On the first October weekend – it was the last hot weekend of this extraordinary summer in the times of global warming -, we went to the beach. We got there by car, an old Daimler of the kind I’ve been driving for the last ten years or so.
All parking lots were full, so we took a residential side street where we finally located a free space. It looked tight, but so what? I only had to squeeze into this parking gap parallel to the sidewalk - something I used to manage in seconds in Cologne or Berlin when I lived there, without even interrupting the conversation I was engaged in.
But this time? I just couldn’t do it. It took me half a dozen attempts to get in there, tires screeching along the curb. I felt so embarrassed I was ready to drive back to P. there and then. Only that wasn’t an option with a slightly mocking husband, the children, swimsuits, and all the toy diggers in the car. So I ignored these people sitting on their porches smirking (as I was sure they were without really daring to look), and shepherded everybody to the beach.
When I later confessed this disgrace to D., she really smirked. “So, you’re finally here! The stay-at-home mom, queen of the suburb! Welcome!”
And it’s true. If you live in a suburb (or, well, a small town) in the US, there’s no necessity of any parking skills. No frantic competition for the few legal parking spots in the streets of your neighborhood when everybody comes home from work in the evening – there is your garage, or your driveway. No circling around the block where your favorite grocery store is located, to virtually make a dash into any space that another car left no ten seconds earlier - there is the shopping mall with its huge parking lot or garage, no parallel parking anywhere, just move in and back out. To cut a long story short: No practice, no skills.
Need more indicators how far I already departed from the city girl? Come to think about it, within my suburban surroundings, I use the car much more often than I used to when we first moved here. Now, public transport is hardly an option, of course. But biking is, at least in this small town of P. where there still is a downtown and, close by, a comparatively cozy shopping center dating from the nineteen-fifties. But isn’t it just so much more convenient to quickly take the car to go there, especially as you could transport two more gallons of milk and wouldn’t have to go again this week? This kind of thought wouldn’t ever have occurred to me in Berlin!
So, what to do to avoid “Death by Suburb”, as Dave Goetz puts it (Subtitle: “Keeping the suburb form killing your soul”)? I may not be religious enough to follow this author with his “spiritual practices” that, as he claims, counter “suburban toxins” like envy of the neighbor’s SUV or more aspiring soccer kids. I’m not there yet, thank God, and P., after all, has quite a few decidedly un-suburban qualities, which might prove soul saving.
But just in case, I should probably start with a reversal of driving habits. No shopping by car this week (even if that means I will have to go twice to fit three gallons of milk and the diapers for my little one onto the bike). But for the next trip to New York I will take the car and not the commuter train, even if I get stuck in the tunnel for two hours, and parking fees will be ruinous.
My big fear about that, though, is that I might already be this horribly dangerous suburban mom driver, knocking about the big city… Maybe I should try Philadelphia first.
Showing posts with label stay-at-home moms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stay-at-home moms. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Sunday, September 30, 2007
The Pursuit of (Women's) Happiness
Last Tuesday I was sitting down at the dining room table, trying to start reading the paper for what was probably the eighth time that morning - only to be instantly interrupted by my two-and-a-half-year-old: “Mama, my train! It doesn’t work!” Up I was again, trying once more to attach the engine to the long toy train R. had assembled on the living room floor. Feeling a little exhausted at 8.45am already. Wishing – with a pang of guilt, of course, about what a heartless und ungrateful mother I was - I could catch a train to some office in the city and put together some words for an article instead.
Ok, train is back on track, all aboard, another five minutes for my newspaper if I’m lucky. And there it is: A column in the New York Times’ business section, titled “A Reversal In the Index of Happy”, telling me that women nowadays not only tend to be less happy than men, but also that they are, on average, significantly less happy than they were in 1970! Although – or maybe: because – women in the new millennium do a lot more paid work and less housework than in the nineteen-sixties.
What has happened, apparently, is that men in general cut down on their work, while women still spend about the same amount of time on work but feel they’d need to do a lot more. Or, as the columnist puts it: “Men’s leisure time has grown; so have women’s to-do lists.”
If it is true that women today compare themselves not only to other women and what they have achieved (like they did in the Sixties), but also to men, it seems like we did not exactly chose new priorities, but simply set ourselves a lot more goals. Like a female student said in a conversation with one of the happiness-researchers: Her mother’s goals in life had been to have a beautiful garden, a well-kept house and well-adjusted children who did well in school. “I want all those things, too, but I also want to have a great career and have an impact on the broader world.”
The result is a lot of pressure, and even if a universally accepted definition of happiness is probably hard to establish, too much pressure most certainly is not a good component.
So, are these surveys simply water on the mills of neo-conservatism, indicating that society would be so much better off, and women would be so much happier if the latter concentrated on their traditional role in kitchens and kids’ rooms? Is cutting down on perfectionism a promising way to more happiness? Like the lady whom I met on the train lately told me: “When my children were little, I simply decided that we did not need a spotless house. So I stopped cleaning up after I came home from the office and played with my children instead, telling myself: They will remember the fun and not the mess!”
