The kid just threw up. And this is why we need universal paid parental leave.
No really.
The kid just threw up, and his preschool has a 24-hours-without-vomiting rule. Which means he can’t go to his (long) day of preschool tomorrow. Which means I lose 6 of my weekly 10 work hours this week. Because I have to stay home with the kid.1
Why?
I, being self-employed, don’t get any paid leave, so there’s no scrimping needed there2, whereas we’re saving every minute of The Man’s paid time off we can for after the baby comes.3 So he can’t take tomorrow off (not even for a half day) as he used to do regularly when the Boychick was sick.
Just one tiny example from a relatively-privileged family, but still: my kid threw up, and this is why we need universal paid parental leave.
- No, I can’t work while he’s home, even if I plant him in front of the TV. Ariel Gore wrote about distractability in How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: when we can be distracted or interrupted, even if we’re not, we cannot really focus. Maybe not true for everyone, but absolutely true for me. This is yet another reason I do most of my writing at night, at the cost of my sleep (and thus why I’ve been doing so little writing recently, because sleep is, at this stage of pregnancy, far less sacrificeable). ↩
- And not having a salary or a direct dollar-per-hour payback for my work — and, really, not getting paid much/anything for my work at the moment at all — it’s a lot easier on the budget to sacrifice my hours than his. This is not normally something we pay attention to, but when we’re trying to buy a house, pay the midwife, and save for the babymoon? Yeah, it does matter. ↩
- And it still won’t be enough. With him having a “really great” salaried position, he’ll be able to go 40 hours in the hole on PTO, which means he’ll probably be paid for about 2 weeks off. And if we can, we’ll take another 2 off unpaid. I know to be able to do so, even potentially, is a sign we’re fucking privileged. But it’s still criminal that a new parent gets so little time. ↩
100th post, and a call to de-lurk
So, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I have this slight streak of perfectionism, combined with a
crazy voicemental illness that likes to pick up and run with any slight hesitations or doubts that I might have, thereby leaving me paralyzed and unable to do so much as “any” much less “good enough” because then it wouldn’t be “perfect”.Plus, we seem to have a virus, possibly of the porcine variety.
So, I say fuck that shit. Perfection is the enemy of good enough, so I’m going to cough and hack and spit in its general direction until it’s soaking the sheets in bed, addled by fever enough that it can’t block me from just putting up a damn post already, even if said post sort of sucks.
When I started this blog, well, I didn’t start it. I had the fabulous idea that Someone Should write a blog about the experience of being a feminist raising a boy child (little knowing that, um, it ain’t exactly a new idea), and came up with a catchy title for it, and went and registered it on Blogger. And did nothing.
Did I mention the perfectionism -> paralysis thing?
It wasn’t until a kick-ass writer friend of mine started her own fab (if under-updated) blog that I mentioned my idea to her, and she triple-dog-dared (ordered, actually) me to start posting to it, at which time I, snowed in (in Portland!) and with nothing better to do, put up an introductory post that set the bar so damn low that even I, tied up by perfectionism’s tendrils of doubt and self-flagellation, could trip over it.
Then I remembered a post I’d written elsewhere and put that up*, because I thought it was worth saving, and then wrote a fair amount of filler crap, and a couple interesting (if somewhat straw-based) posts, and got caught by the bug. I was going to Blog, give it the good college try (is this the right place to mention I’ve tried college no less than four times and have yet to graduate?), publish posts
dailyevery two out of three daysevery other dayfrequently(ish).And here we are.
I’m still just starting. I still swear I’m going to prune down my label list, make my own WordPress theme, buy a domain, and move the blog somewhere prettier and more functional. I still know I have so damn much to learn about my own privilege and prejudices, and needless to say I still have at least 90% left to go in this high-intensity-parenting gig.
But 100 posts? A sizable chunk of which are actually worth reading? That’s pretty cool.
So come celebrate with me. Leave a present: a comment, saying anything, just letting me know you read here, regularly or occasionally. Let me know what you like about the blog, let me know what you want to see in the future, say congrats or good job or keep trying. I know I’m crap at responding to comments, but I read every one, usually about 20 times. So drop a line. It’ll be your good deed for the day.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go down some C and snuggle in bed with perfectionism. We’re both pretty miserable.
*Some of these posts contain language and comparisons I wouldn’t use now, like putting “bad mother” on par with “the n word” (both because, dude, so not in the same league, and because competing oppressions against each other is always a no-win enterprise). Entering the blogosphere, both in reading other blogs and writing out my own thoughts, has been educational and a growing experience in ways I had never anticipated, and that’s a large part of what has kept me going**.
**The rest, of course, being comments from readers, nudge nudge.