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.

A friend sent me this great link. It’s a TV panel where three women discuss the choice of remaining childless. The anthropologist from Rutgers University describes having large families as littering. To be fair, she relates how some people consider having lots of children as littering. Whether or not this is her belief is anyone’s guess. Is this view of motherhood increasingly prevalent, as many Catholic commenters  suggest? I don’t know. I’m too busy tending to my litter to pay much attention to inanities of this type. I think that we will run out of affordable food and oil long before we make ourselves extinct, personally. Then only the resourceful – like children of large families who learned early how to do more with less – will survive. University professors, especially anthropologists, won’t. But I digress.

I will not be breaking any news to our readers with large families but if we were walking around with our environmental footprint hanging over our heads (à la Eeyore), each one of my six children would have a much smaller cloud than any of their friends. See, I have the dubious blessing of having  friends who are significantly wealthier than I am. I say dubious because it is the root of much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the children gallery. We are asked questions like “Why don’t we have a house in Florida? Everybody has a house in Florida!” , “Why don’t we go to Europe every summer? Everybody goes to Europe every summer!” Everybody has a ski chalet, everybody goes to Hawaii for spring break, everybody gets a car at 16… you get the picture. And hopefully, by now, you will also understand that we may drive a full-size GMC Savana but we are burning nowhere as much fossil fuel as our friends who fly to Florida for a long weekend. And I’m not even getting near the relative size of our houses per inhabitant and the new clothes we’re not buying.

In the meantime, to all our readers with large families: happy littering! Don’t mind the academics: we outnumber them.

In this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, a journalist asks: “… as women happily display themselves as sex objects. It raises the question: Is feminism dead?” I don’t know if feminism is dead but I wanted to point out that feminism is not about women displaying themselves as sex objects but about equal rights and equal opportunities. And when it comes to equal rights and opportunities, there is often more than meets the eye.

Take abortion for instance: poster procedure for women’s rights and equal opportunities… Or is it? I don’t need to start linking to previous posts: just scroll down long enough to find the next post on campus free speech, informed consent, pregnancy crisis centres, abortion counseling or post-abortion trauma (post-abortion what??) and you will find a world that doesn’t really want women to know what’s going on with abortion as long as they get it done. How equal is that? And I’m not even getting into coerced abortion (coerced what??), whether the coercion is physical or psychological.That’s it girls, just go and be whatever you want to be: firefighter, CEO, Secretary of State. Just don’t bother us with your babies. Everybody is treated equally here, like a man.

Go ahead and soothe yourself thinking that women still have a long way to go because there are 50-foot posters of half-naked girls adorning the outside walls of La Senza. It reminded me of walking back to the office on a warm summer afternoon, a couple of steps behind a co-worker who had just had her breasts, ahem, “enhanced”. Yes, men were ogling. But that’s — arguably — why she had it done. Where’s the inequality? The last time I went to La Senza, it was a woman’s store selling women things. Unless this has changed radically, the titillating images are selling something to women, not men. Poor taste? Probably. Inequality? No. Just like a boob job.

A good summary by a Catholic scholar (as opposed to an agnostic reporter). Because there is a difference.

Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla is shedding light on the short-sightedness of Internet software like Google Adwords: apparently, the bits and pieces are showing poor judgment in choosing which sites to place Government of Canada ads on, including a site that demeans women by showing them naked. See the article here.

Now, I am the last person who will defend posting GoC  ads on such websites. But the concern about demeaning women is a little over the top, especially coming from a Liberal MP. After all, these are the same people who think that maternal and child health in developing countries must include abortion, a mentally and physically damaging procedure. How is the commoditization of childbirth and childrearing working for us after all? Divorce rates are soaring, as are rates of paediatric mental illness and rates of weak-men-who-can’t commit and women-who-have-much-better-things-to-do-than-mothering.

It reminded me of a recent episode of House where the “good doctor” meets a starry-eyed idealist medical student (see Office Politics). Asked if she would lie to a patient to save his life she answers “Of course not!” then asked if she would lie to her grandma after receiving an ugly tea cozie for Christmas she said she would… “but that’s not the same thing!”. House replies “So you won’t lie when it matters but you will when it doesn’t. Congratulations: you’re fired!”

