This is a coda to my post yesterday, "Abortion Changes You."
A discussion of how much American women are forced to pay economically for making the choice to become parents. A dark look, through the eyes of author Andre Dubus III, at how struggling single working moms are forced to balance work and taking care of their kids.
And recalling pre-Reagan days, more family-friendly days, when a family with children could flourish with only one parent working.
Parenthood has become extremely costly, especially in a nation like the United States, a nation extremely hostile to families and family life.
Also, in non-family friendly America, having children adds greatly to family expenses because so many Americans are without access to adequate health care.
Furthermore, American women are excessively penalized for having children and taking responsibility for them.
It is extremely difficult and costly to pay for childcare -- even though childcare workers, another segment of society enormously despised in this nation, are poorly paid -- for working mothers earning for the most part poverty or near-poverty wages.
Working women with children endanger their careers and their incomes when they are forced to take off work time to take care of sick children. Working women with children are passed over for promotions and salary increases because it is assumed that they will be poor workers because of their obligations to their children.
Andre Dubus III has just published a new novel, The Garden of Last Days, which offers a dark picture of single working moms trying to responsibly take care of their kids:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
One of the main characters is a stripper and single mother, who because of child-care problems, winds up bringing her 3-year-old daughter to work on the evening of Sept. 10th. Another is a terrorist, a young Saudi man, who blows through thousands of dollars bolting down Cognac and Champagne, demanding dances and, in a way, trying to buy intimacy.... Mr. Dubus, who lives in Newbury, Mass., north of Boston, began by interviewing Kerrie Clapp, a Massachusetts stripper introduced to him by a friend who was writing a book about sex workers. "I took her to lunch in Harvard Square, and for about three hours she told me about the life," he said. "I learned all this stuff I never knew. No one pays the dancers, for example. They pay the clubs to work there. Their hustling pays for the whole operation — the D.J.’s, the bouncers. That was also when I began to get the idea that there were really two kinds of strippers... I learned about the house mom, usually an older stripper who kind of looks after the others and sometimes watches the dancers’ kids."
He added: "Kids. That was a real revelation, and I distinctly remember writing it down. The idea that one of these women might bring a kid to the club became a real engine for the book."
Strange how fiction displays some really raw truths about the plight of working moms.
There has been an enormous change in the status of families in this nation.
Being ancient, having existed in the days before Reagan and the beginning of The War Against the Middle Class, I remember what it was like to have the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom, of being able to be there for my kids, because our family was able to feed, shelter and provide healthcare for the entire family on just one income.
Now parents are forced to struggle by holding down two, if not not three, jobs each, in order to barely survive. Children no longer have the luxury of having a parent there to greet them when they get home from school, a parent who is not exhausted by long days of work.