Eleven ways of looking at Ann Romney

I’m not going to write a huge amount (UPDATE: I'm going to write more than 1,200 words, so actually that's quite a lot) about Ann Romneygate, because every publication on earth has already covered it with not one but multiple stories apiece. I’ve currently got five on my screen in tabs. I’m already way oversaturated myself with what is essentially a minor kerfuffle, and not particularly eager to add to the glut.

Still, this kerfuffle does center around one of my main issues: how caregiving work is categorized. I’d feel remiss not to address it at all. And I have thoughts about both sides, albeit somewhat contradictory ones.

 

1.)    I call it Ann Romneygate because Ann Romney, in this metaphor, is the hotel where the break-in occurred, not the G. Gordon Liddy of the episode. Liddy, the original Watergate scandal's villainous protagonist, would in this case be Hilary Rosen, a political professional who remarked that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life." Just as the Watergate break-in could theoretically have occurred in any hotel (though thankfully it didn’t, because “gate” is much catchier suffix for subsequent scandals than “Holiday Inn Express”), this isn’t really about Ann Romney per se. It’s about rich ladies who can afford to stay home with their children without worrying in the least about the financial consequences (even, most likely, long term, in the case of divorce or widowhood), and who have the resources to hire out any or all child-care tasks, as they choose.

 2.)    There’s no question that Hilary Rosen’s comment was inaccurate. Of course Ann Romney has worked a day in her life. Many days. Call me naive, but I'll bet that nobody on earth, no matter how privileged or protected, reaches age 63 (as of Ann Romney's birthday on Monday) without doing any work whatsoever, not just single but, cumulatively, multiple days’ worth. Let alone a mother of five. Even if it’s just interviewing potential servants. So Rosen was wrong, not to mention impolitic. Hey political professionals, rather than having to pick apart every sentence before you utter it—and, when you fail to perform this task successfully, having your offhand remarks become three-news-cycle blunders and targets of national ridicule—wouldn’t it be easier just to stop making rude remarks? Yes, even about people with whom you disagree politically?

 

3.)    Sure, I’d like to have caregiving work recognized as, you know, work. So when someone dismissively calls it “not work,” I am obliged to be miffed. People are constantly confusing “doing work that doesn’t bring a paycheck” with “not doing work,” and I’ll take any opportunity to point out that child care does, indeed, entail actual work. Not the hardest work in the world, I'm the first to admit, probably not even as hard most days as being president or running a company, but work nonetheless. You’d think any parent could attest to this. Still, the myth endures.

4.)    On the other hand, I’ve probably said something similar at some point. That’s because in everyday speech, “work” is convenient shorthand for “work outside the home,” “work for pay,” etc. I can understand how the verbal slip occurred. I see what Rosen said as less a damning revelation of disrespect for all mothers than a minor faux-pas (or, at most, a damning revelation of disrespect for Ann Romney).

 

5.)    And let’s not even get into the situation that inspired Rosen’s ill-considered comment in the first place. She was reacting to the news that Mitt, apparently, sends his wife out to find out what is on the minds of that mysterious special-interest group called “women.” Naturally, Mitt can be expected to understand only what regular voters—i.e., men—have on their minds.  ... Where would I start with this?

6.)    I resent Rosen, both Romneys, and the entire mass media for turning this into yet another situation where people opine that only the most privileged women can “afford” to stay home, anyway. Media proessionals are forever indignantly asserting that this is a choice available only to women occupying a narrow stratospheric strata of the socioeconomic tier. First of all, Census studies show that stay-at-home mothers as a group are actually poorer and less well educated than mothers as a whole (many of them, of course, may not have made deliberate choices to opt out of the workforce, but they are working at home). More to the point, I know plenty of stay-at-home mothers of the middle class, women who choose to be with their children even though they have to pinch pennies to do it but also, at the same time, even though they would qualify for good jobs if so chose. You’d think such women were invisible, yet not so far in the past they used to be known to the media and referred to (albeit patronizingly and one-dimensionally) as soccer moms.

7.)    I’m a Democrat. But I’m pretty sure I’d say the same thing if the parties were reversed.

