LizaWasHere

Tips for Parents Who Travel for Work – and the Solo Parent Staying Behind

2 Mom Family, Opinion, Personal, The Real Live Boy, The Real Live Girl, Training and Development 5 Responses »

Nov 182012

Liza in the lobby of the BBC at MediaCity-Salford. While traveling for work.

A couple of weeks ago, Babble posted “Don’t Phone Home from a Bar” — and other tips for “traveling dads.” Although I love many of the writers at Babble, they do some formatting things that I hate. For example, they do lots of “top ten” lists where you have to click through each item one at a time. Normally, I hate that so much, I won’t even read authors I love on their site. Babble has great taste in writers, but terrible taste in layout.

That’s not the point. The point is that my wife had just left for a 24 day work trip, and I found the temptation to read their advice to her irresistible. In spite of all the (stupid! pointless! annoying!) clicking.

The post is funny, and some of the ideas make sense, but it had such a strangely dated, uber-stereotypical heterosexual marriage vibe, that I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. Critical comments on Facebook, when I shared the link, have kept me thinking about the post. Are there really families where the traveler is expected to — and the family can afford for him (him, really) to come up with a sparkly gift or spa day valued at equal to or greater than the total amount of his meal per diem for the trip? Don’t have dinner with a woman younger than your mother? In a lot of lines of work, that’s going to be a serious challenge, not to mention making the traveling dad (again, him, really) look both sexist and egotistical.

My wife and I have had a lot of experience with work travel. Our children are 4 and 6, and during the 1.5 years after the 4 year old was born, we were apart for a total of 7 months. My trips are more frequent (3 or 4 times/year), and usually last between 3-7 days. Her trips, which normally only happen about twice/year, last between 12 days and 8 weeks, but the standard is 4 weeks. This year, we also survived my Ph.D. preliminary exams, a 60 day process in which my parenting and home responsibilities were drastically scaled back, though by no means eliminated. It wasn’t a work trip, but I think that for my wife, it was kind of like me traveling for work.

Based on my years of experience as both the at home parent and the traveling parent, here’s my list of recommendations and tips for parents who travel for work — and by travel, I mean either often, or for extended periods of time. If you have a night away once or twice/year, my advice to you is all in #5 below.

