ProWomanProLife

Two things I’m interested in here. What was it before? (Chances are they never asked the question but my money would be on fewer men believing it is OK to assault a woman in “the olden days,” for lack of a better term) and secondly, did they ask how many women think it is OK to hit a man? Because when relationships go sour, we see plenty of that, too.

As a working mother — aren’t we all? Ok, let me try this again… As a mother who happens to work outside the home in exchange for a pay cheque albeit not nearly as hard as I work inside the home for no pay and a lot more stress… I feel like I owe the universe a post on the baby-in-the House-of-Commons kerfuffle. Then Andrea sent me this link and asked if I would be interested in sharing my opinion on the topic… Well, since you asked!

The issue has been handled in the media as one of mothers in the workplace, and rightfully so, although there is the narrower issue of whether babies belong in the House of Commons. I am not only an employed mother, I am incidentally employed by the House of Commons. For more on my somewhat-less-than-glamourous political career, you can read this post (in French): Je travaille pour un député à la Chambre des communes.

Do babies belong in the House of Commons? Frankly, I don’t see why not. For all the hand-wringing about proper decorum I must ask two questions: “What decorum?” and “Is a baby a worst offense to proper House decorum than, say, Justin Trudeau’s “piece of shit” and Vic Toews’ “You’re either with us or with the child pornographers” quips? If you yearn for proper House decorum, why not start with Question Period and questioners who don’t ask real questions? (a Liberal specialty: “Is the Minister lying or simply too stupid to see what’s going on?” You expect the Minister to answer that?) or with members of government reading from prepared statements instead of answering genuine questions about policy or governance?

You must see the House as it really is, with people coming and going, thumbing their berries, writing greeting cards, excusing themselves to the lobby for a quick bite or a meeting with staff. The House is a happenin’ place. Throw in a baby during a vote; it would have been a regular day at the office if it weren’t for MPs taking pictures and causing a commotion.

To the question do babies belong in the House of Commons my answer is “Why not?” I agree with the Globe’s editorial:

Mr. Scheer’s ruling is a clear demonstration that, even in the most august settings, mothers must always be able to bring their babies to work with them when emergencies arise. It is not a legal precedent, but it is certainly a moral one.

Which leads us to the wider issue of women in the workplace and whether or not giving them leeway to manage their family obligations while working is indeed a moral precedent. Naomi Lakritz from the Calgary Herald certainly thinks it is not:

Ladies, the world isn’t going to hand itself to you on a silver platter. It may offer you some things and may make some concessions to your status as mothers, but you’ve got to rise to meet the world halfway. You’ve got to do the rest. And you’ve got to understand and respect the idea that there are some places where babies simply don’t belong.

According to Lakritz (read the entire piece here), by asking for accommodations working mothers are acting like whiny wusses. This is a widespread view among some women. A few years ago I wrote a post for ProWomanProLife where I lamented the absence of creative thinking when it came to accommodating working mothers. A reader wrote back something along the lines of “I never thought of you as whiny and high maintenance…” Others believe that women “want it all on Thursday”: for everything there is a season and you can have it all but not on the same day. And let’s not forget the childless — by choice or otherwise — who wonder why, for the same pay, they have to pick-up the slack from  their procreative peers. And all the other mothers who were not given any breaks and wonder — almost jealously — why others should get one.

All this to me is almost irrelevant. As are the reasons why women work, whether they are seeking parity with men, self-fulfillment or a pay cheque. Do we have a societal obligation to make it easier for women, as Naomi Lakritz suggests? I don’t know. But what I do know is that if we don’t owe anything to Sana Hassaini, we owe the world to her son Skander-Jack. We fail children when we look at women in the workplace in isolation. We should be encouraging parents to develop strong bonds with their infants. And in our government-supported healthcare system, we should be pulling all the stops to make sure that infants are breastfed and spend the least amount of time in institutionalized daycare. (If you think I’m making too much out of the common cold go ask any healthcare provider at the Children Hospital of Eastern Ontario how their month of February has been so far.) And maybe your point is that mothers of young infants — and possibly mothers writ large — shouldn’t be working. But I would answer that this horse has left the barn some time ago. And while you are chasing it, may I ask what you suggest we do about the children?

Skander-Jack’s place is with his mother, regardless of where his mother thinks her place is. I’m glad that Skander-Jack was with his mom in the House rather than a nanny in Verchere-Petite-Patrie. What are we supposed to tell him, all 3-month-old cutie? Suck it up, it’s not our problem that your mom wanted to change the world during your formative years? I work for a MP and I can guarantee you that his mom will miss plenty of his most important milestones over the next 4 years. Why don’t we let him this one?

We are creatures of control. I want to get married at this time, with this job and with this amount of money. I want to know where I’m going and with who. I want XX number of children, spaced YY years apart. I want to be comfortable. I want to be the master of my destiny. I don’t want to have to iron out uncomfortable wrinkles, I want to throw out the whole cloth. We are wholly and completely unprepared for anything that throws us for a loop, be it materially or emotionally.