 8.)    All that said, it’s important to note that the experiences of a stay-at-home mother who possesses, for all practical purposes, unlimited financial resources are inevitably going to be drastically different from those of a stay-at-home mother who can’t afford to hire out work. To pretend that insulting Ann Romney in a work-related way is the equivalent of insulting all mothers at every income level in the exact same way is disingenuous in the extreme. Sure, even if you’re Ann Romney, you still have to figure out how to balance a busy schedule (which Ann Romney undoubtedly has) and time with your children, which can be a struggle, emotionally and practically, at any level of wealth. But what you’re not doing, if you’re Ann Romney, or what at least you would not have to do, is the labor that typically comprises at least of half caregiving work. The drudgery. You’re not wiping the spilled mac ’n’ cheese off the floor with a paper towel. You’re not dashing to the basement to throw in a load of laundry at naptime. You’re not running to the supermarket midweek because you’re out of milk and lunch meat, taking the kids with you because there’s no one else to watch them, plunking them in one of those giant fire-engine carts and hoping like hell that the plastic emergency-vehicle inexact replication will keep them entertained long enough for you to grab those items before they start hitting each other or creating chaos in the checkout line. If you’re Ann Romney, you don’t do any of those things. Or I would guess you don’t, anyway—remember, we’re really talking generic rich lady here, as I have no idea what Ann Romney’s actual day-to-day life is like; for all I know she loves pushing a wire cart full of squabbling toddlers through a crowd of frowning onlookers, so always insists on taking care of those midweek runs herself. My point is, she doesn’t have to do those things—or anything else—if she doesn’t want to.

9.)    I debated No. 8 pretty intensely with a friend. For what it’s worth, my friend does not have children. Her income, she says, is just the amount she would pick if she could have her pick of incomes (though this, as an addendum to saying she would not want to be super-rich). My friend argued that it’s not as easy to hire servants as I might think. And that there no longer exists a Downton Abbey-style servant class from which to hire. My counterarguments were a) Oh, boo hoo b) I admittedly don’t know that much about life in the Romnesphere, but I bet that, given 8 percent unemployment, it’s not impossible to find qualified people who are willing to hang out in a luxurious mansion all day doing easy-ish tasks for what must be at least semi-decent pay (because at some point their salaries will probably come under scrutiny). Heck, I know ordinary upper-middle-class people in Minneapolis—affluent, but still within the 99 percent—whose lives are made easier by nannies and the like. Notice I say easier. Probably rarely downright easy.

   

10.)    My friend pointed out that Ann Romney has health problems, which make everything harder. No argument here—I’d take almost anything, including poverty, over poor health. Still, according to Wikipedia, Ann Romney’s MS does not much limit her lifestyle, and she’s been cancer-free since a lumpectomy in 2008.

 

11.)    Verdict: Umbrage in a teapot.

Work-family balance isn't an artisanal cheese

Midway through an engaging book review by David Remnick in the Jan. 16 New Yorker, I happened upon a brief but disturbing remark.

Remnick, who is editor of the magazine, was reviewing Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, but the remark in question had little directly to do with the First Couple. Here is the significant paragraph (emphasis added on the disturbing part):

In some respects, the Obamas resemble a post-sixties version of the Clintons. They are graduates of some of the richest institutions in the country. In Hyde Park, they lived among other highly educated, liberal, earnestly well-meaning, and self-regarding people, with all the requisite concerns about “family-career balance,” “doing good and doing well.” They lived with the small hypocrisies and pleasures of their milieu, bringing together some hyper-wealthy friends and unabashedly progressive causes. It is a liberal aesthetic raised to a style of life.

By “family-career balance,” Remnick apparently means what’s more commonly called “work-family balance” or “work-life balance”—that is, management of the competing demands of jobs and childcare. Since those responsibilities sometimes conflict to the point of being mutually prohibitive, work-family balance is indeed a requisite concern for many people. Especially for women, who tend to shoulder a greater portion of the “family” part of the equation and sacrifice economically because of it, but also for men, who often feel more pressure to prioritize work and consequently miss out on time with their kids (both of which scenarios probably apply to the Obamas, come to think of it).

But look how Remnick presents the term, framed with scare quotes amid wry phrases like “earnestly well-meaning, and self-regarding” and “small hypocrisies and pleasures.” Requisite, of course, literally means necessary. But Remnick is suggesting that in this case the necessity isn’t quite real, that the concerns are a puffed-up product of class expectations. He implies that “family-career balance” is a fashionable issue over which the privileged and progressive may furrow their brows as a matter of propriety, not a really source of serious tension in their glamorous lives.

As if figuring out how to both do your job and raise your kids were a task on the order of, oh, selecting an artisanal cheese.

