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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

“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.

________________________

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?

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.

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!

Second: I knew their conclusion already. Why can’t someone pay me to tell everybody? I probably offer way better rates. Just sayin’ . . .

While the article is kind of all over the place (including defining love — at one moment it’s a flimsy emotion and paragraphs later it’s actually commitment and putting your partner above yourself? Make up your mind! Personally, I was raised with the latter definition, which is what works:

Lasting marriages combine commitment, passion: Researchers