This used to be called selfish, but today it’s called empowerment.

Those are my thoughts on this article about normalizing mothers who abort.

Here we go with another “Tyranny of mother’s milk” article. Listen here, I am not opposed in principle to formula. I have even fed it to my children. But I have several issues with rants such as this one, the first one being that hard cases make bad law. A mother felt that her breast milk was not sufficient to nourish her infant and some healthcare providers with inadequate or incomplete  formation on breastfeeding made it worse. Can we really draw a public health conclusion about this? As someone who struggled through a similar challenge, I will tell you exactly what the problem was: inadequate follow-up by a nurse with inadequate formation. What we need is more research and information about the root causes of the inability to breastfeed (no, everything is not linked to a poor latch). As long as we have health care providers (whether they are doctors, nurses of nursing consultants) blaming everything on a poor latch, we’ll have situations like the one described in Wente’s article.

But that wouldn’t make a rant, would it? Much better to blame it on an evil patriarchal scheme to oppress women using their own children! Let me try to make something perfectly clear to those who hope that formula-feeding will liberate them from the tyranny of baby: human infants are needy and helpless. The well-meaning nurse who told you that formula-fed infants slept longer, she lied. If that makes infants oppressive, then so be it: human infants are oppressive. It’s not an evil scheme to oppress women, it’s just The Way Things Are. Unlike horses, our infants are not expected to stand-up and flee danger within their first hour of life.  Why does liberation have to mean liberating ourselves from our own children? Why do we have to deny motherhood and the fact that we are able to respond to our infants’ needs to be liberated women?   But mark my words – I have 6 children and I am expecting 2 more – if you think that formula-feeding will liberate you from your children, you are in for a big shock.

The other thing I would like to mention – and I choose my words carefully – is that healthcare providers, especially doctors, are in the business of making us feel guilty for our unhealthy choices. Read that again and think about it. Do you think that any OB/GYN worth his salt has a fleeting remorse about making a pregnant smoker feel guilty? And let’s not even approach the topic of overweight people, especially pregnant ones. Human milk is the best nutrition for human babies. You may choose not to breastfeed for a long list of reasons but it does not remove the fact that human milk is best for human babies. Once again, this is not an evil scheme to oppress women, it’s just The Way Things Are.  Any doctor or nurse who pretends otherwise or avoids mentioning it for fear of triggering guilty feelings is not doing his job. I had to be transferred to hospital for complications following a home birth (baby was fine, I was not). Do you think the duty OB/GYN held back from lecturing me about the dangers of homebirths? Not for a second. Did I feel guilty? Yes. That was the whole point.  We start our pregnancies avoiding everything from soft cheese to caffeine and once the baby is out, we’re supposed to avoid finding out that breast milk is better for them? Fight the tyranny, demand proper information!

On May 5, my workplace is hosting a conference. Brad Wilcox and Mark Regnerus are the big name speakers, and I know they will be interesting. But I’m actually most looking forward to hearing Jonas Himmelstrand discuss family matters in Sweden.

For so long we’ve heard much rhetoric about how successful the socialist Swedish model is (particularly with regards to providing daycare for all and long parental leaves) but Jonas actually lives there and he has a different take. And has written a book about it, soon to be coming out in English.

In any event, this conference is open to the public. That’s all of you. So if you are in Ottawa on May 5, stop on by. What better way to fill your post-election hours? Early bird registration rate ends on Sunday, April 17.

Isn’t it ironic that I was not able to post anything on International Woman’s Day, me, the busy working mother of 6? So consider this my Woman’s Day well-wishes, symbolically one day late and rushed (I have 10 minutes, having finished lunches early this morning).

What did I do yesterday? I drove children around while listening to a CBC radio panel on the status of women (listen to it here)  The comments of the 25-year-old gave me hope. After the usual milk run of school and preschool drop-offs, I headed shortly into my part-time job on Parliament Hill, having recently downgraded from full-time work in a effort to bring more balance into my life. I say “shortly” because I was just picking-up a few work items to bring home: my toddler has been fighting a string of bugs since January and was feverish. Again.

So what did I, a highly educated female in my prime earning years, do on International Woman’s Day? I was living the dream! Caught between my work and family obligations, missing work to care for a sick child as I have done at least once a week for the last 6 weeks, happily sabotaging my professional ascension to better pay and more serious responsibilities. You may wonder what my husband was doing and why wasn’t he taking time off work to care for the sick child? The reason is simple: he makes, oh, about 10 times more money than I do. To use round numbers, if a day off for me costs our family $10, my husband’s days off cost us $100. And the nature of the beast is that as long as I keep missing work to tend to my family, I will keep making $10 while my husband’s earnings will keep increasing. It’s not rocket science home economics. It’s just cold hard reality. And no government policy, national daycare program or pity pay-outs will change it.

