Sex in the City: men, marriage Part II

from Ruth

The upcoming premiere of the Sex and the City movie got me thinking about the series (which I loved for the most part) and I find it really sad that a series like this that was supposed to portray single women as strong and independent, and that was groundbreaking in so many ways, still had to end its final season with all four women in relationships.

Even for a show that discussed just about every taboo subject in the book, it was considered too shocking to portray a woman who doesn't find "Mr. Right" yet still lives happily ever after. I just find it so disappointing that the show couldn't depict at least one "happy ending" that didn't involve a relationship with a man.

What's the moral then, "It's OK to be single and have fun for a while, but in the end you've got to settle down?" Just a sad commentary on how little our society has progressed on this issue.

Men, motherhood and marriage

from Julie, reacting to the lengthy ChoiceMoms discussion group thread about Choice Moms, marriage and the pressure to marry.

Reading this made me conjure up this image of a bunch of men blogging about caring for children on their own and trying to fit into society's standard of being married.

How silly the image! Men are just so different than women.......at least the ones I know.
I think a lot of these discussions about whether we should be married wouldn't exist if men were more nurturing. I don't think it's odd at all to not want a marriage if the one you are marrying is more work to care for than the child you are raising. The men in my life have been sorry excuses for role models. I don't really want to get married because I have yet to meet a man that would enhance my life more than he would drain me of my reserves. Who needs that? I'll raise my child by my own will, thank you very much.

This isn't to say I don't want that close and loving relationship with a man, but he needs to be someone who contributes to my well-being and I his.

I think our parents desire us to get married because it's just the only way they see life as a "normal" progression. They aren't taking into account the lifestyles of women these days. When our grandmothers were young women, they had three careers to choose from (nurse, teacher, prostitute:-), but now, women can run for President, among thousands of other career choices. So this entire concept is beyond foreign to them.

I think raising a child on my own is not a selfish endeavor. It is a biological urge that is hard-wired into my brain and I WILL NOT apologize for it. My reproductive rights are equal to all of the married people out there, happy or not.

Being married and staying married is no test of character.

Divorce on foot

I attended a conversation with three local historians last week that left me with several interesting morsels that have been rattling around in my brain since.

One of them talked about our tendency to think the past was somehow simpler and less complex than our intricate lives today. As example, she talked about how we tend not to notice that there was "divorce on foot" in past years. We know about the many widowed heads of families who ended up being single parents by default, but we tend to forget that many men headed West to explore and have adventures and try to find a new life -- often leaving behind wives and children in the East. In a time when divorce was unacceptable, it was a way to leave marriage behind.

I'm intending to do further research to learn more about how prevalent this might have been. To be sure, many of these men never took the step toward family life. But another interesting side comment the historian made was that many of the women's colleges and other female-oriented activities (including development of the settlement houses) that started in the East were partly a result of a lot of determined single women wanting to make something of their lives, some of them undoubtedly bypassing the lack of good marriage material in their midst.

Is today's Choice Mom much different?

Honoring Grandma

My grandma Jean died Monday, age 96. She was the only grandparent I ever knew, and a true matriarch in many ways. She raised her two kids alone, after her husband died in 1945 in a tragic accident, by putting herself through cosmetology school, setting up her own beauty shop, and staying focused on her kids, being frugal, and nurturing friendships.

In some ways, she was my Choice Mom model. Although her path was definitely not by choice, she actively decided not to bring a stepfather into her kids' life, and did not remarry until both kids were off on their own. She dedicated herself to doing what she needed in order to survive. She developed fun friendships that kept her balanced and lasted more than 50 years. Her one surviving friend Arline came to the cemetery, age 93, and joked to me that Jean, Harriet and Mary were waiting in heaven for her to join them as the fourth in their card games.

We were proud of the fact that we had opportunities for four-generation photos with the matriarchal line. From my mother down to my daughter, we share the middle name Jean, a strong-minded bent, and a love of travel and experiencing city entertainment. My daughter, at age 8, showed a great deal of patience with Grandma Jean's late-year crankiness -- kindred spirits in many ways as they were -- both loving pink, butterflies, nail polish, pretty jewelry and clothes, knick-knacks, just the right hairstyle. I consider it a gift, in fact, to have seen my daughter's tenderness with my grandmother in the last few months of her life.

My grandmother is the one whose ancient typewriter many years ago, when I was my daughter's age, launched my writing career. I used to write poems at grandma's house, when my mother was busy with concurrent college and nursing work. One I remember distinctly writing in the kitchen area of grandma's apartment was about "My mother the whirler." Not long thereafter grandma gave my parents the typewriter for me as a Christmas gift. They'd kept it hidden somewhere in the house, and I burst into tears when they brought it to me, I was so overjoyed with this first communication tool of my very own.