Should woman endlessly deliberate what might make them happy, until they miss the chance to have children, like it tends to be the case in many European countries? Or should we just fight more vigorously for affordable universal day care plus better treatment by employers for women with small children?
Before we moved to P., I was one of the lucky few, who had that perfect combination of work and children for a short time. I worked part time - three days per week – as a journalist in Berlin for an employer with a lot of understanding for parents’ need of flexibility, while N. was in school and R. was in preschool until 4pm. Also, there was a nanny to bring the boys to school and pick them up on the days I worked. Plus, a husband who, in spite of a full time workload, still loves to spend time with his sons and does so regularly.
Now, as I’m not yet allowed to work in the US, one important component of my life is missing, and sometimes badly. There is less balance in my everyday life; I tend to feel I’m standing on just one leg right now where there used to be two. Maybe there are more unhappy moments now, especially when I nourish feelings of loss and renunciation. But there might also be more moments of intense happiness because I spend more time with my children. Just enough to let me sense that concentrating on one task is not necessarily the worse alternative to multitasking - and getting this feeling that one doesn’t do anything right. Am I all in all less happy now than I used to be in Berlin? I honestly couldn’t say.
Don’t get me wrong: This is no plea for the case of stay-at-home moms. I’d go back to work tomorrow if I could. But instead of nourishing unhappiness at times when one cannot have it all, it might be better trying to make the most of what is the case just then. Like sitting on the sun deck on a beautiful September morning, spending one intense hour with R. building a new, exciting train track. And then writing - maybe not that Pulitzer-Price winning article, but at least this post -, while a perfectly content little guy choo-choos along all by himself. Here we are: One happy little man – and one happy woman. At least for this precious moment.
Ok, train is back on track, all aboard, another five minutes for my newspaper if I’m lucky. And there it is: A column in the New York Times’ business section, titled “A Reversal In the Index of Happy”, telling me that women nowadays not only tend to be less happy than men, but also that they are, on average, significantly less happy than they were in 1970! Although – or maybe: because – women in the new millennium do a lot more paid work and less housework than in the nineteen-sixties.
What has happened, apparently, is that men in general cut down on their work, while women still spend about the same amount of time on work but feel they’d need to do a lot more. Or, as the columnist puts it: “Men’s leisure time has grown; so have women’s to-do lists.”
If it is true that women today compare themselves not only to other women and what they have achieved (like they did in the Sixties), but also to men, it seems like we did not exactly chose new priorities, but simply set ourselves a lot more goals. Like a female student said in a conversation with one of the happiness-researchers: Her mother’s goals in life had been to have a beautiful garden, a well-kept house and well-adjusted children who did well in school. “I want all those things, too, but I also want to have a great career and have an impact on the broader world.”
The result is a lot of pressure, and even if a universally accepted definition of happiness is probably hard to establish, too much pressure most certainly is not a good component.
So, are these surveys simply water on the mills of neo-conservatism, indicating that society would be so much better off, and women would be so much happier if the latter concentrated on their traditional role in kitchens and kids’ rooms? Is cutting down on perfectionism a promising way to more happiness? Like the lady whom I met on the train lately told me: “When my children were little, I simply decided that we did not need a spotless house. So I stopped cleaning up after I came home from the office and played with my children instead, telling myself: They will remember the fun and not the mess!”
Should woman endlessly deliberate what might make them happy, until they miss the chance to have children, like it tends to be the case in many European countries? Or should we just fight more vigorously for affordable universal day care plus better treatment by employers for women with small children?
Before we moved to P., I was one of the lucky few, who had that perfect combination of work and children for a short time. I worked part time - three days per week – as a journalist in Berlin for an employer with a lot of understanding for parents’ need of flexibility, while N. was in school and R. was in preschool until 4pm. Also, there was a nanny to bring the boys to school and pick them up on the days I worked. Plus, a husband who, in spite of a full time workload, still loves to spend time with his sons and does so regularly.
Now, as I’m not yet allowed to work in the US, one important component of my life is missing, and sometimes badly. There is less balance in my everyday life; I tend to feel I’m standing on just one leg right now where there used to be two. Maybe there are more unhappy moments now, especially when I nourish feelings of loss and renunciation. But there might also be more moments of intense happiness because I spend more time with my children. Just enough to let me sense that concentrating on one task is not necessarily the worse alternative to multitasking - and getting this feeling that one doesn’t do anything right. Am I all in all less happy now than I used to be in Berlin? I honestly couldn’t say.
Don’t get me wrong: This is no plea for the case of stay-at-home moms. I’d go back to work tomorrow if I could. But instead of nourishing unhappiness at times when one cannot have it all, it might be better trying to make the most of what is the case just then. Like sitting on the sun deck on a beautiful September morning, spending one intense hour with R. building a new, exciting train track. And then writing - maybe not that Pulitzer-Price winning article, but at least this post -, while a perfectly content little guy choo-choos along all by himself. Here we are: One happy little man – and one happy woman. At least for this precious moment.
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