Call home and call the traveler. Both parties should call. Figure out 1 or 2 times of day when it is reasonably likely the traveler will be able to speak to the child(ren), and try to call during those times. It may not always work, but if you try most days, at least it will mostly work. In my family, that usually means calling either during dinner, or from the car, on the way home before dinner.
Offer support. This can work both ways, but is more the traveler’s responsibility than the parent at home. When the children are behaving as if they were possessed by demons, the traveling parent is not expected to solve the problem. That person should listen, sympathize, express hope that it will be better tomorrow, be sorry that that they aren’t there to help. They should NOT tell the at home parent what to do. Unless the at home parent explicitly asks, “here’s what you should do!” is never as helpful as you think it will be.
Trust the parent at home. In my family, the biggest thing this means is that when I’m at home, I do NOT want to be nagged about exactly when I’m taking a child to an activity, or have cleaned the bathroom, or other similar regular features of daily life. When only one parent is present, some of these things slip, or are even skipped entirely. Nagging just makes me resentful about managing as well as I can. When I’m the traveling parent, I fret about what the kids are eating, but I do my damnedest to keep my mouth shut. Even if it is my worst case imagined scenario, a week of horrible eating won’t kill them.
Trust the traveling parent. This ties back to the Babble article headline. Do you really want the traveling parent not to call you from a bar? Isn’t it a good thing that they’re calling? And isn’t it a good thing that in addition to working hard, they’re also having some fun on their trip? Maybe they’re out with work colleagues. Maybe this is the first time they’ve had a chance to call. Maybe they saw your favorite kind of beer and had a sudden desire to hear your voice. If you don’t trust your spouse, that they’re calling home while in a commercial establishment that serves alcohol is probably the least of your worries. (Of course, there may be exceptions. If the traveling parent is in AA and calls you from a bar, that’s a different set of circumstances than if the traveling parent is a healthy social/occasional drinker, and at the end of a long day at an academic conference, calls you from a bar.)
Be sensitive. It isn’t about “don’t go have fun without your spouse” or “don’t have a nice dinner” or “don’t go to a concert/play/game” or whatever. In a mature relationship, both spouses should want the other one to enjoy themselves. But if the at home parent calls to vent about spending 5 hours at the ER because Child A hit Child B with a hammer causing Child B to fall down the stairs and land on Child C, breaking Child C’s leg, that’s probably the wrong time for the traveling parent to announce that they scored an amazing seat to The Big Game for half of face value. Or just ate the most delectable meal of their life. Save the thrilling detail for the next time you talk.
Get a Sitter/Help. If you can afford it and make it work logistically, the at home parent should take some time to relax, do something fun, or at least get a break while they are solo parenting. (I like that term over “single parenting” for these circumstances. You still have a partner for making policy decisions, even if you are the solo adult at the moment.) How often and for how long you should get a sitter probably depends on how long the other parent is gone, and the rest of life’s circumstances. Turning to friends, grandparents, etc, if they are available, also makes sense. Once/week doesn’t seem unreasonable, but it really depends on what everyone needs. You might need more, you might not need quite that often. Even if money is tight, the traveling parent should support this kind of sanity-affirming (possibly saving) help for the at home parent.
Make special occasions or conflicts work, if at all possible. We have had work trips that covered birthdays, both of a parent and of a kid. We have also had nested work trips — my partner had a 4 week trip extend to an 8 week trip, while I had a conference the weekend at the end of the 4th week. It is hard to do birthdays with someone gone, but you can start the celebration early, continue it late, and find ways to make it special. We once met in Chicago in the middle of one of her trips, because it was in driving distance of home and where her work needed her, and celebrated my partner’s birthday there. (Lucky for us, we were able to afford the weekend getaway for the family. But we made it a budget priority.) The nested trip? She came home for the weekend, got to spend some time with the kids, and I got a very nice, very needed break and conference trip. We barely saw one another, which was decidedly non-optimal. But our choice kept resentment, frustration, and loneliness down for both of us, even if it didn’t meet every need we could imagine. My son has enjoyed an extended birthday season when someone is gone over his special day.
Re-entry is hard. I think it takes about half the length of the trip for a family to re-adjust to having both parents back. The traveling parent wants to feel needed. The at home parent wants some help, and to be acknowledged for having kept life functioning all by themselves. The at home part of the family may have adjusted to a “new normal” if the traveling parent was gone for more than a week. Remember that everyone involved is doing their best, and give them the benefit of the doubt. Kids may test the traveler or both parents, or punish them. Try not to lose it.
Give the at-home parent a break. Even if the kids are acting completely evil, the returned-traveler should give the at home parent a break, as soon as reasonably possible. Babble suggested an expensive spa day. If your world doesn’t contain quite that much disposable income, or free time, an afternoon or evening “off” the following weekend, so the at home parent can go out with friends, see a movie, get a cup of coffee, or even just take a solo adult trip to the library or go for a long walk might be more affordable options. Both parents will probably need these kinds of breaks during the re-adjustment process following a long trip. A two-to-one ratio of alone time, in favor of the at home parent, may be reasonable for 2 or 3 weekends, depending on the length of the trip.

Don’t get me wrong, honey. If you want to give me an expensive spa day, or something sparkly, (or the iPhone 5), I’m not going to turn them down. But I don’t think those things are a tax on spousal travel — not in our family, and not in most two-parent families. I don’t even really think they’re expected in the world I imagined when I read the Babble post — suburban, heterosexual, working dad/stay at home mom. Being thoughtful, supportive, and appreciative, however, is good for any kind of family.

Electing Women: Is fear of the campaign a copout?

Current Affairs, Opinion 1 Response »

Aug 072012

While at BlogHer’12 last weekend, I attended a fantastic panel on social media and electing women to public office.

During and after the panel, there was a lively Twitter thread happening, in parallel, on the topic. You can read the whole thread by searching for #BH12ElectWomen. It includes panelists, members of the live audience, and people following from other locations.

