Recently in Family Category

Alex e-mailed to me the remarkable story of Gaby Hinsliff, the political editor of The Observer newspaper in England -- or rather, the former political editor, inasmuch as she resigned because she concluded she couldn't have both a high-powered career and a satisfying family life. Excerpt:

Tucked away down a winding track on a remote Welsh peninsula, the farmhouse we rented for a family holiday last June was a much-needed haven from real life. My two-year-old son and his cousins ran wild on the empty beaches all day, chasing crabs through rock pools. When they all finally fell asleep in a sandy tangle of sheets, the adults cracked open another bottle and watched the sun sink slowly into the water. Months of tension melted away... until the night someone flicked on the television for the weather forecast, just in time to see James Purnell resign from the cabinet.

"That's the end, then," I said.

Of Gordon Brown, someone wondered? But I meant, of the holiday. The point of journalism is being there when things happen: the blessing, and the curse, of political journalism is that things happen so often. I rang the office, and started packing.

All the way back down the motorway, the car seethed with resentment. "Freddie NOT go home," said my son mutinously, kicking the back of the seat. "Yes, well, Daddy doesn't want to either," my husband muttered. Even the dog glowered.

And was that the tipping point? The moment I realised I couldn't do this any more, couldn't do it to my family any more, and would therefore have to resign from the job I loved? It would make for a convenient story if it was. But in all honesty, it was a slower, subtler thing than that.

Surrender steals up on the working mother like hypothermia takes a stranded climber: the chill deepens day by day, disorientation sets in, and before you know it you are gone. In the sleepless blur of the last three years, I can barely even remember now how it started.

More:

Every day became a battle against the clock. I never listened properly to phone conversations with friends, because I was always simultaneously doing something else. I was so on edge I raged at the tiniest delay - tourists blocking tube escalators, a computer slow to spark up in the morning. Running for the train in high heels, I sprained my ankle: the doctor prescribed some exercises, but who had time for that? I wore flat shoes, took painkillers.

My reward was that for two crazed but fantastic years, I did - in that loaded cliche - have it all: terrific job, plus small child. Thanks largely to a brilliant nanny and a hands-on partner, I don't honestly believe either suffered from the other.

But what got lost in the rush was a life, if a life means having time for the people you love, engaging with the world around you, making a home rather than just running a household.

So when my long-suffering husband was offered a new job in Oxford, involving the move to the countryside he has always wanted, there was strangely little to discuss. For years he had organised his own career to let me do what I loved, and now it felt like his turn. I closed my eyes and jumped.

But I never expected the emotional outpouring that followed. "Wish I had the guts to do the same," texted a junior minister, when I announced my resignation.

A seemingly unflappable PR confessed secretly agonising over "not being the kind of mother my son deserves": a colleague whose slick work-life balance I had always envied admitted she was "at the end of my tether", dying to quit.

Confessions tumbled compulsively from people I barely knew: tales of stricken marriages, miscarriages, only children who were meant to have siblings but then a career got in the way. "Too many of us once had relationships that we haven't got now because of this job," said a veteran male reporter, now divorced.

"I can't afford regrets," mused a cabinet minister, "because I've had this fantastic career, but..." Politics had, he said, dominated his children's lives.

I hope you'll read Hinsliff's whole essay.

Hinsliff is now writing a blog about her life as she tries to downshift from high-powered career woman to stay-at-home mom. Here's an excerpt of a recent entry:

I come from a family where good food and the rituals associated with eating together -- talking, arguing, laughing, getting drunk -- mattered.

When I worked fulltime, cooking supper marked the transition from office to home: here is something terribly soothing about chopping, stirring, spooning. But it was also one more thing to fit in, and sometimes by the time it was finished I was too tired to eat it.
So Henry has reminded me that now I have more time I want to spend more of it on food: cooking for friends, cooking with my son, maybe growing a bit more of our own stuff, and working out how to use cheaper cuts and leftovers.

After all, without a fulltime salary, there can't be expensive takeaways and convenience foods and nice stuff from the deli. But there might actually be time to eat without getting indigestion.

