motherhood

I launched the weekend by reading my first official parenting book: Amy Tiemann’s mojo-y book, Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family (the new editiion!).  And I am so thankful to have started here.  Many of you are familiar with Amy’s message from reading her blog (Mojo Mom), but in all honesty, it didn’t really sink in for me of course until I got pregnant.  Now it’s all gotten very personal.  And what a relief that this book exists.

Chapter 1 begins: “It is tempting to romanticize miraculous transformations.”  The chapter’s epigraph reads: “Sometimes you just have to take a leap and build your wings on the way down.”  Still barfing at 13 weeks, I’m having a wee bit of a hard time when well-intentioned friends and loved ones say to me “this is such a special time! enjoy each moment!”  Because it’s hard to enjoy it all when you’re on the verge of 24/7 puke.  Believe me, I am overjoyed beyond belief that I am at this particular juncture; but overjoy and “enjoy” are not the same thing.

But I digress.  I really wanted to use this post to send a HUGE shout out to Amy for writing this book, and for writing a second edition of it, one which addresses more of the cultural conversation around motherhood.  I’d been feeling intimidated by all those books with light pink covers written about pregnancy and mothering and couldn’t bring myself to read anything other than The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, which Marco picked out for me early on.  Mojo Mom is helping me build confidence that I will find my own way into this whole pregnancy and motherhood gambit, that there are motherhood books written for women like me, and that there are fellow travelers out there–Amy did a PhD in neuroscience and is on the executive team of MomsRising.org (and a longtime supporter of Women for Women International)–to guide the way.

For some more hardcore political reading, definitely check out the opeds in today’s NYTimes on what to give mothers in the developing world, and the stats and links Kyla rounded up over at The REAL Deal (“Motherhood by the Numbers”).

And to all the moms out there, the moms-in-the-making, and the moms-in-waiting (I have a number of friends in this latter camp), and to my own extremely amazing mother, who I am becoming more and more grateful for every day, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!

Well, here we go.  I’ve decided today is the day to officially “come out”:  I’m pregnant!  I’m 12-and-a-half weeks along, and here’s the kicker: it’s twins.  OMG OMG Marco and I are still getting used to saying that out loud.  “It’s twins.”

That fertility stuff can really work.  I bow, with tremendous humility and gratitude, to the miracles of modern medicine.

It’s been strange sitting on this piece of rather all-encompassing information for the past three months and not sharing it with the world–or at least, I mean, with the GWP community.  So it’s a relief to say it.  I’m pregnant.  I really am.   We went for the first round of testing yesterday, and so far, all clear.  Two heartbeats, two fetuses of relatively same size, both swishing around and doing their thing.

I’ve been confused about whether to pregnancy blog or not, but, well, I just broke my own taboo.  So there you have it.  I’m preggers.  Overjoyed to the point of tears, feeling a little clueless, and nauseous as all hell.

Marco has been wonderful.  It’s been serendipitous, really, having him home while I’ve been feeling so physically bleh.  Today he went back to his freelance job for a few days, however, which is also quite nice, of course.  My Love in the Time of Layoff column is about to become Pregnant in the Time of Layoff.  I suppose my next column over there will have to be something about momentarily breadwinning wife expecting twins?!  (My Recessionwire contribution has gone from weekly to monthly, by the way, due to, shall we say, other demands…)

I’m supershort on battery so may only get through part of this next session, but here we go…

Jeremy Adam Smith, creator of the blog Daddy Dialectic and author of the book The Daddy Shift, is introducing the panel by talking about the difference in attitudes about fatherhood among his grandfather, his father, and himself.

Panelists are:

Reeve Vanneman (he’ll be talking about The End of Gender Revolution?)
Oriel Sullivan (on Slow but Steady-ish Change)
Josh Coleman (speaking on The Ghost of Traditional Marraige in Contemporary Ones)
Mignon Moore (talking about Is Convergence Moot in Same Sex Copules?)
Amy and Marc Vachon, bloggers at Equally Shared Parenting and coauthors of a forthcoming book on the subject (on that)

Reeve Vanneman is up first:  There was a big shift in the 1990s, he notes, a stalling in gender revolution. But the question is, why?  Three possible reasons:

1. End of feminist protest: in the mid-1990s, media coverage of feminism declined…

2. Economics: in the mid-1990s, for the first time in a long time, men’s earnings increased.  They had stagnated in the 1970s, but during the early Clinton years, there were fairly broad-based increases in men’s earnings.