Moderator Jill Miller Zimon, whom I think is fantastic, made a comment during the panel, on which my brain has been chewing and debating ever since. What she said, more or less, is that for women to not run because they are afraid of the campaign, is a huge cop-out.

What I responded, on Twitter, is that I semi-agree and semi-disagree. This statement is both true, and useless. But there is no way I can say what I think in 140 characters. So.

I want to agree 100%.

Campaigns are a lot of work, but the work isn’t brain surgery, and lots of people are there to help. There are countless candidate training programs across the political spectrum. Depending on the size of your community and the level of office, there may be professional staff available for you to hire to help. No matter how small your community or the level of office is, you will have friends who want to help. There are even training programs for potential staff/critical volunteers. You can create campaign internships and work with local college students who want to learn how campaigns work.

But it isn’t wrong for you to be afraid.

I have an unusual perspective.

Both of my parents are elected officials.

For most of when I was growing up, my dad was an elected judge in the County Circuit Court. He ran for U.S. Congress twice. He took out an incumbent judge in a fierce battle — a judge who had sexually assaulted a woman in a courthouse elevator! That judge had been suspended from the bench, but was still so popular that my dad only won with 51% of the vote. And now, dad is a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly.

During most of those years, my mom was more of the “behind the scenes” type. She was a Presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney during the Carter Administration. During the 80s and 90s, she worked for a large law firm, doing complex civil litigation, which paid for my sister and I to go to college, and gave my dad the freedom to pursue his political dreams. But in 2004, mom ran for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, also against an incumbent, also winning with a less than 51% margin.

By the way, in that campaign, I learned that the most effective line EVER in political volunteerism is, “Would you help me help my mom?” Everyone wants to help you help your mom.

As I joked in the panel, I was raised by wolves. Politics, campaigning, and civic engagement is my native language.

And I could not be more proud of my parents. I think they are fantastic role models and effective leaders.

I learned so much from it, about people, about organizing, about getting things done, about politics, about power, about reputation, about communities, about languages and names, about demographics, about loyalty….

But it isn’t easy to learn those things as a kid.

Other kids mostly don’t learn what I was learning.

And some of what I learned was really hard. I wasn’t supposed to hate the mean jerky kids, because they might tell their parents I hated them, and then their parents might not vote for my dad. It goes without saying that I wasn’t supposed to be a naughty kid or act up at school, because teachers or administrators might think my parents were doing a bad job as parents.

The pressure to be a perfect kid was pretty intense, and I gauged how far I could rebel against it with a minutely exacting measure. I was a mostly B+ kid, because I could go that far down without getting in trouble, and I thought that not being a straight-A student would make me seem normal. (HA! I really did. I had no idea that there was no chance I wouldn’t be seen as the smart, geeky, oddball I am.) I did some naughty stuff (not that much, and not that naughty) with friends I totally trusted, because I knew I wouldn’t get caught, but I loathed being a goody-two-shoes. Or at least being perceived as one.

I tried not to let people know who my parents were, although if they knew and seemed not-freaked-out, I opened up. I’ll never forget the time in 5th grade that my mom took me with her to the White House for a meeting. When I got home, I didn’t tell a soul where I’d been.

Not all of the pressure to be both perfect and normal came from my parents. I watched the media coverage of Amy Carter, and I watched the little bubbles of coverage of Ron Reagan. Later, I watched coverage of Chelsea Clinton with my heart breaking for every cruel opinion I read. I knew every single kid, in every school I attended, whose parents either were also elected officials, or whose parents had run for office. I didn’t hang out with those kids, with one notable exception (David Stacy, high school friends and others who might be curious), but I always knew who they were, and what “people” thought about them. David and I were friends because we were very much the same kind of geeks; I don’t recall politics playing a role in our friendship until we were in our 20s.

Back to the point — being afraid of the campaign.

Living under the microscope is hard. I watched my parents make very careful, very ethical choices, choices they almost certainly would have made no matter what — like paying the sitter’s Social Security taxes, never hiring undocumented workers to do yard work or house repairs, etc — with an explicit recognition of the political implications of those choices. They lived life expecting that someone would look into their choices in the future.

Most people don’t live like that.