Esther Fein and David Remnick

Remnick isn’t being mean-spirited; his précis is only lightly sardonic, not to mention otherwise spot-on. (Don’t you just know people like that, even if those in your orbit rank somewhere below the Obamas? Heck, I’ve had neighbors whom this describes to a T except for the “hyper-wealthy” part.) He pokes friendly fun at those people—and, implicitly, at himself. The New Yorker is politically liberal, arguably the country’s most esteemed periodical, and famously well-paying. As editor, Remnick occupies the same sort of glittering, left-leaning environment he gently mocks.

He is also a husband (to New York Times reporter Esther Fein), and father of three children.

Who knows how the Remnick-Fein household handles its child-caring duties. Maybe for whatever reason the matter has never posed much of a problem, despite the parents’ demanding careers. A 2006 profile of Remnick in the Guardian (back when his sons were teenagers and his daughter seven) depicts his family stuff as ordinary but remarkably stress-free: “He does his fair share of ferrying to music lessons and little league games. Asked to explain how he manages to balance these things, Remnick shrugs and says he doesn't do anything other than spend time with his family and work. 'It's not like I build toy ships, or travel to Tahiti. I don't go surfing. I don't know: what do people do?'”

Well sir, many of them struggle with work-family balance, even if they’re financially successful. Or so I assume, anyway. Because, sure, wealthy people can afford great childcare, but many also work long hours and travel for business, and even wealthy parents want to spend time with their children.

But the rich are hardly the only ones facing the problem. If juggling work and children is tough for the 1 percent, imagine how it is for people who have not “careers” but plain old jobs, people who can’t afford great childcare and for whom staying home with a sick kid might mean not only forfeiting a day’s pay but possibly getting fired.

Remnick is aware of all this, of course. But maybe it doesn’t all click together; I suspect he doesn’t connect “family-career balance” to the shortcomings in our system—problems with family leave, daycare, job flexibility, health care and so on—that can lead to genuine desperation, financial sacrifice and, in some families, economic disaster. His use of “career” rather than “work,” together with his light-handed tone, suggest he is imagining hyper-responsible parents checking off quality time with little Abigail and Aiden between conferences and fundraisers, just another aspect of the “liberal aesthetic raised to a style of life.” After all, it was under Remnick’s editorship that, in a 2004 New Yorker review of books describing this dilemma, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote, “Choosing between work and home is, in the end, a problem only for those who have a choice. In this sense, it is, like so many ‘problems’ of twenty-first-century life, a problem of not having enough problems.”

Maybe I'm making too much of Remnick’s offhand phrase in a piece that’s mostly about something else.

But I can't help thinking that if even the brilliant editor of one of the country’s most influential publications doesn’t fully understand why work-family balance is a serious issue for a lot of people at every socioeconomic level, then those of us for whom it’s an honest-to-God requisite concern have an long way to go.

But wait -- have I even mentioned "TORN" yet?

I don't think I have. Tell you what, I've been so busy with my new job (which a couple of weeks ago went from an easygoing part-time gig to -- temporarily -- a more-challenging-what-with-everything-else-full-time gig), with a bunch of freelance work, with my sons' ridiculously intense after-school sports schedules, with going to a favorite uncle's funeral in Athens, GA, two weeks ago, with being out of town all last week (Eureka Springs, AR, with a group of old friends -- really fun until two of us were thrown by horses; I sustained only bruising but, sadly, my friend Beth broke her pelvis), coming home to a dining-room table blanketed a foot thick with newspapers, magazines and mail ... so busy, anyway, that I've done a crappy job of keeping up this blog AND of doing my part to spread the word about

TORN: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood 

It's a wonderful collection of essays about, well, just what the title says, a.k.a. the challenges of work-family balance, a.k.a. the impossibility of having it all. My essay, "Regrets of a Stay-at-Home Mother" was a last-minute addition after it was published in Salon, and I'm very proud to be a part of it.

The book was well-reviewed today in the Los Angeles Times, which mentioned my piece in a nice way. (I didn't exactly "leave journalism" -- just quit my full-time job -- but since you called me "refreshingly candid" I'll forgive you, LAT!).

Good news on the job front

I know it’s lame to start a post with an apology and/or excuse for going so long without posting, but here goes: Sorry I’ve gone so long without posting. I’ve been busy.

The good news is that I’ve been busy … with work!

