File under: Missing the Point

Over at Salon, Katie Roiphe weighs in on one of this week's "issues of the moment," older parenthood, in an article entitled "The Feminist Fertility Myth." The subheading reads like so: "Why do women believe they can delay children for so long?" 

Roiphe writes in response to Judith Shulevitz's piece now up in The New Republic, and she challenges both the idea that women can "have it all" (a subject for another post, but one I successfully avoided dealing with/reading about all summer--don't get me started here) and that they

"...should be able to have children...that the world should not be withholding an experience like motherhood from you because you have dedicated yourself to your career and adventures in your 20s and 30s. We tend to view basic biology as a practicality to be surmounted, something trivial and irritating that shouldn't get in the way of the promise of a full life. It's almost as if we are shocked that nature itself has not read The Second Sex and The Feminist Mystique."

Sigh. Where to begin? As a writer, I claim the right to respond with a story. This is a story that an American woman recently told me--just last weekend, in fact. She is married to a Swede, has two children, and has raised them in both the US and Sweden, where they currently live.

Once upon a time, she said, the Swedish birth rate was one of the worst in Europe. It was bad. No one was replacing anyone else, and in a country where, post-WWII, social support structures for the elderly were becoming even more societally important, this was a problem. 

So the Swedish government did what Swedes are wont to do: they looked into the problem systematically. They found a bunch of Swedish women of childbearing age and asked them why they weren't choosing to have children. And the answer? Well, it wasn't that they felt that biology or Mother Nature owed them--it was simply that they lost too much by putting their careers on hold. They lost earning potential, they lost their ability to support themselves, they lost their identity outside of being a mother, and they got little to no help from their partners or society. So they gave it a pass.

Pragmatic as always, the Swedish government took action. They instituted some of the best parental leave requirements in the world. They made daycare accessible and affordable. They provided child support payments to make up for the loss of income while on leave (Swedes are paid a percentage of their salary by the government while out, but not the whole thing unless the company chooses to make up the difference). Most recently, they extended the mandatory (yes, extended. Yes, MANDATORY) paternal leave. If dads don't take the leave, both parents lose out. BOTH parents expect to take time off, and BOTH parents expect to return to their jobs, without penalty, when that time is over, or at least be able to look for a new position without having a black mark on their resume for the two "empty" years spent bringing up their kids. And from what I can see, what they expect is how it usually happens. (And just as a note, 'both parents' can and does cover same sex couples as well.)

And lo and behold, while it took some years, the birth rate here is currently doing pretty well. Stockholm in particular is in the middle of a little baby boom, something immediately apparent if you spend time anywhere outside of your home. And there are lots of parents--fathers and mothers both--out with their babies during the day, because they can't go to daycare until they are around two. (I told some Swedes once that lots of parents in the US have to put their kids in daycare from eight weeks or so, and they were absolutely horrified. "That's way too young!" they said. "Kids that little need their parents!" I couldn't do much but agree.)

The social message here is clear: children are important. Parents are important. They are so important that we will make sure everyone involved in bearing, birthing, and raising kids is able to keep both the little ones and themselves happy and healthy. Swedish women don't seem to have children in their mid-twenties, but they also aren't waiting around until they're forty. Early thirties seems to be it, and it seems to be working well.

The system isn't perfect. But it does NOT treat having a child as some sort of duty borne only by women, for which they (and they alone) must be willing to sacrifice their careers, earning potential, and independence. It doesn't label as selfish women who choose to establish themselves in their 20s and 30s, knowing that because of the way things work, having a child earlier would leave them (and their children!) less secure in the future.

Looking at the US from a distance, the moral tinge to this mandate (and Roiphe's article is just full of it) is even clearer to me now than it was while living there. Oh, those selfish mothers who won't make enormous sacrifices on the "appropriate" timetable. Oh, those women who think that they can have a job and thus ESCAPE BIOLOGY. Oh those future mothers trying to resist the pull of the kitchen and apron strings when we all know that their children would be better off if they'd just get back where they belong.