Grandma didn't understand computers, the Internet, websites. But her friend Arline loyally sent me a check in order to buy my "Choosing Single Motherhood" book when it came out. And my staunch Catholic grandmother, whose viewpoint was the only one I worried about when I announced my decision to become a Choice Mom in 1999, quickly reassured me that she thought it was perfectly fine for women to have kids on their own. That she knew I was always very independent and capable.

Much like she was. She lived on her own until she was 90, and even then moved into an independent-living facility until she fell at 94 and needed to go to a nursing home for care.

She was tired of living by then -- having lost three husbands, four sisters, and countless cousins and friends she kept faithful contact with over the years. But I saw the resolute twinkle in her eye on one of my last visits with her, when I teased her about yet another male admirer who apparently had taken a fancy to her in the home.

She was a grand lady -- quite able, as the priest pointed out, to remind people of what she needed. She was always meticulously dressed and made up. And more than anything, she was proud of family -- and is undoubtedly happier now that she is rejoined with so many people she has missed for so long.

Is Mr. Good Enough Okay?

For this Valentine's Day month, Choice Mom Lori Gottlieb pondered whether she actually was too picky, as critics like to suggest when women in their 30s cannot find a partner before it's time to raise kids.

You can read her views in Atlantic Monthly and hear her perspective on NPR.

When her essay link was posted on the Choice Mom discussion board, women quickly stepped up to disagree with her notion that settling for a business partner in household management and childrearing was the route to take. Of course, Lori herself is a romantic who does still want to fall deeply in love. And many thinkers who are afraid that becoming a mother first will preclude them from being a wife - or silent Choice Moms who might agree with Lori today that settling might have been the greener side of the pasture - will find her thoughts very interesting.

In 2005, also in the pages of Atlantic Monthly, Lori wrote about why settling for somebody isn't always better than nobody. But now, with the challenges of dating while parenting a toddler, she looks at her married friends and realizes that, "Marriage isn't a passion-fest. It's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business."

And as many of us know, couples with kids don't spend that much time together anyway.

"So if you rarely see your husband," she writes, "but he's a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own-how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?"

As readers of this sporadic blog know, I have had my own thoughts about what marriage means -- and why more women aren't choosing it before they have kids. Back in October 2007, I wrote here about how married moms I know are dismayed at the lack of household management help that actually comes from a mate, and that failing at that makes men seem less valid as a lifetime partner for an increasing number of women.

Lori's view in her essay is that being able to have help around the house is the major benefit to marriage, and that it should, indeed, become the major prerequisite to "settling" down with a partner. Dating with that view in mind, she says, might actually help more women find someone before they have kids, which requires babysitter money -- and a tremendous amount of effort simply getting beautified before the Big Night Out.

Just the day before I read Lori's essay, I was asked by a TV reporter if the Choice Mom trend meant that men were becoming insignificant. I stumbled in my answer, and realized later -- of course -- that the sound bite quote is, "Men who make great husbands and fathers are never insignificant. It's just that women are less in need of a husband and father who is not great, and today, if they have the financial and emotional security, they don't have to choose that option."

So I agree with Lori that dating tends to prime you for a passionate connection, but weddings and children tend to turn that relationship into more of a two-person job, with roles and responsibilities assigned and hopefully agreed upon so one of them doesn't decide to look for a different place of employment...and hurt the kids in the process.

But I also believe strongly that many of us don't actually need a partner to raise our children well, if that is our primary goal. We do need to deal with the stress of handling the job alone -- which, depending on temperaments and other distractions can be considerable -- but luckily it's a job with great benefits.

Recognizing signposts

I consider myself a pretty practical, if sometimes passionate person. I believe in using logic to make decisions. And I believe there is a kind of internal computer processing that needs to happen in order to spit out answers that are sometimes more complicated to reach.

Yet I also believe the universe sends signposts to help us, if we can train the internal eye to recognize them (or the non-cochlea inner ear to hear them, if that's how you see best).

In my case, sometime in my 30s, I began to trust that there was a kind of spiritual guidance rapping on my head. I can trace it back to a particular dream, on a particular vacation in the desert, in which my grandfather (deceased more than 40 years by then) came to visit me for a day...and for some reason told me his age. When I awoke with this very strong sense of the dream (I rarely paid attention to them otherwise), I checked family records and found that his age was accurate, had he still been alive that year.

It led to me write a story that turned into a major research project that turned into a novel that still sits in my drawer today, waiting for the day I feel smart enough to write it the way it needs to be.

Some years later, I returned to the novel in a space of creativity. Finding bits and pieces of random thoughts during the summer I was home on maternity leave with my first child. One day I was inspired to write a very detailed scene in which I was in a pub dancing and singing with my Irish ancestors. The next day, a random encounter with someone led to an odd comment he made that he sensed I had just been celebrating with family. Turns out he considers himself a psychic, and he said he was picking up this vibe from me. Again, it was something I wouldn't normally have laid stock in, other than the odd coincidence of it.