Here’s your International Woman’s Day wisdom from the trenches, one day late and rushed between making lunches and wiping runny noses with my power suit: children need taking care of. Bosses need taking care of. There are 24 hours in a day. Choices have consequences. They are either work-related or family-related. Sort it out. Then deal with it.

You’re welcome.

This news item about the birth of Rufus Wainwright’s daughter is remarkable in that it is actually very confusing but no one is supposed to notice. I gather Rufus and his partner had a baby daughter with a surrogate (the daughter of Leonard Cohen) but she is not the surrogate. She is the mom. And Rufus is “Daddy #1″. My only point is that it’s hard not to read and reread to try and figure it out.

So I did so listening to this. Still love this song regardless of the mess that is his  personal life.

Wow.

“Smart, fair-minded, hard-working good men make all sorts of mistakes in divorce. Executives and professors and doctors make the same mistakes as plumbers and truck drivers,” according to Joseph Cordell in The 10 Stupidest Mistakes Men Make When Facing Divorce. The lawyer and his wife run a bustling St. Louis law practice specializing in men’s divorce. “You can’t make a mistake we haven’t seen,” he writes.

Apparently, one of the worst mistakes is not censoring what your new girlfriend writes on Facebook.

When men ask his firm, “What can my girlfriend put up on Facebook about me and our relationship?” Cordell says their answer is: “Nothing. Not a word. Not a single photo. Nothing.” He goes further, telling men to buy a new computer at the first sign of marital discord. “The cost of a new computer is cheap compared with the cost of an incriminating browsing history.”

Sigh. I suppose “trying to work out a way to save the marriage together” would be too boring and simple.

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Véronique agrees: I always thought that if people spent half as much time and energy working on their marriage as they spend working-out their divorce, the divorce rate would be significantly reduced.

Yes, marriage can be challenging. And yes, everybody has a good reason why everybody else should have worked on their marriage but they couldn’t. Marriage is like riding a bike: you have to keep it going or you fall. And it takes two to tango: it takes two people to make a marriage work and it takes two to ruin it. But people are fooling themselves thinking that the end of the marriage will mean the end of their problems, especially when children are involved. Divorce with children means that you will be in almost daily contact with your ex-spouse over child-rearing and finances, the two leading causes of divorce. So why not seek help and learn to make it work?

I came across this blog post on the cost of staying home with young children, linking to another post on the cost of staying home with young children, referring to a series of articles on the cost… Not exactly a new topic, is it?

In the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that I sacrificed a potentially successful (I will never know) and highly paying (heck, why not?) legal career to stay home with my four oldest children. I returned to university when my fifth child was born and started working while pregnant with my sixth. I like to think of myself as a specialist in matters of family-work balance or (more often) lack thereof.

Let me make one thing clear to all the mothers, working or otherwise, thinking of “opting out:” this is not an economic investment. You will not be better off financially if you stay home with your children instead of working for remuneration. Kids don’t pay. If they do, it’s with your money. Anyway, they cost way more than they bring in. Until they grow into successful hockey players and hip hop artists and buy you a house, you will be out of pocket. And even then.  This is an investment in yourself, your family and your children, rooted in deep-set values and a sense of doing the right thing.

That being said, you cannot pay the rent with good intentions. If you decide to leave the work force to raise your children, someone will have to support you financially. This role generally falls on the other parent, often the father. And for each millionaire who can acrimoniously support his ex-wife to stay home with their children, I can name you 10 000 regular guys who cannot pay their rent as well as yours. As a result, your ability to stay home with your children hinges on a solid commitment between yourself — the caretaker — and the provider, also known as marriage (or something like that–civil union, nuptial agreement, memorandum of understanding, I’m not fussy.)

Women don’t find themselves suddenly “post-divorce, with two adolescent sons to care for, no job, no job prospects and a seriously dated resume that looks less-than-stellar in the middle of a recession” because they stayed home with their children but because of the breakdown of their marriage. Don’t get me wrong: my resume is less-than-stellar and I am working an entry-level job for an entry-level salary in my late-thirties.  Staying home for ten years has kept me from building-up my resume and networking in the workplace. However, it should be understood that the most important decisions of your parenting career are the myriad of choices, small and large, that build-up (or destroy) a solid commitment between you and your spouse (or whatever you call the person you reproduce with). A solid, respectful — ideally loving — relationship between parents is the bedrock of all parenting decisions. The rest, including the loss of income and work experience, will fall into place.

Liza Frulla, a well-known Quebec politician and media personality, has good advice for her own younger self. I like this bit:

I am of the generation of women who put family life on the back burner to accommodate a career. The idea of work-family reconciliation didn’t exist when I was in my 20s. Today, without saying that everything is perfect, household responsibilities ‘are being shared more equitably. This means you can invest in your personal and family life now without fearing you will have to sacrifice all of your career ambitions.

Now there’s a resolution worth keeping. Happy New Year!