I don't mean to give the impression that Hinsliff believes she's stepped out of a stressful life into a garden of domestic bliss. She's struggling with a lot of anxiety over whether or not she's done the right thing, and getting used to life at home all day instead of being at the office. What Gaby Hinsliff did takes courage, and I bet she'll embolden many more couples to try it. Her blog is one to watch.

Watch this short "Sesame Street" clip:

Grover: "Well, I guess that's what marriage is about."

Brilliant propaganda, this. You can't very well accuse "Sesame Street" of openly promoting same-sex marriage, but come on, that's plainly what's happening here. Why on earth would you run a segment asking a little boy to define marriage if you didn't have in mind the idea of defining marriage in the minds of your young, receptive viewers? Is it too much to expect "Sesame Street" to stay out of the culture wars and teach the freaking alphabet to kids? What's next, Bert and Ernie affirming their partnership, and getting a wedding announcement in The New York Times? I'm joking -- and have your Jerry Falwell/Tinky Winky jokes (Falwell was bonkers on this point) -- but this really is insidious stuff, from a traditionalist point of view.

[Via InkTank.]

UPDATE: If, as one commenter said, this clip originally aired in 1987, then I'll feel really stupid ... but so will gay blogs (e.g., here and here and here) that recently cited this clip as Sesame Street promoting same-sex marriage. I've Googled around a bit and it seems that the commenter is correct. The joke's on both sides in the marriage war, for reading our own agendas into this old Grover clip. I thank the reader for pointing out what politicized morons we are. Nevertheless, while Grover obviously wasn't consciously put into the service of normalizing same-sex marriage, despite what gay activists and traddies like me thought, what do you suppose the point of this clip, and Grover portraying marriage as he did? I'm asking seriously.

Turns out that stage father Papa Heene has this thing about directing his sons to make bratty videos, presumably to show off their ersatz Dennis-the-Menace-like scampiness. Here's a lovely video in which the Heene children pick their noses to make a booger soup to serve to Mom:

Here's a clip in which the Heene children get paid to pick up what they call "dog sh*t." It's always charming when small children swear:

In this clip, described by one of the Heene parents as "outrageously funny and comical" (funny and comical both), the trio makes dessert. I particularly love it when the littlest one calls his brother a "dumbass," and later suggests putting "sh*t" on the plate. Har har! No wonder this YouTube channel is titled "Hilarious Heene Family." Verily, these frisky tots ought to be given their own reality show. Well, whaddaya know, Richard Heene has been unsuccessfully pitching just such a project to the cablers.

I look forward with lip-smacking relish to the truth about the Balloon Boy story coming out. It might be the only thing that saves these three children from having their lives ruined by their world-class jerk of a father.

I don't know if you watched the Heene Bros. rap video yesterday when I posted it. I just watched it all the way through. What horrible little trolls those children are. In the video, they rap in praise of farting, picking boogers, and offer the following charming couplets:

I look up in a tree, what do I see? I see a faggot trying to pee on me! So I picked up a rock, threw it at his rrrrragh! [here you see a drawing of a cockerel held by the child over his crotch]

A mother and father who would teach their children to behave like this, and to make a video of their bratty acting-out, are attention whores capable of anything. That doesn't prove they orchestrated this balloon chase. But I wouldn't put it past them at all. Those poor kids, growing up with such obnoxious parents.

UPDATE: Oh great, now an exhausted Falcon Heene, dragged out of bed by his parents so they can appear on national TV, vomits on national television. Do you suppose the kid's upset stomach has anything to do with Daddy being asked if the thing is a hoax? Daddy Dearest strikes again:

Last weekend, watching my wife put on a great birthday party for Matthew, with a homemade cake, and thinking about all the amazing work she's done in our backyard, with our chickens and the garden, and considering how much she gives to our family in homeschooling Matthew, taking care of all the kids (and me), and cooking our meals -- well, I was struck, and struck hard, by how fortunate I have to have married Julie. She laughs at how crunchy she's become over the years, how she came to love digging in compost, transplanting seedlings, and cooking homegrown edamame more than the kinds of things she used to be into. Lucky me. Lucky Dreher children.