Those of you who saw my essay “Regrets of a stay-at-home mom” on Salon or one of the other places it appeared or was discussed will know what a welcome turn of events this is. As I wrote in that essay, which is about the financial risks parents take when they give up work to care for children, I mentioned that since 2008, when I got divorced and moved back to Mineapolis, I had sent out countless resumes resulting in but a tiny handful of interviews, that I’d been passed over for jobs I wouldn’t have considered in my 20s, that I’d tried but failed to land jobs that would have paid $20,000 lower my last full-time salary, 15 years ago.

How things can change in a few months—a few months in which, not coincidentally, a Salon essay about your miserable job prospects and pathetic finances goes slightly viral, gets passed around by friends, so it gets noticed by editors at your local paper as well as reprinted on its Sunday op-ed section, the local paper being the workplace out of all local workplaces for which your job skills happen to be most ideally suited.

That’s how I came to be hired as a writer for the niche products department of the Star Tribune, my local paper in Minneapolis, where I started work last week.

What are niche products, you’re probably wondering. They’re the special sections the paper puts out now and then throughout the year, on subjects such as aging, health and wellness, autos, back-to-school preparations. These sections were created, originally, as vehicles for advertising. At one time they contained nothing but advertising. Gradually they evolved, first acquiring bland filler and then better freelance-written pieces. A few months ago, the newspaper made them part of the editorial department, with an editor and now, a writer. Me.

It’s a wonderful job in so many ways. The work, I think, is going to be fun—we’re inventing from the ground up a product for which the bar, historically, has been set low. That lends the enterprise a giddily freeing sort of creativity. How good can we make these things? It’s entirely up to us!

Frankly, as someone who has foot-tall stacks of unread magazines in at least three rooms of my house, 60 books in my Amazon shopping cart (that’s not even counting the ones I’ve already purchased, but not yet read), 23 tabs currently open on my computer screen (which is less than usual, actually), a dining room table covered with newspapers and other assorted pieces of paper with words on them, I have no interest in foisting additional writing on the world unless I can make it as worth reading as possible. That’s the fun challenge of the job.

Also, the job is part time, a great way to segue back into the workforce. I can schedule my 25 hours a week just about whenever I’d like (“The only thing I can tell you for sure is that you can’t do them all in one day,” said my easygoing editor), which makes my work-family balance relatively easy to maintain (and by “easy” I mean “impossible,” though by "relatively," I mean "slightly less impossible than if I worked a rigid full-time schedule"). And I can fill my so-called “free time” with freelance assignments and personal projects like essays, a memoir and, er, blogging.

Put it this way: If this job had been available 15 years ago, I might never have given up a steady paycheck for freelancing in the first place.

Oh, there are a few downsides. Salaries in the niche products area are capped about midway up the guild scale—to keep the products competitive with similar publications—so although my hourly wage is actually a bit higher than it was 15 years ago (and much higher than the wage offered by literally all of would-be employers who ultimately rejected me), my paycheck will still be smaller than if I worked, as I used to, as a regular newspaper reporter. Because I’m part time, I don’t get health insurance, so for now I’m stuck continuing to throw away $200 a month for a private policy with a deductible so high that the only way I’ll ever receive benefits is if something terrible happens to me. And although writing for sections designed to be profitable seems to me a perfectly valid strategy for practicing journalism in the face of the industry’s current business-model crisis, you can probably guess that mine is not the highest status job in the newsroom. I may not win a Pulitzer anytime soon, and don’t look for my picture on the side of a bus.

But so what? It’s a better job than all of the jobs I interviewed for, better than most of the jobs I sent resumes to, better than most of the jobs in the entire world, for that matter. In fact, for me right now—and, as I say this, I’m knocking furiously on the laminated particleboard or whatever it is my desk is made of—this job feels ludicrously perfect.

Welcome, "Here and Now" listeners/website readers!

My interview NPR's "Here and Now" program finally aired today (it had been bumped a couple of times earlier for breaking news in Egypt). If you missed it, you can listen to it here. (Click the button near the top of the page.)

For those of you who are visiting after hearing the broadcast, welcome! This is a good place to discuss work-family balancing, the financial hazards of stay-at-home parenting, pressures on mothers, and other life choices women make and the cultural context in which they make them.

Feel free to suggest topics, or just write your thoughts. Glad to have you here!

P.S. If you like the "Here and Now" segment, you might also enjoy a call-in program I did recently on Minnesota Public Radio with law professor Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law and author of Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. You can hear it here.