spynotes ::
  July 21, 2006
Reduxion

We had 4 inches of rain yesterday. 4 inches! AJ�s wading pool was overflowing. So my comment yesterday about building an ark? Not so far-fetched.

It rained today, too, but not until after AJ and I had ventured to a library we like a couple of towns away for a picnic lunch and storytime in their children�s garden. Surrounded by flowers and lots of well-dressed children (this town is somewhat wealthier than our own, which explains its far superior collection of books and videos), we listened as two college students told -- not read, told the old-fashioned way � stories of a leopard who wanted to count his spots, of a king who didn�t want to take a bath and one other story that I don�t remember because I was busy watching a curly-haired toddler wander around and smell all the flowers.

AJ was one of the oldest children in attendance, but also one of the most enthusiastic. He loves hearing people tell stories. After he�d made a half-hearted attempt at gnawing on the peanut butter sandwich he�d made himself, he asked to go sit in front of the story ladies. As he listened, he gradually inched forward until he was sitting right at the feet of one of the tellers. After the stories were over and we sang one final song, he started running races around the garden with a couple of other boys, one of whom he bonded with immediately because he had the same baseball sneakers as AJ.

The lovely morning spent with parents and children on the lawn made this story, sent to me by RS with the subject heading �In case you want to SCREAM,� all the more irritating. I should note that the above link is actually a blogger�s intelligent response to an idiotic column in New York Magazine about how stay at home moms are, �bad for the child and bad for the mom. And bad for society�. just plain bad.� The columnist�s chief complaint seems to be that stay-at-home moms are boring (I�m going to gloss over the fact that she herself seems to be a stay-at-home mom, even though she doesn�t think of herself as one and thanks her �Tibetan nanny� for providing her with self-esteem time to work by buying her cable. As I told RS in an email earlier today, such things make me want to light things on fire.

But at the same time, there is a small part of me that agrees about the boring part. But I don�t think it�s stay-at-home moms who are to blame. It�s people in general. And it�s not really that they�re boring, but that you are bored because there is not enough of a connection. What happens when you�re a stay-at-home mom (or, more accurately, what happened to me) is that you find yourself in many conversations with people you would otherwise not converse with. Kids are a great leveler of social barriers � an instant commonality. But often there is little else to go on. Just because your kids are the same age and in the same school doesn�t mean there�s anything else in your backgrounds or interests on which to base a conversation. Kids drag you into new social circles, but they are not necessarily circles founded on factors that make for good socializing.

Or to put it more baldly, you may find yourself in a melting pot of class/education/economic/cultural qualities. Despite the fact that I find myself in more boring conversations these days as a result of this, I think it�s fundamentally a good thing. We tend to stick with our tribes. It�s important to know the world is a lot bigger than that, even if it may mean you�re not really connecting. And that woman at the playground who does nothing but talk about brands of strollers? Try talking to her about something else and see what happens. Maybe it�s the only thing she knows for sure that you have in common.

Interestingly, there�s another current article in New York Magazine that gets at some of this stuff by a different route. Emily Nussbaum, in her article on the sociology (or perhaps socio-pathology) of the website Urbanbaby.com, observes that, �It is little wonder that motherhood on UrbanBaby is surprisingly hard to distinguish from class war.�

Here�s why this is an issue: mothers who work have been, for most of our cultural history, of a lower socio-economic class than those who stay home. Until a few short decades ago, the morality of working mothers was still often called into question [I�m not providing examples here, but trust me when I say that this is something I�ve spent a lot of time reading about. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of evidence a few feet from my left elbow as I type this.]. Changes in educational access and expanded civically patrolled economic protections for women along with changes in family structure (requiring more outside-the-family child care) have flipped the class associations around somewhat � at least for the women who spend time debating the Mommy Wars, the Nanny Wars, and all those heavily marketed, over-simplified debates that we�re getting tired of reading about. Suddenly there�s a conflict between highly educated, middle or upper class stay-at-home moms and their socio-economic but working counterparts. They�re locked in a contest for moral superiority. Meanwhile, no one is talking much about the women further down the socio-economic scale, unless they�re working as nannies. The wars they are involved in are totally different. And probably much harder to win.

The problem with class is that it only means something if someone is lower down the scale than you.

I had intended to draw some conclusions from all of this, but The Girl Next Door has just come over to play with AJ. They are sitting at the kitchen counter conducting science experiments on their snacks � dissecting them, squashing them with their fists, and trying to blow them across the counter. It�s hard not to observe that kids, when thrown together, do a much better job at finding commonalities than their parents. But then, they are much more invested in finding something to do together, not with preserving the differences that define them to the world.

2 people said it like they meant it

 
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