3. Culture: gender attitudes shifted (ie, when surveys asked questions like “do you agree that a working mother can have a warm relationship with her children?” the answer “yes” trended upward from the 1970s, then leveled off in the 1990s; other questions tracked were questions like “do you believe that men make better politicians”? etc)

In sum, we have evidence that there was a stalling of gender revolution in the mid-1990s. But we don’t fully know WHY.

ARGH! Hate to leave ya’ll hanging, but I’m running out of battery here…

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine section to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight, although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well.  Not so anymore.  Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation).  Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too.” Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.”

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more.  But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.”  Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, it turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.  Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family.  Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring.  My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

But what Belkin gets to at the end of her article — and what I think bears far more exploration — is how scientific evidence that men too have a ticking biological clock could undermine what is a commonly socially accepted timeline  women, shelf life and expiration date with fertility is fixed, men, well, they can always Tony Randall it, and procreate as he did in his 77th year.  (Nevermind that in this New York Times article, “He’s Not My Grandpa. He’s My Dad,” Randall’s widow, left with two children under age 10, questions if her own long-range planning was all that wise and admits she’d tell her daughter not to marry an “older man.”

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So this just well may be my favorite annual report out there, and it’s just out now: Unconventional Wisdom: New Data, Trends, and Clinical Observations about Equality in American Family Life and Gender Roles

In it, experts from the Council on Contemporary Families review key recent research and clinical findings on gender and equality. In preparation for the Council on Contemporary Families’ Twelfth Anniversary Conference at the University of Chicago at Illinois, April 17-19, 2009, CCF surveyed its members about their “most important or surprising research results and clinical observations related to topics being considered at the conference.” The resulting report provides a snapshot of what some of the nation’s leading authorities are seeing in their research and clinical practice. Check it out:

1. Does marital quality decrease when couples need to negotiate the division of household chores and child-care?

Researchers and clinical psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan report that marriages suffer most when couples fail to talk through these thorny issues. On average, having a child leads to a long-term decline in marital satisfaction. But couples who have more egalitarian relationships can avoid these problems, first when they jointly plan for and welcome the birth of a child, and second, when they minimize the tendency to slip into more traditional gender roles after the child’s birth. Still, the closer couples move toward equality, report conference presenters Marc and Amy Vachon, the less likely they are to focus on quantifying who does which chores. Good to know, huh?!

2. Women feel more work-family conflict than men, right?

Not any longer. A just-released report from the Families and Work Institute, “Times Are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home,” shows that as men have increased the amount of time they spend with young children over the past 15 years, they are now experiencing more work-family conflict than women.  Welcome to our world, dudes.

3. What’s happening to the traditional double standard?

It’s been to a great extent reversed in middle school, according to researcher Barbara Risman. Forty-five years ago, studies showed that the school culture was suppressing girls’ natural talents and aspirations by the time they entered middle school. At age 10 or 11, girls stopped speaking up in class and even started “playing dumb” to attract boys. They often chose not to compete in sports or to develop their bodies for fear of being teased as tomboys. Risman’s new study of middle-school children in the 21st Century shows a remarkable reversal of this pattern. Being a top-flight athlete is now considered part of the “ideal” girl package, and girls are very willing to compete with boys in the classroom. Today it is young boys who are afraid of showing off how smart they are and who feel they have to suppress their interest in certain activities for fear of being taunted as “gay.”

4. But the double standard is still alive and well in college, says Stanford University researcher Paula England.

While women have gained some sexual freedoms, they risk harsher judgments than men do if they proceed beyond “making out” in a hook up. And when activity does progress beyond making out, there is a striking “orgasm gap” between males and females-it is worse than the sex gap in pay! “Men get more than their share of the orgasms while women get more than their share of the bad reputations,” notes England, who is currently interviewing students across the country about changing sexual practices and norms.

5. In another finding, sexual health researcher Adina Nack discovered that women who are diagnosed with an STD ultimately develop improved sexual communication with their partners and are better able to discuss their own needs and wishes as well as insist on safe health practices.

In still more data-driven observations from family experts, you can learn about important and surprising research on family, gender, economics, and sexuality from the past year. The report is available here.

WANT MORE UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM? CHECK OUT CCF’s CONFERENCE “Relationships, Sexuality, and Equality” — I’ll be there! Here’s more:

The Council on Contemporary Families 12th Anniversary Conference,
“Relationships, Sexuality, and Equality: How Far Have We Come?” (April
17 and 18, 2009 at the University of Illinois, Chicago) includes the
following panels, presenting new research and best practice findings on
these timely topics:

*Work-Family Balance for Women and Men
*Gender Convergence in Families and Intimate Relationships
*Gender in the Next Generation
*The Marriage Go-Round – A Special preview of his forthcoming book with Andrew Cherlin
*Women, Men and Equality: What the Election Taught Us

You’ll hear Jeremy Adam Smith discuss his study on role-switching
between husbands and wives, including interviews with dads forced into this
position by lay-offs. At a time when men have experienced more than 80
percent of layoffs since 2007, we have a growing number of families with
stay-at-home dads and breadwinner moms. The entire work and family panel
offers fresh perspective on families in a time of recession.

