on so many levels.
But that isn't fair! Did Einstein feel selfish or guilty about sitting in a chair, letting his keys fall? Of course not! What does it take to get to the point where sitting and thinking doesn't feel like cheating? Does one have to publish a certain number of articles or novels to find that feeling? Or is it more innate than that? Is it, as I suspect, somewhat related to gender?
There is a classic Dilbert strip that begins with Alice the "brittle engineer" working at her desk, skipping lunch yet again because she has too much to do. She goes looking for Dilbert and finds him in the cafeteria with Wally and the other guys, eating lunch, and she blows up at them. "How can you sit here and eat lunch when there's so much to do?" she says (or something to that effect). "Um... we were hungry?" is the reply. That, my friend(s), is the nub of it right there.
When I was first married, my husband and I went about the usual task of divvying up the household chores. We moved into a fairly large house with a yard, and it was our first foray into homeownership -- even more so for my husband, who had lived only in apartments his whole life. It soon became clear that, regardless of our agreed-upon splits, my husband would do only as much as he felt able to do without giving up any of the activities he had done as a bachelor apartment-dweller. He felt no guilt about things that were left undone and could not for the life of him understand why I insisted on doing so much work around the house. Nothing got in the way of his afternoon nap, while I spent hours doing yard work. When I complained about all the work that had to be done, he would just tell me not to do it. Not that he would do it, mind you, just that I should leave it undone. This infuriated me.
Someone has to take responsibility for the day-to-day operation of life. That's the key word: responsibility. My husband knew that he could abdicate responsibility for the house because I was so gung-ho about it. This happened in my work life as well: my male colleagues, like Dilbert and company, would go off to lunch while my female colleague and I would work through lunch because we felt there was so much to do. Clearly, the women on the team felt an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for the work that had to be done, and the men took advantage of that, consciously or not. It's a recurring pattern in the world as I see it, and I wonder how much of it is nurture and how much is nature.
Do we teach boys that they don't have to take responsibility for their domestic environment? Or is it broader than that? Are boys somehow learning that someone else will cover for them? I wonder if this is something we're doing overtly, or unconsciously. Women don't get rewarded for this behavior (except perhaps with sisterhood and shared eye-rolling), so why do we keep doing it? It must have to do with biology: women are evolutionally (?) wired to keep family life humming along while the men go off and please themselves, going forth and multiplying, as it were. Is that too simplistic? Is it a sociological rather than biological phenomenon? I can't separate the two. Perhaps it's just a matter of seeing the big picture. Men just seem innately more capable of selfishness than women, speaking generally, anecdotally, and with absolutely no scientific facts to back it up.
In any event, it seems to me that accomplishing something great in the world of letters or science or just about anything contemplative requires some level of abdication of responsibility for everyday minutiae. If you're coordinating carpool while you're putting dinner on the table, answering homework questions in between, you're not coming up with profound ideas. Someone has to keep life running, but these days it is still an inordinate number of women doing it. We need to let it go, and men need to pick up the slack. That means equal senses of responsibility, which may require some evolution in both sexes.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Day Care and the SAHM (or, Validation and the Modern Woman)
This is a debate that is never going to end. Studies will continue to be done, psychobabble televangelists will continue to expound with ever-greater pomposity, and women will continue to second-guess their career choices forever and ever, amen.
What we're all really doing is looking for validation. Did I make the right choice in staying home with my children? Would it be better for them if I went back to work and put them in day care, giving us more money for trips to Europe and piano lessons? We need someone to tell us that what we're doing is right for our children and/or for ourselves, and that it's okay to put ourselves or our children first, whichever one we've tried to do. Thank you, feminism, for giving us the choice, and thank you, Eli Lilly, for giving us Prozac so we can deal with the cultural/personal/financial consequences of that choice.
Why are we so dependent on this outside validation? Why isn't it enough that our family is happy with whatever our situation is? Are we all determined to be SuperMom and outdo every other woman on the planet? Or are we all vast sinkholes of need, requiring constant positive feedback to maintain our own self-esteem?
Because it seems that it's not enough for women to be happy with their own arrangements. We need everyone else to be happy with them, too, or we consider them a failure. How interesting it is that men are seldom plagued with these doubts. It is my impression (correct me if I'm wrong) that men are happy if they are happy, but women aren't happy unless everyone else is happy, too. And that's the thing that is going to keep women as primary caregivers until the end of time.