Apparently, demeaning women by making sure they don’t learn the nitty-gritty about abortion is fine… as long as you don’t show them naked. That would be demeaning.

Yesterday at the dinner table, we asked our children a very dangerous question. We said “If you were the parents of six children, what would you do differently?” Suckers for punishment, I know. “I wouldn’t have six children” was the first (half) joking reply, followed by “make more money.” Then the conversation turned more serious: “I would do more things with my children, fun things” said one, “I would better protect the older children from the younger ones” said another. It was humbling, if entertaining.

Which is why I was so excited to see this morning’s feature in the Ottawa Citizen: Family 101 with Angelina. Help is at hand, thought I, she also has six children and she’s a celebrity, so she must know what she’s doing. Right?

So how does Angelina do it, with six kids, including toddler twins, a full-time job and a hot husband partner? As it turns out, the answer is that she lets her seven- year-old do the cooking. That’s it! Despite the best assurances of the journalist, I have an inkling that childcare and household staff *may* be involved.

So for the rest of us, I have created a hair child-raising assignment that Angelina will need to successfully complete before claiming a seat among the parenting experts:

1. Your teenage daughter, who rides horses and knows how to keep them alive, tearfully demands a horse. Lovingly shoot her down. Lose points for laughing. Absolute failure if you purchase a horse farm and/or a groom.

2. Your toddler’s life mission is to trash everything that is not bolted down. Your life feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. Your challenge is to cook a healthy meal for eight and clean the toilets. Fail if the toddler ingests cleaning products or climbs in the oven.

3. School lunch challenge: your daughter is sick of homemade cookies. While looking for snack options, you learn that your son is selling his homemade cookies at school to buy chips from the vending machine. He is concerned about his clientele’s reaction to the change in menu. Mediate. Loose points for referring to personal Chef.

Email results to Véronique at keeping it real dot nut.

I don’t know what to think of Saturday morning’s feature on older mothers in the Ottawa Citizen. What I found in equal parts troubling and interesting was to see the feature in the Life section, alongside maternity fashion and the comics. One article reported on “midlife mom” and blogger Angel La Liberté whose website heralds midlife pregnancies as so many fashion statements. You too can have children after 40… look at Céline!! As thrilled as Céline must be with her newborn twin boys, I’m not sure she considers years of fertility struggles and failed IVF attempts, briefly carrying triplets and losing one before finally giving birth prematurely to the remaining two babies on par with choosing the best maternity fashion to fit her midlife curves (not that Céline is particularly well-endowed in that department, which may or may not explain a lot). I don’t know Céline but I’m guessing.

I have no doubt that the particular challenges of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing after 40 make La Liberté’s blog timely and relevant, still I was struck by the “us against them” tone of the gig. Happy as I am to no longer qualify as a SMUT — well-toned Stepford Moms Under Thirty-five — being neither well-toned or under 35; I did not buy it. Truth is, having children late in life is not so much a choice as the culmination of previous choices not to have children before. Women have children in their late-thirties or early forties for many reasons: some married late,  others were unable to conceive right away, other wanted to get a head-start on their careers, sometimes all of the above.  Their choice not to have children at any given time morphed into a choice to have their children late.

Nobody argues that delaying motherhood is not the healthiest option for mother and baby. And I have yet to meet women who delayed childbearing because it was a bad health choice. We shouldn’t  transform midlife childbearing into a lifestyle choice but wonder why women are not having their children earlier in life. As someone who had two children in her early 20s, I do not recommend it. When my young friends get married and start having children at 21 (usually in the reversed order), I cringe. As a society, it is much easier to look at pictures of Céline, Kelly Preston and Mariah Carey and attribute it to lifestyle than to wonder where we took a wrong turn.

The debate on graphic abortion pictures resurfaced in my house this morning in a most unexpected way. My local paper has decided to publish some of the least offensive pictures released during Col. Russell Williams’ sentencing hearing. The sight of a grown man in girls’ underwear is not my idea of a wake-up call at 5 am. But as the Ottawa Citizen explained: “…we believe it is vital that the true nature of his crimes be revealed and that, by (publishing the pictures), the Citizen is contributing to an understanding of the proceedings against him and his sentencing.”