In the “Next Generation” panel, noted psychologist Diane Ehrensaft will
discuss the growing phenomenon of children telling their parents
that they are not the gender stated on their birth certificate or are
not able or willing to play within the culturally defined binary boxes
of “girl,” “boy.” They might be transgender; they might be gender
fluid; they might be a “Prius”-a hybrid half boy-half girl; or they
might be a “gender smoothie”–a synthesized blend of male/female.
What do we know about how parents can best handle these situations?

For a detailed conference program, visit www.contemporaryfamilies.org.
Accredited journalists seeking complimentary registration should contact
Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, Council on
Contemporary Families: coontzs@msn.com. Phone: 360 556-9223.

Over at Broadsheet this week, Amy Benfer has a nice little post on “accidental” pregnancy in which she writes:

About half of American women will have an accidental pregnancy before age 45. So while we like to think of accidental pregnancy as a rare and catastrophic event that happens only to women who take extraordinary sexual risks, it’s actually rather common. Nevertheless most stories about accidental pregnancy focus on teenage girls whom many people feel entitled to automatically dismiss as unfit mothers. Thus I was initially excited to see that this month’s Self magazine leads with a feature that puts a face on those who constitute the vast majority of unplanned pregnancies, one with the subhead: “Forget Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol. The new face of accidental pregnancy looks like … you.” But while it starts out by allegedly showing that even “good girls” can get knocked up, it ends up reinforcing some very old stereotypes about what the choices women make say about them.

About 50 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion,  but the article does not contain a single quote from a woman who had one.

Hmm…

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up.)

Following on the heels of Stephanie Coontz’s awesome op-ed last week in the NYT (“Til Children Do Us Part”), notwithstanding the creepy illustration (left), my colleagues at the Council on Contemporary Families has released a research update on the subject, asking: Are Babies Bad For Marriage?

Man, I hope not.

But here’s the breakdown, cleverly bulleted below:

* Old News: Having a Baby Will Save Your Marriage
* New News: No, After Having a Baby, Satisfaction With Marriage Goes Down for Most Couple
* New New News: Having a Baby Won’t Improve a Poor Marriage, but Couples Who Plan the Conception Jointly Are Much Less Likely to Experience a Serious Marital Decline
* And Really Good News: Couples Who Establish a Collaborative Parenting Relationship After the Child Is Born not Only Have Happier Marriages but Better-Adjusted Children

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Well, certain wives of presidents aren’t the only ones thinking about working family’s issues these days.  Check out GWP friend Heather Hewett’s interview with Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans (pictured left), editors of the collection Mama, PhD (reviewed here last month)  and Professor Andrea O’Reilly, author and editor of many books about mothering and Director of the Association for Research on Mothering at York University in Ontario.  The convo is posted here, at The Mother’s Movement Online.

Since I’m all about the mens for the moment, particularly as their working family issues and work lives affect women, here’s an excerpt that touches on the question of what’s going on:

Heather Hewett: Do these [work/life] challenges face fathers as well as mothers?

Elrena Evans: As far as fathers facing the same sorts of challenges, when Caroline and I were first dreaming up this book we talked about whether it should be a collection from both men and women, or just of women. Eventually we decided that while fathers do indeed face these challenges, and more involved fathers face them to a greater degree, since the brunt of biology falls on women, women are the ones whose stories we wanted to hear. Because men can choose to be involved, but they can also choose not to be — and those kinds of decisions are more difficult to face when you are the one who is pregnant or nursing. Even beyond the biological factors, though, we’re so conditioned to think of mothers as the primary caregivers of children that it’s really hard to escape that.

Caroline Grant: Fathers who ask that a meeting be rescheduled so they can take their kid to the doctor are viewed as charmingly hands-on, while mothers who ask for that accommodation are viewed as asking for special favors. And that’s an attitude that’s not exclusive to the academy; it’s just how mothers and fathers are viewed in the U.S.

