Picket Fence Post

Apparently when a mom and a dad share the child-rearing workload, it’s a major news story. At least according to the New York Times.

The cover story of this weekend’s New York Times Magazine – entitled, “Will Dad Ever Do His Share” (not a very nice topic for Father’s Day weekend) – was downright depressing. While the piece did feature couples who participate in “the equal-parenting movement” (we need a movement, with an official name and, I suppose, name tags and literature, to get parents to do their jobs?), it also included some dire statistics, . . . dire if you’re a mother raising young kids that is.

Among the upsetting stats: Women handle more child care duties in their households than men by a margin of nearly five to one. Even if you remove the whole employment factor and look at two-income families, women still spend 11 hours a week caring for the couple’s children, to men’s three hours. Sampson Lee Blair, a professor of sociology specializing in families, told the Times, “The most striking part is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.”

 So, I guess it IS news when mothers and fathers share the burdens (and yes, of course, the JOYS, but no one complains about the joys) of child-rearing.

In my household, because I work from home, I bear the brunt of the responsibility for doctors’ appointments and trucking kids to activities, although The Spouse has coached several of the kids’ teams and makes it to the practices and games. When The Spouse is home (and not commuting during dinner time as he usually does) he will make or help make dinner, particularly if he’s trying to butter me up so he can go play basketball with the guys. He does the laundry and has almost always been in charge of making sure the kids have been bathed at night. If he hasn’t left for work before the kids have gone to school in the mornings, we tag-team breakfast duty and school lunch-making. I have precious little about which to complain regarding the ratio of child-rearing work The Spouse does, except when he has a string of really late nights, misses a bunch of meals and I get cranky about it.

What about in your household? Do both parents share the work or is Mom responsible for a disproportionate amount of the work? And if Mom does most of the child-rearing is it because she wants to or because she thinks she does it “better” than Dad?

Apparently American pets are so enamoured of their human “dads” that they’re now buying Father’s Day cards for them. (Just to be clear: I’m talking about pets giving cards TO the humans, NOT about cards that simply have cute pets on the cover.)

How the pets — mostly cats and dogs — are accomplishing this feat is beyond me. I’ve yet to see a pet go to a card store, pick out the perfect Father’s Day card, slap down the cash and then deliver it to its human dad. I simply must not have been paying close attention. They must be choosing cards for their human dads, or why else would major greeting card makers create Father’s Day cards from a cat or from a dog to its human father? (I’m making a huge leap in assuming that the cards are meant for the human fathers, otherwise, how would the animal fathers actually read and laugh at the witty one-liners inside said cards?)

When shopping for Father’s Day cards today, I also saw cards intended to be from a baby to his or her dad. But, like with the cats and dogs, I’ve never before witnessed an infant pick out a card for his or her dad. Frankly, I think it’s dumb to pick out a card “from the baby,” because you’re not fooling anyone. The kid didn’t pick it out. Drooled on it, well that’s a distinct possibility. Picked it out? Maybe if you guided the child’s arm in the general direction of the cards you could argue that the kid picked it out, but that would be stretching the truth. (Better to get one of those, “On your first Father’s Day cards” instead.)

When my kids pick out greeting cards — though I prefer that they make them — there’s no doubt that they made the selections (you should SEE what SpongeBob-ish choices they make). It’s believable to say that anyone from a toddler age on up could conceivably select a card for his or her father. It strains credulity, however, to suggest that a baby picked out a card. Or that Fido just had to get Daddy a card too.

But I could be wrong. Certainly the nice folks at the greeting card stores would never create a line of cards for nonsensical reasons. Pets MUST be doing a lot of card buying these days or they wouldn’t have these cards out on the racks, right?

So if any of you, intrepid blog readers, actually see a dog or a cat selecting a Father’s Day card for its human father, please drop me a line. I’d love to get a detailed report.

You may know Christie Mellor from her Three Martini Playdate books which lampoon today’s parenting trends. Now, the humorist takes on not the grade school set, but twentysomethings (who need a little direction in their lives) in her new book Were You Raised by Wolves?: Clues to the Mysteries of Adulthood. Mellor fielded some questions from your intrepid Picket Fence Post scribe:

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: Your two previous tongue-in-cheek Three Martini Playdate books urged parents to raise their children to become civilized, well-rounded adults and to conduct that child rearing in a way in which parents actually get to enjoy being adults and not simply serve as their kids’ executive secretaries and all-purpose servants.

Were You Raised by Wolves? aims to tell young adults — whose parents couldn’t benefit from your Three Martini sage advice in time for their kids — how to be civilized, well-rounded adults. Why did you decide to write this and how do you think college grads will respond to such counsel?

Christie Mellor, author of Were You Raised by Wolves?: It started as a nugget of a suggestion from my publisher — but I had been taking notes for a while on the very topic, I just didn’t realize that I’d already started the book in my head. I wanted to put the fun back into being a grown-up. I remember when I was a kid, being a grown-up seemed all cool and mysterious and fabulous. So I wanted to put the fabulousness back into it, but with some gentle suggestions on behavior and etiquette, to fill in the gaps that may have been left by an overly supervised upbringing.

As far as the twentysomethings responding, well, I’m hoping that since I’m not their mother and I’m not being naggy, that they’ll have fun with it. And maybe they’ll want to pass the book around to people they know. They may not recognize themselves as needing any help, but they may recognize friends or coworkers. And of course, it’s always fun to laugh at friends and co-workers.

The hope is that through the humor, a seed will be planted. A very good and thoughtful friend wrote me this in an e-mail regarding my book which I really should have printed on the back cover:

“It really is a common sense manifesto for injecting a better theology and philosopher into the world (to borrow Ignacious J. Reilly’s refrain from “Confederacy of Dunces”) — which modern culture so desperately needs — using essential older world values in newer world togs, all with your unique and magical style. And never mind the adorable, original illustrations.”

Now isn’t that just the sweetest? I would like to think he’s right on target and that Were You Raised by Wolves? will catch on as an etiquette book, albeit a humorous, hip etiquette book, with recipes and hangover cures. (more…)

I’m on a hamster wheel. And I can’t seem to get off of it.

I usually block out — probably for self-preservational purposes — how absolutely loony the springtime can get when you have three kids who play sports. I was deluded into thinking that I actually had a handle on things, at least between January and early March, when the only real holidays are Valentine’s Day and the start of the spring training. You don’t have to send cards to anyone, make special meals or buy gifts to celebrate the fact that baseball’s back.

Then spring officially arrived. And all hell broke loose.

On Sunday, the Spouse and I had to sit down with spreadsheets, calendars, four bottles of Advil and a bottle of Merlot in order to figure out the next few weeks, schedule-wise. (We’re still scraping the ceiling following my head explosion.) Take this week’s nuttiness:

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