Social media exacerbates how easy it is for common choices to be exploited in their worst light, and for “bad” choices to be broadcast to any part of the world that might care.

And when a person runs for office, she has to take responsibility for her choices at a level in which most people are never required to take responsibility. Her family gets to be included in that.

Although not every campaign is a mudslinging nightmare, you can’t assume that yours will be the nice one. Or that your family will react well to the pressure to perform — even if you bend over backwards not to apply that pressure yourself.

SOMEWHAT aside, I think the whole microscope is sort of ridiculous. Why should only “perfect” people who have been ambitious since birth represent us in elected office? Being an effective advocate and having bad credit aren’t mutually exclusive. Being a good negotiator and being a philanderer aren’t mutually exclusive. Making occasionally dopey personal decisions doesn’t mean you will make dopey decisions that affect your community. Having friends who are radical or weird or out there doesn’t mean that the candidate shares those views or outlooks. And in a representative democracy, surely some of the representatives should include people as flawed and human as their constituents.

So far, though, that message doesn’t seem to be getting very far. (In fact, I’m having a sudden moment of not wanting to know what’s hidden in Mitt Romney’s taxes. I don’t want him to be President because I disagree with him on most issues of public policy, without regard to his financial circumstances.)

I DO want women to run for office.

Even with my own experience — and my occasionally aggressively imperfect choices, some explicitly intended to preclude running for office (freshman year of college, I’m looking at you!) — I’ve thought about it myself.

I will probably continue to think about it, although at this time, it seems like a choice likely, if at all, to be in the pattern of many women: after the kids are grown, possibly as a third career.

But I can’t say that fear of the campaign is a cop-out for women (or for anyone). I just can’t.

I hope that more women will take the plunge and run for office in spite of those fears.

Birth Control Pills are Not Just for “Sluts”

Ancient History, Current Affairs, Opinion, Personal 1 Response »

Mar 022012

Apparently the topic of women having safe, affordable access to birth control and other forms of health will just not die.

For a historical context of how insane it is that we are still having this conversation in 2012, see my former law professor Louise Trubek‘s New York Times op-ed yesterday, about her role in litigating this in 1957.

1957!

In 1983, two things happened to me that seem related. One I actively chose. The other one happened to me.

In health class, we had an assignment to write a research report. I don’t remember what the parameters of the assignment were,but I decided to write about different kinds of birth control. Mainly, I remember 2 things. The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective book, Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, was so chock full of good information that although it was the source for 90% of my information, the teacher gave me double credit for the work — 2 A’s for 1 report. And at the time, there was a “pill for men,” which was derived from cottonseed oil, being tested in China. (That was in Newsweek.)

Yes, I studied birth control options in my public school, and I kicked ass doing it.

Let me be perfectly clear: I was 13 years old. I had kissed one boy. That was the full extent of my sexual experience at the time, and for a good while after that. (Granted, we kissed a few times.)

The other thing was the thing that happened to me.

I suffered such severe menorrhagia that I began blacking out every time I stood up, or had to walk up stairs. No exaggeration. I would stand up, and my vision would go fuzzy and dark from the outside in; and, I usually had to clutch the handrail on the stairs, so that I wouldn’t collapse and fall down.

After 3 weeks, I was no longer able to hide what was going on from my mom, who took me to my first gynecological appointment. They gave me a massive dose of some kind of hormone to stop things, and told us that if I could not keep them down for 24 hours, I would have to be hospitalized.

14 hours later, at around 4 am, I threw up with the kind of drama that I can only describe as exorcisian. Mom rushed me to the hospital, where I got a blood transfusion, a lot of drugs, and finally the ability to stand without fainting.

And when I left the hospital, the doctor gave me a prescription for birth control pills. (And iron supplements.) The birth control pills were to make my body both menstruate, and STOP menstruating. On a regular, appropriate schedule.

I was no slut.

And the birth control pills I was on didn’t make me get sluttier, they didn’t make me have sex. But they did make my body work, they made me not need another blood transfusion, and they made me able to safely LIVE MY LIFE. You know, standing, sitting, walking up and down stairs — the basics. Concentrate on classes, conversations, not walking into traffic because I was no longer obsessing about whether or not I needed to rush to the bathroom, or in the alternative, die of embarassment — I’m not talking about anything too crazy.