Look, Slate. I like you. But Roiphe is missing the point. It's not about looking at the choice many, many women are making and then condemning it as detrimental to society. It's about looking at society and asking why it can be detrimental to the point where so many women are making the same choice.

A Ghost at the Edge of the Sea: Chapter One

Chapter One

The plane over the Pacific shuddered and dipped. Its wings flexed, and the metal groaned as the passengers groaned. From his position in seat 46B, Will couldn’t tell which sound was which. He clutched at his armrests, his seatbelt cutting into his stomach with every jolt. The flight attendants had been strapped into their seats for at least ten minutes now, or twenty; he couldn’t move to check the time, and outside, it was still dark. The woman next to him gasped and grabbed his hand as the screens showing the film flickered, then went dark, and Will held his breath, waiting for the oxygen masks to tumble into his lap.

“At least,” the woman said softly, without letting go of Will’s hand, “at least I know where I’m going.”

Will raised his eyebrows at this, and then turned to her and gave the best smile he could manage. “Shanghai still, I hope. Unless they’ve changed it to some small Pacific island.”

The woman giggled and shook her head. Her blond bangs brushed at her eyes with the movement. “No, that’s not what I meant,” she said, pressing down with her hand and driving his own into the cracking gray plastic. “I mean after that, if this plane gives up. What’s your name?”

“Will,” he replied, cautiously, unable to come up with another to give her.

“Pray with me, Will,” she said. “Pray that we reach whatever destination God has set out for us, whether it’s of this earth or not.”

For a second, Will thought she wanted him to pray something with words, words that he knew he wouldn’t know. But she simply sat in reverent silence, her eyes closed, her lips moving without sound. So he closed his own eyes too, to keep her company, and realized, right before his plastic cup tipped melting ice into his lap, that even now he still didn’t buy the idea of heaven. It was Shanghai or oblivion.

Will did not believe in an afterlife; he never had. He didn’t really wonder about it when he was a boy, not even when his cat and his grandfather died on the same day and adults reassured him awkwardly that they’d both gone to a better place. And when his father was diagnosed with cancer, he tried his best not to think about death at all.

It was only after his father actually died that he realized one night in his dark bedroom, alone save for the blinking lights of the router and power strip, that his father was gone, really gone. Death was final, decay inevitable, and his father’s life was wiped from existence as completely as an arrangement of driftwood in the face of a rising tide.

And after the turbulence finally subsided and the movie began again, after Will dried off his jeans in the cramped restroom as best he could, after the woman next to him stopped praying and offered him a valium, which he gratefully accepted, he thought of his father again as he slipped into sleep and wished that there really was a place to go, that death wasn’t as hopeless as he knew it to be.

Click to read more ...

Why Are My Eyes Sad?

Not actually our tree, but still a Swedish Christmas tree.

So I bought a Christmas tree today from an Egyptian guy who had a bunch of them stuck out in the snow right by our house. It's a lovely tree, and it's currently in our apartment, upright, with two cats circling. (After all, not only is it a tree, but it came in with snow that they didn't have to go outside to experience.)

While he was wrapping it up in the tree-netting, though, after we'd discussed the relative merits of our home countries' political systems, he told me he wanted to ask me something.

Oh boy, I thought. Here we go. "Sure," I told him, preparing to turn down a date.

"Why do you have sad eyes?"

That one wasn't what I expected.

"Well, I don't know," I said finally. "I mean, I'm not actually sad."

"Ah, okay. Some people just have sad eyes. That must be it."

This wasn't the usual "Smile, gorgeous!" that creepy guys like to give women on the street now and then. And he didn't seem like a creepy guy. The conversation drifted to tree technicalities easily, and then I paid for the tree and dragged it home.