As an argument for publishing, it is uncomfortably similar to the rationale supporting the use of graphic abortion images, don’t you think? So can I both support graphic abortion images while denouncing the publication of explicit pictures of a sick man? I dread looking at pictures of aborted fetuses as much as I dread looking at Williams’ pictures. In fact, when I go to work, I make a point of looking the other way when I walk by the abortion display on Parliament Hill. Yet I support the use of graphic abortion pictures because the story needs to be told. And the story is not told by our sex educators, our schools or our medical system.

Does a story of sexual perversion need telling in all its gory details? I am asking because I am not sure what purpose is served by publishing the pictures. I read that Russell Williams was a grown man who liked to wear girls’ underwear. Then I saw Russell Williams in girls’ underwear. What changed? I honestly fail to see how seeing the pictures after reading the article has enlightened me. Do I better understand the proceedings and the sentencing? Two women are dead, several more traumatized. Whatever his sentence is, I can promise that I will find it inadequate.

I didn’t need a picture.

When I studied bioethics, the topic of addicted mothers — especially of the pregnant variety — was the issue  to polarize a group. Check this one out:

Project Prevention. It pays money to drug addicts so they can be sterilized. Should we be shocked? I don’t know. Call me disillusioned but we’ve been able to remove ourselves from the gene pool for quite some time now. Is getting a financial reward to do so any worse? The slope isn’t that slippery at the bottom. As far as I can read, the state is not paying people to be sterilized. Nor is the state deciding who should get paid to have it zipped.

All in all, much ado about nothing. Not to mention that sterilizing males does nothing to prevent the birth of drug-addicted babies.

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Andrea adds: “The slope isn’t that slippery at the bottom,” is a good point, Véronique. While I may not be shocked, I am dismayed that rather than curtail sexual behaviour, we’d rather all run out and get ourselves sterilized. There’s something upside down about that. But then again, I’m pro-life. I think it’s upside down to consider aborting as a solution to anything at all. Very backwards, I know.

When Brigitte sent me this link by email yesterday evening, asking if I would like to blog on it, I was sitting at my desk working. It was 8:00 pm, the younger children were in bed and the older ones were watching James Bond “Moonraker”. I saw Mooraker in the plane to France in the summer of 1979, now my kids watch it as a piece of archive. Not that it dates me or anything…

It’s now 8:00 am the next morning and I am sitting at the kitchen counter with my laptop, working. You will agree that I have an expertise of sorts in matters of work-family balance — or lack thereof. My question today is: “What else is new?”

“Culturally, it paints an unhappy picture,” Ms. Bourne said in an interview Monday. “Where are we going to be if people are overworked, burned out, feeling stress and tension and not recognizing it? There is a societal policy implication.”

One of the reasons the women struggled to balance work and non-work is because they often found themselves working beyond a full work day and work week, the scholars say. The women used various justifications to express their acceptance of that situation.

What else is new under the sun? Men have been taking work home for generations. Were we concerned in the 50’s, 60’s and whatever about the societal policy implications of our poor bread-winners feeling over-worked, stressed, and burned-out and not recognizing it? As long as the bills were paid and the work was done, I didn’t think so. All of a sudden, women – who by the way fought to get the privilege of being over-worked and burned-out – get it and we are concerned about the policy implications. Guess what? If we want the lifestyle that comes with the paycheque, we will have to work for it like the men did. Nowhere is this reflected better than in the business world where start-up success is still very closely linked to sweat input. This leaves the female entrepreneur distressed? Maybe she shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.

The flexibility in “flexible work arrangement” applies to the schedule, not the output. I, for instance, am working from home this morning: my babysitter is on holiday and my oldest daughter is at camp. My husband – who pays the bills that don’t go away, like mortgage and hydro – needs to work more than I do. That’s not sexist, that’s called “keeping the creditors at bay.” So I am working from home. It doesn’t change what has to be done: I still have a foot-long to do list. As a result, I will likely spread my 8-hour day over the next 12 hours. But I had to fight to get the privilege to work from home, partly thanks to all the well-meaning studies suggesting that we, mothers, should have it easier than the average worker. It’s by making sure that the work gets done that I am now able to work from home occasionally. Flexible schedule doesn’t mean flexible output for fixed income.  It means that you can be trusted to get the job done.