But flash forward a few years, and there have been a series of other oddities that catch my attention. The rare nightmare I woke up from at 6 a.m. in New York City on the 9/11, dreaming of dark-skinned men accosting me in an alley. Or thinking more recently, as I drove under a bridge with my son, about how awful it would be to be on or under a bridge if it fell -- and four days later, that very same Minneapolis bridge did.

Or, on a lighter note, the time I was poor and had been feeling disconnected for some time. On a lark, I entered a short story contest for the first time, and ended up winning the grand prize -- a round trip flight to Ireland. One afternoon there, still battling emptiness, I took a hike into the beautiful and endlessly deserted countryside, found a rock, sat quietly and felt a profound urge to say out loud that life was good, life was good, life was good. After that trip, my short story led to a novel that led to new friendships (and an agent) that has a tremendous amount to do with the strengths in my life today.

Much of our subconscious is bizarre and random and gives no particular message or roadmap that is of any use to us. But for the creative artist who finds inspiration that comes from an unseen place and moment....or the parent who senses unspoken concerns from his or her child that requires reaching in...or the minister or volunteer or teacher who heeds a calling...or the athlete or chef or copyeditor or mother who is supremely gifted at the work...it can sometimes be abundantly clear that there is a reservoir of "psyche" or "soul" or "angels" that surrounds us and can help to propel us. Others, more traditionally religious than I, would certainly call this inspiration from God or the Buddha master or Allah. In my case, even non-"New Agey" as I consider myself, I prefer to think of it as being aided by "spirit guides."

I do not give credit to any guardian angel for directing me or giving me my moments of inspiration, but I do believe they give signposts that might lead us down a particular path that we might not have noticed before.

I believe it is our willingness to listen, to notice, to pay attention -- and then make decisions based on what we learn -- that enables us to live mindfully and with satisfaction on our chosen pathways.

Healthy skepticism and the practicalities of daily life can certainly make it hard sometimes to notice signposts. And undoubtedly, when we are wrestling with issues above or below the surface, we might find ourselves "looking for a sign" that could then seem conveniently placed in our way. But I believe the subtle oddities of our subconscious, easy to sweep aside, are where some of the true inspiration, or the authentic messages, come from.

How is this relevant to the Choice Mom experience?

So many of us think and ponder and debate and wrestle with the logical issues that face us in deciding to take a solo journey as momentous as this one. Invariably, when our children come to us we cannot imagine why any of those things once mattered to us -- the logistical difficulties are far outweighed by the profound moments and precious snapshots of life that we get from our children.

So it is in all aspects of our lives. Sometimes we get clogged. Or we take a path that doesn't feel right but aren't sure if we should turn back. Or we mistrust our instincts and try to sidestep them with rationalization. Or we feel devoid of inspiration.

Looking back, it is the somewhat serendipitous encounters -- during travel, journaling, talking with someone new, reading, hearing an inspirational speaker or musician -- that can jump-start our process. And I think those are the times when we are open to heeding a message that is being delivered to us.

Really being able to listen is a skill we all have, even if we've temporarily forgotten how.

Most children are blessed with this ability. Have you ever had a child tell you the blunt, unspoken truth, or surprised you by asking a deep question you stopped trying to figure out yourself? Have you ever met a gifted or driven young adult who believes in the ability to get things done according to his or her vision? Does that sublime belief in the power of one's own strengths and curiosities and visions sometimes get lost when jobs and relationships and kids and household maintenance and bills crowd us?

Sometimes we live through our kids' beautiful confidences about their own creativity, and we become the happy observer of how another person's life is open to the possibilities.

We always need to regain some of that confidence for our adult selves. Life has many paths, every year of our lives. We need our visions and creativity to choose all of it mindfully. We can all surround ourselves with the people and moments we need to charge our lives when we decide to consciously and proactively find them. No, this doesn't mean going to match.com if you're looking for a partner (although that works for some). It means listening to the random woman on the bus who you might otherwise shut out. It means talking to the mechanic about life outside the auto body shop.

It means opening yourself up to the unusual messages we can get in ordinary life. And in so doing, we keep ourselves alert to paths we might not otherwise think we can learn from.

Mikki

More women not seeking marriage...

One of the questions I am commonly asked by those who are not yet familiar with the Choice Mom community is whether we're made up of women who find men irrelevant.

This is typically something I disagree with.

But lately I'm rethinking that position. In a way.

In the nuanced world, women can hold two seemingly opposite views at the same time: 1) Men are important and often great role models for our kids, and fun, affectionate partners; and 2) That doesn't mean that marriage is the right answer for many.