I was lucky. My parents had good health insurance, and could afford my treatment and medications.

Everyone deserves the health care I had, although I really hope you don’t need it.

(Especially if you are a teenage girl.)

PS: I would have deserved that health care, and respect, even if I had been having sex. Even if I’d been having sex with every boy — and girl — I knew. I can tell you for damn sure, if I had gotten pregnant at 13, I would have had an abortion. I think we can all agree, 13 year olds should not become parents.

Talking with my 5 year old about relationships

2 Mom Family, The Real Live Boy 4 Responses »

Feb 022012

I had my first direct conversation about romantic relationships with Noah today. He’ll be 6 next week.

I really did not expect this. At least not yet.

The thing is, a very lovely girl in his class, we’ll call her NamelessGirl, has had a rather obvious crush on him for a couple of months. And he seems to have some of those kinds of feelings back, although he is a lot less willing to admit to them.

Three or 4 weeks ago, NamelessGirl totally mortified Noah, by playing “texting” (tapping on your hand with one finger and saying something about the person) and telling Noah that she thought he was handsome. He told Jill someone had told him the most terrible, awful, horrible thing anyone had ever said to him. With her heart in her stomach, she inquired, and he reluctantly admitted this story.

He also admitted to “texting” her that she was pretty. She was apparently not offended by this.

On Tuesday, he came home with a note in his coat pocket. From NamelessGirl. It is a crumpled, green, construction paper snowflake, apparently originally folded into a card. On the front, in pencil, it says, “Noah I love you” The inside is decorated with crayon snowflakes.

Tonight at bedtime, Josie announced that she was not going to marry Henderson, she was never going to get married. Then she asked Noah if he was going to marry a girl when he grew up. Hot with defensiveness, he fired back, “I DON’T KNOW!” and hid under the blankets. He emerged as I commented that most of the time, boys marry girls, but they don’t have to, and some boys marry other boys, and some girls marry other girls. “Like you and This Mommy!” I told them both they couldn’t get married until they were grown-ups, and they didn’t ever have to decide to marry anyone, then I changed the subject.

A few minutes later, after tucking Josie in, I lay down next to Noah. The look in my eye made him hide under the covers, peeking out with one fascinated eye.

“You know, it is ok to have funny, liking-feelings for a special person, either a boy or a girl, and most people do get those feelings sometimes.”

Hide.

“And it’s ok not to have them.”

Peek.

“You don’t have to talk about them if you don’t want to, but if you ever do want to, I promise I won’t laugh or tease you about them.”

Hide.

“There’s just one thing I think it is really important for you to know. Even if you don’t have those feelings about someone, if you know they have them about you, you have to be nice to them.”

Peek.

“We know that NamelessGirl has those kinds of feelings about you, right?”

Nod.

“Well, it is ok if you don’t have those feelings for her, or if you do. And it is ok for you to tell me, or not. But you have to be nice to her, ok?”

Hide.

“Ok.”

Long pause, in which I consider the lumpy pile of blankets, hiding my son.

“Can I ask you if you have those kinds of feelings for NamelessGirl?”

He half-shouts, “NO!!!” from under the blankets.

“Ok, sweetie. Goodnight. I love you.”

Noah’s head emerges from the blankets. “I love you, too, Mom.”

10 Percent

Healthy 2 Responses »

Jan 202012

I haven’t talked about it much online, although looking at my sparse posting here, apparently this is where I do almost ALL of my talking about it. I’ve been doing Weight Watchers online pretty seriously since September, and I hit a big milestone this week!

I have lost 10% of my body weight — 17.2 lbs. Actually, I lost 18 lbs, but both of those things happened at the same weigh-in. Ten percent!

That’s still more than my pre-pregnancy weight, and since Noah will be 6 in a few weeks, I think it is high time for my body to return to that state. And since when I got pregnant with Noah, I was right on the BMI borderline between “normal” and “overweight,” my long term goal is to land myself about 2/3 of the way down into the normal range.

I’m trying to set a few mini-goals on my 42:42 journey:

1) Pre-Pregnancy Weight: 150.