But this still begs the question: are my eyes actually sad? No one else has ever told me that. So either everyone has just been protecting me from the horrible truth, or maybe I really did look sad. The possibility that the young, lonely, cold guy who spoke no Swedish was trying to prolong the conversation and hit on me notwithstanding (my husband and my father, I know well, will pick this option), what could be causing sad-eyes?

1) Allergies. Definitely a contributing factor.

2) I'm deeply depressed but have no idea.

3) I was actually a little bummed about something just before I bought the tree and it showed on my face.

Yeah...it's number three (with a touch of number one). I didn't realize that it was going to be obvious, but as I walked from the mall to the tree place, I had just realized why I've been so reluctant to get to work this week. After a wonderfully productive retreat with the Stockholm Writers' Group, I now have a full draft. This will be (knock wood) one of the last full drafts of this book I ever write. In the new year, I'll send it off to my agent, and I hope with all sincerity that she'll then take it away to be sold.

In short, while the rest of you might get to enter this imagined world sooner rather than later, my own period of intimacy with it is almost done. For six years and change, I've been at it, off and on–but mostly on. I've spent so much time with these characters that they are as real to me as many famous real people out there I hear about but have never met. More real, even. And just now, just as I'm getting things to where I am really happy with what the book is and does, I have to send it away. Maybe it's kind of like sending a kid to preschool just after you get them toilet trained. And I do joke that I'll tell our kids (when they exist) that this book is their older sibling.

Jokes and comparision to kids aside, I know I can't be the first writer or artist to feel this way near the culmination of a large project. I'm actually pretty bad at finishing projects in general. I took a personality test once that gave you indices of how driven you supposedly are by all of these theoretically-motivating factors. And guess what I got for "Completing Things," or whatever it was called. Yes, that's right: 0. That was my lowest score, even lower than "Neatness." (Swear to god, Mom, it really was!) It's probably tied into why I write novels vs shorter pieces in the first place. This way, I get to sit with these characters and their world for years.

I wish for all possible success with this book, I really do. But it's still bittersweet to give it up.

I Didn't Expect This

So despite the weather--or, more accurately, because of it--I'm having a really hard time staying in to finish the novel. I'm so close. I'm in that magical part where things are just falling into place as though they were always meant to be that way, and it's SO much fun, so energizing, etc. (And I am in no way taking this for granted.) 

And yet. There's a whole lot of snow outside. There are only so many hours of daylight. And while my snowboots aren't quite as warm as I hoped, my parka is performing impeccably, and I sometimes even get hot. And I just found out about these spikes you can strap to your running shoes so you don't fall on your ass on the ice. And did I mention that I'm going to pick up a pair of used cross country skis tomorrow morning?? The boots guy stood me up, but I won't let that stop me for long. After all, what else am I going to do with a pair of skis and poles besides go ski in the giant snowfields and woods just next to our house?

It's pretty great out there. Sorry, locals. I love it. And fortunately for my novel, I do actually get down to work when night falls, which happens these days around 3pm. (Still love it.)

(All temps below in celcius. It's just so much more dramatic that way when it's cold.)

Why I Write (Fiction, and specifically Novels)

Via the ever-wonderful longform.org, I present to you one of the best articles I've read this year: "Remains of the Day," in the Washingtonian. Matt Mendelsohn is a DC area wedding photographer who decides to check up on some of his previous couples after a family whose milestones he's photographed for years begins to deal with the health crisis of their son. 

I can't say much beyond go read it. What Mendelsohn captures in his cross-section of couples, the ins and outs of their lives, the tragedies and joys and absurdities they've encountered, is precisely why I write fiction. It's also why I write novels. The best short story writers, I'm well aware, can capture an entire world in 5,000 words or so (much like Mendelsohn does), but for me, there's just too much potential to practice such disciplined asceticism. There's so much to know, so much to discover, so many layers to peel back as the harmonies, dissonances, and echoes among characters' lives and circumstances gradually become clear. As a reader, I love that process of discovery; as a writer, I love it no less.