Category: The Dish

A reader makes a nuanced argument:

There are some real problems with Miller’s position. Men increase their hours, while women reduce theirs. As a rather natural consequence, men get bonuses and raises. This happens when one works longer hours and work harder. Women want to work less. As a rather natural consequence, women have trained employers to be suspicious of women after they have children. Even if a particular women works longer and harder, she is tainted by the general reaction. I don’t think this is the fault of employers. Employers have the rather sad duty of living in the real world where economic decisions actually matter and have consequences. Thus, they are typically a conservative (in the traditional sense) bunch who go with what mostly happens: a women will work less and want more time off.

What we really need to do is to stop being a society that demands that the adults in a two-parent family both work. We need to re-organize back to the idea of one parent works to support the family and one stays home. We should be egalitarian about which one stays home and encourage fathers to stay home as much as mothers.

But we need to give employers both the message that the working parent can be fully counted upon to work and the stay-at-home parent can take on the real responsibility of raising children (which is wildly hard work, so much so that I would never, ever do it; even the sight of a day care center is enough to make me queasy).

The easiest way to do this is to credit the stay-at-home parent with Social Security credits equal to the working parent. The bonus for society would be fewer workers, higher wages for the remaining workers, and neighborhoods with adults home to keep track of the children. The time from after school to parents return is the most dangerous time for children and, with a parent home, that would end. Not only do studies clearly show children do better in two parent families (the sex of the two parents really doesn’t matter), but that children do even better in two-parent families where one stays home and takes on the daily task of raising the children (please see: Family Structure and Children’s Health in the United States: Findings From the National Health Interview Survey, 2001­ – 2007, published by the CDC).

For far, far too long, we’ve allowed our society to be organized to optimize what is best for corporate profits. We need to organize around what is best for our citizens, particularly families. I write this as a single gay man without children, but someone who fully recognizes a society that puts children and families first will be a healthier one.

Robin Lane Fox surveys a history of plants in poetry:

Surprisingly, the poetry of flowers is often patchy and ill-informed. None of the ancient Greek poets mentions the brilliant wild tulips that run like red rivers through parts of the Greek landscape. Chinese poets focus on a narrow canon of flowers, soaked in symbolism and hidden meanings. They say nothing about the heavenly wild flora, the superb shrubs and mountain flowers that have transformed Western gardens since their collection and introduction by Europeans. John Milton’s poetry describes bunches of flowers that would never flower during one and the same season. No gardener, especially in Britain this year, would agree that April is “the cruellest month” and in no gardens or landscapes known to me does April breed “lilacs out of the dead land,” least of all on the American East Coast within range of the young T.S. Eliot.

The exceptions prove the rule. Sappho had an engagingly sharp eye for the flowers of her native Lesbos, including milk-white pansies. Theocritus’ poems, some three hundred years later, include particular flowers from his second home, Cos, and also from Sicily or southern Italy that he probably therefore visited. Shakespeare of course observed and included many flowers, and D.H. Lawrence was also unusually alert, not just to dark blue Bavarian gentians but to the dark trunks of almond trees, which he acutely observed during his time in Taormina and rendered in poetry there. William Cowper could garden well, but among living poets, only James Fenton has had a garden that challenged expert gardeners with its assemblages of snowdrops and highly unusual plants.

(Photo by Susanne Nilsson)

Colin Marshall introduces Dripped, an animated tribute to Jackson Pollack:

In its 1940s New York City setting, painting-swiping protagonist Jack lives not just to make world-renowned canvasses his own, but a part of him. When he gets these works of art back to his apartment, he doesn’t even consider selling them; instead, he chews and swallows them, thus enabling him to assume in body the forms and colors famously expressed in paint on their surfaces. We are what we eat, and Jack eats art, but even becoming the art of others ultimately leaves him unsatisfied. Determined to paint and eat a canvas of his own, he finds his stomach can’t handle his work in progress. Thrown into a bout of frustration, an angered Jack tosses one of his paintings to the ground, randomly splattering it with every color at hand. And thus he discovers, in this animated fantasy, the technique that Jackson Pollock would pioneer in reality.

Ann Friedman speaks for a lot of women:

Many women are certain they want kids someday. A smaller number are positive they don’t. But there’s another group that isn’t the subject of many hand-wringing studies or best-selling books: the ambivalent. The ones who vacillate between “I don’t feel compelled to have children” and “What if I regret not having had children?” …

“A lot of women on the fence feel like they should be feeling a deep longing to raise a child, and the truth is they don’t,” says Laura Carroll, author of The Baby Matrix. There’s really no evidence, she says, that women have a biological urge to procreate. Humans are the only animal that can choose whether or not to spawn. When you joke that your ovaries are jumping, it’s really your brain thinking, I’d like to be a mother someday. You’re emotionally — not biologically — processing all those cute baby photos on Instagram.

It would certainly be easier if there were a definitive biological drive pushing all women to become mothers. For most of us, it’s far more complicated than that. “Looking back, I never wanted kids,” says Jill Uchiyama, a 46-year-old filmmaker and teacher. “I think there was a moment when I did, because I was married and because I was so in love with my husband. That was the closest I got to really wanting it to happen. But it wasn’t strong enough to make it happen.”