Aspiration: Reach this goal by 2/9/12

3) Down by 25 pounds: 147.

Aspiration: Reach this goal by 3/1/12

4) Three-fourths to Goal: 140.5 marks the 3/4 point on this journey.

Aspiration: Reach this goal by 4/5/12

5) 20% Lost: 137.5 means I will be 80% of the woman I was in August.

Apsiration: Reach this goal by 5/3/12

6) Last but not least, 130.

Aspiration: Reach and maintain this goal by 7/4/12: Independence Day!

Why 130?

A few reasons. That was my wedding weight, and I looked awesome at my wedding. 130 is also comfortably in the middle of the normal BMI range for my height. The range is 120-150. And 130 fits well with my turning 42 obsession with the number 42 — it seemed like “the answer.”

On the other hand, except for my wedding, I don’t remember when I last weighed 130. Law school? College? It may not be a realistic goal. If I keep exercising and eating healthfully on the WW plan, and I plateau before I reach 130, I’m not going to beat myself up over it. I’ll keep working towards that goal until the 42:42 game I’m playing is over — when I’m 43. At at that point, I hope I’ll have been hanging out at the same roughly 130 for 4-6 months, but wherever I am, I’ll re-evaluate and make sure I’m still making healthy choices as I move into 43.

Too Young for This

Ancient History 3 Responses »

Nov 022011

This morning, I found out that a man I know died. He died yesterday.

His name was Darin. We weren’t extremely close, but he was part of a group of friends that were an important part of my life in the 1990s.

Back then, Darin was first a student activist, and then worked for the University of Wisconsin’s statewide student lobbying organization, United Council. I’m pretty sure that he was also part of the group my friend Mindy, and probably other US Student Association activists and staff referred to as “the straight, white, guys from Wisconsin.”

From 1993-1998, and especially in the fall of 1995 and the summer of 1996 to spring of 1997, a LOT of my social life revolved around UC staff and USSA. We hung out a lot, excessively at a bar called the Echo Tap, and I came in dead last in the one and only football pool I’ve ever joined (although I think ultimately all that money went to guys from The Onion).

I learned to follow football games from these guys; before I started hanging out with the UC crew, I found the game completely bewildering and boring. And although I was probably closest to David, Sachin, Michelle, Tim, and Dean, who shared my political obsessions, Darin was always there if we had an event, or were watching a game, and he was often with us out drinking Uff Da Bock.

Like many of the UC staff, both from that era and otherwise, Darin remained politically active, stayed in Madison, and was working for the state. He was married. He was 40 years old. He had a son who was 3 years old — Josie’s age.

And yesterday, he collapsed while playing basketball with his friends. He was rushed to the hospital, but they weren’t able to revive him.

As Sachin put it when we talked this evening, go hug your kids, and make sure your life insurance is in order. You just never know what’s going to happen.

And if you are they praying type, pray for Darin, and especially for his widow, and his 3 year old son.

Discouraging and Encouraging Week

Academic Life, Personal No Responses »

Nov 012011

Last week was a roller-coaster here in the rough neighborhood of my mind.

On the one hand, although I did everything I was supposed to do on weight watchers, I was still up a pound. It feels very unfair to be super-careful with my eating, and to successfully exercise 5 days/week, but to gain instead of losing. I *know* I’m in this for the long-haul, I’m making healthy choices, and that the gain may involve building some muscle.

Logic and knowledge have nothing to do with my feelings about this.

But I haven’t given up, although I did miss 2 mornings of exercise in a row. There has been no massive gorge on Halloween candy — I’ve had a couple of pieces, but nothing outrageous. And I’ve gotten up the last 2 mornings, exercised, and gotten homework done in the early morning.

On the encouraging side, I had a FABULOUS IDEA that has completely reinvigorated my PhD work. I’m not going to try to explain it here, but in a nutshell, it involves a feminist and queer theory analysis of copyright law.

I promise, that makes more sense and is less boring than you might think. It was one of those ideas that propels you forward instantly, where you find yourself WIDE AWAKE after bedtime, excitedly looking for articles and reading until the wee hours.

And on that note, back to statistics.

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