And while I’m on it, I loved this comment on a GWP post from last week, by Lydia, a grad student who shares this anecdote about her spouse, a SAHD:

A few years ago I started grad school and my spouse became a stay-at-home dad. Something we have both found disconcerting is just how much attention he gets as an “exceptional father” because he is doing this. [Like when the above father was introduced to the playgroup as “we have a daddy with us!”]. The same response does not happen for a woman who chooses to stay at home and may have made the same sacrifices to do so. The problem is that our society does not expect fathers to take such an active role in parenting, despite what strides we have made. The fact that the title for this piece was the new “Mr. Mom” shows how much parenting is associated with women in our society.

I also question the psychologist’s advice to be on the job hunt. This assumes that the choice is temporary and out of necessity, and not a valid choice for fathers to make just because they want to or feel it will be good for their children. When I began grad school, my spouse’s family kept asking him if he was looking for a job to help support me, until I finally said to them that if our roles were reversed, everyone would be supportive of me choosing to stay at home without the need to look for other employment. Obviously “mother”work is still undervalued in our society (unless a man is doing it, and then he’s a good man).

A note on all this framing: All the mothers are working, all the workers with work/life issues are women, but working men who are also involved fathers get to be “brave.”

Harumph.

I return after a most serious case of blogger’s block (yes, there is such a thing – wikipedia entry and all.) Initially, I thought it was just a post holiday digging out from all that gets put aside, but, no, I simply couldn’t sit down to write.

I now know that when this happens to me there’s something brewing personally.  My writing does tend to be reflexive – its just where I’m at these days.  Perhaps a result of turning 50.

I am on the NY thruway again, and I am crying.  I have just left my daughter, Lauren, once my very little girl, now a smart, funny, loveable young woman, to embark upon the adventures of her last semester of senior year in high school. I have had a very unusual high school experience with Lauren because she has attended a fabulous all-girl boarding school, Emma Willard, in Troy, NY. How’s this for a tag line?: “Since 1814, empowering girls who transform the world.”  Alums include Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1832), Jane Fonda (1955), and Kirsten Gillibrand (1984), (and my daughter, 2009!)

So, while other parents of teenagers have been dealing with curfews and parties, I have had the relative ease of knowing she is safe – surrounded by friends, houseparents and a faculty that have cultivated her extraordinary talents and focused her strengths.

I can no longer suspend the terrible truth. And it is just this: Next year, she’ll be a freshman in college.

Now I know what you might be thinking…….that’s what supposed to happen, isn’t it?

Yes.  And she is well prepared, mature, enthusiastic. But, I wonder, will she be safe?
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I’ve seen books that teach you how to apply lessons from private life to leadership in the office, but this one  takes leadership skills from the office and applies them to the home. The whole premise of Jamie Woolf’s Mom-in-Chief: How Wisdom from the Workplace Can Save Your Family from Chaos is that “being a mom means being a leader,” and the foreword is by none other than CEO of Working Mother Media Carol Evans.  While I have yet to pass judgment on whether business strategies that work in the workplace transfer to parenthood, what I’m most interested in here is the way the author has fortuitously capitalized on the Michele Obama moment to promote her book–a book that was finished, I am sure, long before Obama won the election.  Ingenius, I say.

Here’s from the promo material:

Michelle Obama Has What It Takes to Be Mom-in-Chief:
5 Lessons in Leadership That Mothers Can Learn From the New First Lady

Michelle Obama has stated that her focus when her husband takes office Jan. 20 will be serving as “mom-in-chief” to her daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7. Leadership expert Jamie Woolf, author of Mom-in-Chief: How Wisdom from the Workplace Can Save Your Family from Chaos (Jossey-Bass; 288 pages; $22.95) examines how Obama will lead her family through this challenging transition.

When President-elect Barack Obama moves into the White House, his aides and supporters will celebrate his historic achievement. His wife and kids will be glad he’ll finally be home for dinner. 
Michelle Obama, a high-powered lawyer and executive administrator, values family life and says she will strive to give her daughters as normal a life as possible despite their being in the pubic eye. While she intends to use her platform as first lady to be an advocate for women’s issues, military families and national service, her priority will be her children, not policy–especially in the first transition year.

Jamie Woolf, whose book teaches moms how to use “best practices” from the workplace to make family life run more smoothly, says that adopting business leadership strategies can make the difference between a smooth and a chaotic transition for any family. Here are the lessons she draws from Michelle Obama:

Lesson 1: Motherhood is a leadership job: By calling herself “mom-in-chief,’ Michelle Obama sends a message that being a mom means being a leader, giving her job a status not usually afforded mothers. By celebrating her role rather than apologizing for it, she connects the notion of leadership beyond the walls of corporate suites and presidential mansions to the homes of average parents. The best leaders, like the best parents, strive to provide the proper conditions in which others can grow and reach their highest aspirations.
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