Picket Fence Post

As I continued to marvel at the surprising GOP vice presidential selection, I fired off a column about my impressions of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s first national speech to the folks at Mommy Track’d in a piece entitled, “McCain & The Working Mom.”

Additionally, I wrote an essay about the difficulties working women have when they are asked to speak at national political conventions when their spouses are running for president, called, “Michelle As First Lady: General Election Edition.”

Image credit: Associated Press/Kiichiro Sato.

Item #1: Adam@Home

I’ve been loving the latest Brian Basset cartoons, Adam@Home, where a work-from-home dad named Adam (has three kids and a wife who works elsewhere) is fielding online questions about what it’s like to work at home with kids bustling about and fighting. This week’s cartoons have cut a wee bit too close to my life’s experience as a work-from-home parent. I have several of the comic strips up on the fridge and in my home office that regularly make me laugh, though, sadly, the humor is lost on the children.

Item #2: thirtysomething Online

Shh! I’ve got a secret. If, like me, you’ve been waiting patiently (or in my case impatiently) for the 1980s thoughtful yuppie drama thirtysomething to be released on DVD (or VHS) and cannot, for the life of you, understand why it hasn’t come out yet, I have a solution for you. Try YouTube. Type in “thirtysomething.” Scroll down the page and you won’t be disappointed.

After watching many of the episodes which are 20+ years old, I find that — fashion aside — they hold up well, particularly when it comes to the angst one of the lead characters, Hope Steadman (Mel Harris) felt about working parenthood. (During the series, she wound up working outside the home after being an at-home mom for a while.) The clip below is from the first episode of the second season after Hope had decided to go back to work at an environmental magazine when her daughter was 20 months old. She and her husband Michael were also debating whether to have another child.

 Item #3: Halloween ALREADY!

It’s the first full week of August. My family just got back from our summer vacation, and what am I finding, other than beach sand still littering the mini-van? Halloween stuff for sale in stores and e-mails in my inbox from Halloween costumer purveyors. This initial Halloween appearance seems earlier than last year when I first spotted Halloween products while shopping for my twins’ late summer birthday party supplies. I say to you premature Halloween pushers: No mas! It’s scary enough to think about back-to-school shopping (school idiotically starts BEFORE Labor Day around these parts), I don’t need the added pressure of Halloween costume shopping.

Hot fun in the summertime . . . except when you’re trying to actually, I don’t know . . . get work done and you’re summoned to referee between two kids who are having a heated dispute over a driveway basketball game or about who gets to use the family room with a friend and banish all others from it, or you’re asked to provide a steady stream of food for a voracious pack of children who can’t seem to go more than an hour without proclaiming famine-like hunger.

Being a work-from-home parent who’s trying to teach her kids how to be self-sufficient in keeping themselves busy until we go to the pool we’ve joined in the afternoons (without shelling out mucho bucks for camps for three kids) can be a challenge, one which you need to approach with an expansive sense of humor. I tackle this topic in this week’s column at Mommy Track’d.

Item #1: Cindy McCain’s Strength

While some in the media portray her harshly — depict her as talking Barbie doll — Cindy McCain has an inspiring life story. Profiled in a cover story in Newsweek, she addresses how difficult it has been to be married to someone who spent a large chunk of their marriage either deployed with the Navy someplace or serving in Washington, D.C. while she was home with four kids in Arizona, working at her father’s beer distributorship and running her charity for children.

An excerpt:

“Cindy has sometimes likened herself to a single mother; now 54, she has often been far away from her husband during difficult moments, including two of three miscarriages she suffered in the 1980s. Years later, her husband did not notice when she became addicted to painkillers, a habit, she says, brought on in part by the stress of politics. In 2004, he was on the other side of the country when she suffered a stroke that left her partly debilitated. On her own, she learned to walk again. Cindy says she doesn’t resent the time she spent without her husband. It was her choice to stay in Arizona while he rose in Washington, and she says she knew when she married him that he was always going to ‘put country first.’”

She also said she tries not to discuss that she had a son serving in Iraq during the presidential primaries because she was afraid it would put him in danger, while her husband’s statements on the Iraq war were being parsed by the media. Newsweeksaid that when her son was in Iraq (he’s back now and it’s unclear if he could be redeployed), McCain slept with her BlackBerry in her hand so she wouldn’t miss his call if he phoned.

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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?

Item#1: OK Free Play

The Boston Globe ran a great column this week by Derrick Z. Jackson extolling the benefits of letting kids play on their own without adults chasing them with bottles of Purell and micro-managing everything. Jackson quoted Susan Linn, Harvard psychologist and author of the book The Case for Make Believe, as saying, “In saving make believe, we are saving ourselves.”

Jackson added: “What it means is an America where boys and girls are encouraged to not use the screen as a first resort of socialization. The first resort becomes themselves, scripting fantasies on porches and yards, becoming their own heroes and heroines, or just sending a letter to their teddy bear.”

My childhood summers were marked with great flights of imagination ranging from re-enacting Star Wars scenes in our living room with my brother using his action figures and ships (I always had to be the Evil Empire . . . fill in your wisecrack here), creating myriad secret clubs with convoluted rules, and staging countless shows with my brother and neighbors in our driveway (anything from dancing and singing performances to puppet shows . . . in fact my first boyfriend told me he once paid ten cents to see a puppet show at my house.)

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