Dear Tim,
A hasty hello this morning. Between carpool (our morning to drive; whoops, one of the booster seats is at the car repair place in the other car) and Alice’s morning tantrums and so on, this first message of the day is always the hardest one to pull off–despite the fact that you did the driving, and packed the lunch, and brushed all the little teeth. I felt grumpy after reading two pieces in the Wall Street Journal about dual-career couples and parenting. The first, a page one update on a piece the Journal did 25 years ago on the then-novel (at least in the Journal’s demograhic) phenomenon of two-earner families, followed up with three families they introduced Back When. Two are divorced. One includes Warren Farrell, the leading guru of the Men’s Rights movement. Irritating fact number one: Farrell never had children, and never got married again after divorcing his first wife. This is the guy who’s supposed to tell us about how changes in male roles will set us all free?
Irritation number two is Sue Shellenbarger’s “Work and Family” column, all about how younger women are now insightfully planning long in advance how to combine work and family, through such measures as getting Harvard MBAs to make them more valuable assets even after long maternity leaves. They seem to be under the pathetic impression that they can game it all out in advance, unlike the misguided older generation that made it up as it went along. Aside from the obvious point that everyone under discussion has more resources and options than most Americans even dream of, they all miss the crucial surprise in store for them: that no matter how you game it, the conflict is the conflict is the conflict, and they will routinely feel torn in two.
Perhaps because I’m seeing through this domestic lens, I’m struck by the dispatches this week from Ireland, which offer a rare example of the human interest story-normally a pretty mindless genre, on the political stage-as a force for good. Today’s funeral coverage suggests that the awful firebombing deaths of the three Catholic Quinn boys, which first seemed to augur ill for the spring peace agreement, have instead become a kind of sobering reinforcement.
That’s it for now. I promise a less harried mood as the day marches on.
Love,
Marjorie