Critics might be quick to think women are "too picky," or "selfish," or "neglecting their child's needs" when they choose not to marry.

But it's indicative of the infamous double standard to think that all men are good marriage and fatherhood material...That there are plenty of good men to go around for our increasing numbers of well-educated, well-paid, well-balanced women who want to work AND raise a family...That a woman who is with a man who doesn't want to have kids, or play a role in raising them, must simply deal with that hand...That it is HER fault for not picking a better man in the first place.

How many times now have I seen a woman reamed online for daring to take this step without a partner. When Rachel Sarah wrote on the Washington Post blog about attempting to date as a single mother, she was blasted by those who labeled her an unfit mother. When Louise Sloan was interviewed recently on Salon for choosing to become a single mother, many posts flew back belittling her choice as a "rich woman's" selfish decision that inflicts pain and suffering on her child. (Others might blast her as a less-than-rich woman who has no business raising children on a single salary.)

Of course, online posts are not always an indicator of the pulse of society overall. It tends to be a haven for those who need to get things off their chest.

So it was with interest that I read a thread on my Choice Mom discussion board started from a woman who had suffered through many abusive relationships and had then made the decision to forego a partner in order to fulfill her dream of having a child.

In the outside world, she might well have been beaten up again for making "bad choices" in men -- with no regard for the fact that it was the men in her life who had been making the bad choices.

But on the discussion board, a wonderful thing happened. Women offered support and insight instead of derision and ridicule. Some messages urged counseling so that she could bring her future children into a world that did not feel threatened by men. Other women told their stories of how they felt weakened in relationships with particular men but had risen past that to build a happy family life, complete with male and female role models.

And then conversation started with some of the younger women on the board. I'd always been surprised to find so many women coming to my website and board who were in their 20s and early 30s, rather than those many women after the age of 35 who were deciding that motherhood required a solo step rather than the partnered one they'd imagined once upon a time.

I started listening to women of the "new generation" who were describing a societal shift that they felt a part of. One that did not dismiss men in general, but did not feel that they added to their lives in ways meaningful enough to sustain a long-term relationship. Many of these women (not all) were talking about needing a partner who would always be there for their child, in all ways, and deciding that they were too few and far between. Lesbians and heterosexuals alike were reporting their own views that parenting was simply too important to trust to everyone.

As Fiona, a 32-year-old woman (who gave me permission to reprint her comments here) wrote: "I couldn't agree more with your point that times have really changed. I currently have four friends around me who are also pursuing single motherhood by choice (all around my age). I didn't meet them through a single mother group. It just happens that we're all friends. I can't help but think we're experiencing a societal shift. These are extremely well educated and intelligent women who have not been able to find men who respect them or who are willing to share the load of a partnership. They are frustrated by the men they meet, even men with the same qualifications, who still expect that their wives will do most of the work. We haven't all spent 10-12 years in school to pick up after a man! Single motherhood is for most of us the ONLY decision. We haven't got here out of despair. It actually feels like the logical first choice. Put simply, men have not kept pace with women's societal progression and until they catch up they may be perceived as a burden to women who want a relationship based on equality and mutual respect."

Her views were echoed in an article I was recently asked to write about "how to raise sons to value women."

I interviewed a roundtable of mothers with young sons, most of them married. And it was a quite strong note that even those I had assembled who identified themselves as feminists (which we ultimately defined as simply valuing women as much as men) were surprised, and frustrated, to find themselves shouldering the bulk of household chores in a traditional way with their partners.

Most of their partners were strongly involved in the kids' lives, more so than many husbands. Many of them are close friends of mine, whose husbands I respect for being egalitarian and involved in many ways. Yet when it came to division of labor, many of the moms were concerned that they were modeling old traditions to their kids.

One woman I interviewed, whose 12-year-old son is highly aware of gender bias (he complained to the director that a line he had to say for a school play was sexist), indicated that despite all her efforts, she simply seems to care and notice housework chores more than her husband or son. Another engages her 3-year-old in "making breakfast" with his fake kitchen in the morning, which he enjoys, but realizes that her activist partner of 26 years continues to expect her to take care of house and cooking and this is something she's actively trying to correct before her son thinks it's the way things are.

Household chores are not the strongest measuring stick of our new values, I think, but seems to be an indicative dividing line between men and women.

The end view of a growing number of women, it seems, is that if a man is unable to share the workload at home as well as in the office, what's the point? Why teach our sons and daughters that women are primarily here to serve?

Another post on my board put it this way: "For my mother's generation, partners were necessary. Then they were preferred. Now they're optional."

Again, I don't personally think men are irrelevant. Nor do many Choice Moms I know. But there do seem to be a growing number of women who have changing views of how they should relate to each other in the home, with hopes that men will start to catch up to them on that view so that we can start re-coupling again.

Interesting stuff...