I thought about how blessed we are in that regard when I read Sharon Astyk's long, great post about women, men, marriage and householding. In it, she writes of hearing from male readers who laments that their wives are not like her (Sharon), insofar as they're not interested in farming, backyard agriculture, and the more traditional householding skills. She links to this guy's complaint that women are less willing than men to make the sacrifices necessary for a more agrarian way of life. Sharon's response includes this:

My own take on this is that while collapse as a whole, with its radical dislocation of male roles and providers, is probably scarier and more destructive to men than to women; volunteering to live a low energy life probably is more frightening to many women than to men - and for pretty good reasons. Because there's an excellent chance that the reality is likely to be that the practical burdens of hauling groceries home on a donkey, emptying the composting toilet bucket and stoking the sauna are likely to become the wife's chores. I don't think it is an accident that in many cases (and from what I know of him I am explicitly exempting Orlov from this), that the men making these complaints tend to be traditional sorts who don't share in the household labor equitably. Nor do I think it is coincidental that many women married to more traditional men are unthrilled with the vision of a low energy future, and a return to the bad old days, in which "men may work from sun to sun, but women's work is never done."

As usual with Sharon's posts, there's no way to do it justice by excerpting it here, and I really do encourage you to read the whole thing (she gets into male vs. female status markers later in the post). But I especially like the point she makes here, about the way shes can only be Sharon Astyk because her husband Eric is the kind of man he is, and their marriage works the way it does:

The work that he is doing, I did yesterday, when it was my day for the farm and the kids with the kids - but the fact is that you cannot offer a call to arms to women to come back to the kitchen unless everyone else goes with them. If all of this domestic labor were entirely my responsibility, there is no freakin' way that I'd be able to do it alone - my husband is a full partner in our domestic arrangement - and not a traditional partner, who does the heavy "guy stuff" but isn't there for the endless daily cycle of chores. I'm not afraid of laundering the cloth diapers, because I know my husband will change the diapers and rinse them out first. I'm not afraid of taking on canning, because I know he'll be homeschooling the kids.

Moreover, I'm able to take on not-very lucrative jobs like farming and writing because I can trust my husband deeply - I know he's not going to leave me for another woman, I know that I can trust and rely on him. So if I don't contribute to a retirement account or pay that much into Social Security, I know barring death or disability, he'll be there with and for me. He's not going to pick a pretty face with an air conditioner or a nicer farm - this is a permanent marriage. I can't say how I know this, merely that I do.

I wrote about this in "Crunchy Cons" -- how the only way my wife and I can do what we do (and we're not remotely in the same league as Sharon and Eric re: homesteading, but were are kind of on the continuum) is because we absolutely trust each other. For us, it's a matter of personal honor, certainly, but also because God, and our promises before God, are at the absolute center of our life together. The priest who married us, Father Paul, introduced a Croatian Catholic custom into our wedding vows. He had us grasp a crucifix together, holding it as we made our vows. He told us then, before the congregation, that as long as we held on to Christ, we could hold each other too -- but if we lost Christ, then our own hold on each other would be tenuous.

Broadening the point beyond Christians (Sharon and Eric are Jewish), I believe that especially in a culture like ours, which exalts individual desire over commitment, a couple that's going to do what Eric and Sharon do, and to a lesser extent what Julie and I do, have to have a powerful incentive to trust each other -- because there's so much risk involved if the family breaks down. To anchor one's commitment to one's spouse in religious faith is the most powerful incentive one can have, I believe. If it were foolproof, religious believers would never divorce, obviously. But it is critically important in this day and age. It's a point Allan Carlson touches on deep in his overview of the status of the family over the past few decades. Excerpt:

These years also taught me lessons regarding the causes of family change. To begin with, I gained a much deeper appreciation for the lasting effects of the industrial revolution on family life. Called "the great transformation" by Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book with the same title, the process severed the place of living from the place of work for most people in developed countries, a profound revolution. To this day, issues surrounding gender roles, childcare, and elder care derive from the hunger of an industrial economy for specialized labor. The industrial revolution also altered the nature of marriage, displacing the natural division of labor between husbands and wives in a productive home economy. Moreover, the market-based economy requires that ever more tasks once done within homes be transferred into the commercial sector, and it uses advertising to whet appetites for these new, industrially-produced products. Taken together, these forces tend to leave family homes stripped of function, with husband-wife and even parent-child relationships subject to the bonds of emotion alone.