It’s a Girl

So my favorite Oregonian food writer, Leslie Cole, did an article recently about people trying to get off the grid, getting back to nature, growing their own food, keeping chickens, spending more time with their families, yada yada yada. If this sounds like retro hippiedom, well, it is. But now, as an old-school activity decked out in trendy millennial clothing, it’s got a much edgier name: radical homemaking.

Radical in the sense that getting off the corporate treadmill, saying no to the big American bucks, and choosing to take the slow lane are radical, at least by current go-go standards. Not so radical, however, is the model offered for emulation: mom quits day job, stays home to raise her kids. So maybe an apron is more comfy than pantyhose, but work is still work. And guess what? Nobody pays you to stay home with the kids.

Granted, the new book Cole was writing about — the one called Radical Homemaking, natch — includes profiles of radical-homemaking men. But Cole only profiled three Portland moms, no dads. None of these moms — two writers and a landscape architect — came from what you would call corporate-ladder backgrounds, so their choices to “go radical” aren’t exactly that. And all of them have husbands who bring home the regular-paycheck bacon.

Here’s what the article really missed: All of these “radical homemakers” are busy trying to turn their thriftiness, their clever craftsy homemaking skills, into new careers. In other words, they’re mompreneurs. They’re not just housewives; they’re housewives trying to get people to pay them money to write and talk about being housewives. (Cole’s interviewees are a freelance writer who frequently writes about herself and her lifestyle choices, a cooking teacher who teaches other people how to live the way she does, and a manager of a farmers’ market.) In other words, they’re meta-moms.

Not that toiling housewives should go unsung, of course. But to pretend that a) what they’re doing is different from housewifery, and that b) they’re not trying to turn old-fashioned housewifery into a new kind of paid career, is, well, a neat bit of legerdemain.

It’s not much different from what Newsweek books writer Jennie Yabroff did in her recent lambaste of food memoirs. Like Cole, Yabroff started out well, swinging punches against traditional ideas of gender roles and satisfactions, taking down female memoirists for equating food with love and male memoirists for equating food with sex. But then Yabroff held up a lone memoir as a model for the New Woman to emulate: Dalia Jurgensen’s Spiced.

Spiced, in Yabroff’s estimation, is a genre-busting book because it’s by a female chef (a rare bird indeed) that acknowledges the macho world of chefdom without succumbing to weepy feminine sentimentality. But Yabroff ignores the invisible line in the professional-cooking world: the one dotted between chefs (generally male) and pastry chefs (often female, including Jurgensen). Is that line sugary or salty? Yabroff is too busy applauding Jurgensen for being a female chef (not like those poseur amateurs Ruth Reichl and Kim Severson) to notice that Jurgensen is still making female choices in her career.

Now, a buncha stay-at-home dads wielding chef’s knives and clogs and bonding with their kids while prepping dinner? That’s radical.

Right after my college graduation, a dozen-odd years ago, I flipped through the book on my dad’s nightstand: Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions. I’d seen him snickering at it, and occasionally sniffling, and wondered what was up.

First published in the early 1990s, the book — now a classic of the memoir/parenting/spiritual-journey subgenres — is nothing more than a journal kept by Lamott during her son’s first year. (These days, of course, she would’ve kept a blog.) I laughed at a few passages — the cat’s disgust with the new baby, or the inevitable adult comparisons of the oblivious tot to, say, a drug addict (loving the playground swing waaaay too much) or a dog (a drooling St. Bernard). The book alternated between caustic humor and tearful poignancy. I could see why my dad enjoyed it. And then I forgot about it.

Until, of course, I found myself having a baby at about the same age Lamott did, and decided it would be worth a second look. Yes, the book is still funny, and still weepy. But this time around, I found myself first nodding in agreement with the book, and then shaking my head in disbelief.

Here’s the line that made me nod:

One of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

Well, this wasn’t news to me — I suspect that everyone has these problems, whether or not they have children. What was new was the sense of validation this passage suggested, a big OK to all those parents who are still whiplashed every day by the emotions, good and bad, of raising kids.

Not everyone is willing to admit this in public, however. Today, in the course of a casual chat with a neighbor, he asked, rhetorically, if Delphine didn’t make us just the happiest. “Well, yes and no,” I answered. “It’s more like life gets more extreme — in both directions.” He seemed confused by this. Babies, in our culture, are supposed to provide endless bliss — at least until they become surly teens, or so the stereotype goes. So I was bucking his expectations. But I was also confused by him, since his little family consists of himself, his wife, and their 13-year-old daughter, who has Down syndrome. Maybe brokenness and rage never happened for him, but I doubt it. So more power to Lamott for having the guts to say Yes, your life is upended, and No, you are not a bad parent for feeling like a seesaw every day.

My head started to shake, however, when Lamott revealed both the numbers behind her single-parent money worries and her coping strategy for them. For the first few months after her baby was born, she lived off of her savings and a single regular freelancing assignment: writing a monthly food review for California magazine that paid $1,000 a pop. “I am grateful for the easy money, but I need $1,500 a month more to get by,” she writes. How to get more money? Well, as a devout, albeit funky, believer, she chooses the classic Christian passive: sitting by the phone, waiting for someone to call and save her.

Let’s see. First, she has to write one restaurant review a month, for which she earns $1,000. Remember, kids, this is 1989. 1989. I don’t know what freelancing rates or the cost of living were 21 years ago, but $1,000 for a single review these days is pretty swish, and $1,000 per month, while slim, is still doable for a single person.

Second, her stated minimum-necessary income, per month, is $2,500. Well, our little family has twice as many adults as hers, and we do just fine — 21 years later, remember — on less income per person. Perhaps we’ve just become inured to wage stagnation, along with everybody else in the dwindling middle class. (Keep in mind, too, that Lamott pays her daily babysitter seven bucks an hour. We have friends who still pay their sitter seven bucks an hour.)

Third, her waiting-by-the-phone tactic actually pays off: the phone rings and an editor offers her a book column at twice her restaurant rate, or $2,000 a month. Was it God, or the fact that she was already a well-known author? Either way, now she’s making $3,000 a month, or $1,500 per article. Nice work, as they say, if you can get it.

What killed me, though, was the fact that Lamott — a foul-mouthed, Republican-bashing, gay-loving, in-your-face militant feminist — didn’t even negotiate. The phone rang, and she simply said Gosh, thanks, yes, I’m so grateful. Not, “Oh, two thousand dollars is a little low, could you bump it up by a thou?” Wage stagnation, indeed. This is how feminism dies, I guess.

So which planet was Lamott living on? The planet of speaking truth to power, of ripping open the pretty packages we wrap around parenthood? Or the planet of warm fuzzies and happy endings, in which writers suffer a lot but don’t really have to work very hard, babies drive you crazy for three months and then turn into precocious little angels, and friends get cancer but hey, God is cool?

Delphine hit the big one-oh a few weeks ago, on Sunday, March 21. We had planned a party for her in Cambridge, but then, well, our plans got rejiggered, and we ended up just having a little party for her here at home.

She had all the important stuff: loving guests, a pretty party dress, cards and presents, and chocolate cake (the cake I grew up eating at every family birthday, the cake my sister loved so much she made a movie about it in college) with a lone orange candle on top.

This last was a bit of a challenge, since we couldn’t find the box of well-used fluorescent candles for a while. “How hard can it be?” asked Caleb. “She only needs one.”

Next year, maybe we’ll add in balloons.