I am a SAHM whose children are all in school all day. I could easily go back to work; in fact, I was offered, and declined, a full-time job at a local college. The problem is, the full-time job I already have isn't going to go away. The house will still have to be cleaned, dinner will still have to be made, laundry will have to be done, child care will still be of utmost importance, but I'll have a lot less time to do it all in, and zero time to sit and contemplate a story idea, read a book, play the piano, etc. I have no illusions about how much my husband will do around the house: he already does pretty much what he's going to do, and I'm not ready to go into unending battle to get him to do more. But I still troll the job listings, just in case the perfect job appears out of nowhere. Niggling guilt hangs at the back of my mind, repeating the trope that, because I can work, I should work. I feel guilty because I like being home by myself all day, and somehow that translates into being selfish.
So I'm staying home with the kids, yes, but I have to admit, these days it's an excuse for staying home and doing what I want to do for a change. I could go back to work, sure, but I don't really want to. I feel like I should for future financial security, but if I do, I'll never get another chance like this. I started working when I was 13 years old, and this is the first time in my life that I've felt like I have time to follow some dreams, try out new things. When I was young and single, I was so desperately afraid of being without health insurance and a paycheck that I worked my ass off and went to graduate school at the same time. Then, when my children were tiny, I ran my own business while they slept until I just couldn't physically handle the sleep deprivation anymore. This is my first taste of freedom, and I'm not ready to give it up for a bunch of shoulds.
But there's this part-time job I found on careerbuilder....
What we're all really doing is looking for validation. Did I make the right choice in staying home with my children? Would it be better for them if I went back to work and put them in day care, giving us more money for trips to Europe and piano lessons? We need someone to tell us that what we're doing is right for our children and/or for ourselves, and that it's okay to put ourselves or our children first, whichever one we've tried to do. Thank you, feminism, for giving us the choice, and thank you, Eli Lilly, for giving us Prozac so we can deal with the cultural/personal/financial consequences of that choice.
Why are we so dependent on this outside validation? Why isn't it enough that our family is happy with whatever our situation is? Are we all determined to be SuperMom and outdo every other woman on the planet? Or are we all vast sinkholes of need, requiring constant positive feedback to maintain our own self-esteem?
Because it seems that it's not enough for women to be happy with their own arrangements. We need everyone else to be happy with them, too, or we consider them a failure. How interesting it is that men are seldom plagued with these doubts. It is my impression (correct me if I'm wrong) that men are happy if they are happy, but women aren't happy unless everyone else is happy, too. And that's the thing that is going to keep women as primary caregivers until the end of time.
I am a SAHM whose children are all in school all day. I could easily go back to work; in fact, I was offered, and declined, a full-time job at a local college. The problem is, the full-time job I already have isn't going to go away. The house will still have to be cleaned, dinner will still have to be made, laundry will have to be done, child care will still be of utmost importance, but I'll have a lot less time to do it all in, and zero time to sit and contemplate a story idea, read a book, play the piano, etc. I have no illusions about how much my husband will do around the house: he already does pretty much what he's going to do, and I'm not ready to go into unending battle to get him to do more. But I still troll the job listings, just in case the perfect job appears out of nowhere. Niggling guilt hangs at the back of my mind, repeating the trope that, because I can work, I should work. I feel guilty because I like being home by myself all day, and somehow that translates into being selfish.
So I'm staying home with the kids, yes, but I have to admit, these days it's an excuse for staying home and doing what I want to do for a change. I could go back to work, sure, but I don't really want to. I feel like I should for future financial security, but if I do, I'll never get another chance like this. I started working when I was 13 years old, and this is the first time in my life that I've felt like I have time to follow some dreams, try out new things. When I was young and single, I was so desperately afraid of being without health insurance and a paycheck that I worked my ass off and went to graduate school at the same time. Then, when my children were tiny, I ran my own business while they slept until I just couldn't physically handle the sleep deprivation anymore. This is my first taste of freedom, and I'm not ready to give it up for a bunch of shoulds.
But there's this part-time job I found on careerbuilder....
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