the shape of a family

My Mister and my girls, making Orange Juice in our kitchen

Recently I heard an interview on KPBS These Days with a couple of stay-at-home-dads. I only caught the tail end of the program, but as the wife to a mostly stay-at-home-dad, I desperately wanted to call in and discuss. Alas, I never made it to air, but it got me thinking about the traditional family structure, how so many of us in theatre ignore it, and how recent politics (think prop 8 ) have asked us if it even really matters anymore.

Last month I interviewed a guy for a bartending position at the Pub I manage and watched him slowly break down as he discussed why he was so desperately in need of a job. With two kids and a recent job loss, he was looking for anything to keep them afloat. “My wife had a great job, but I told her she needed to quit. I couldn’t take care of two kids! I need to provide!”

Wait.

So your wife has a full time gig with benefits AND you’re out of work, but you ask her to quit? Ultimately, after discussing this further, it came down to a matter of pride. In his world, it wasn’t OK for his wife to be the provider while he cared for their active kids. So, instead of hanging on to what they had (one full time job in this economy), he asked her to stay home while he hit the street to find a job fit for a man. One that could take months, if not years to find.

Um, I didn’t hire him. Not because the feminist in me was screaming (though she was very much ruffled) but because I knew this gig could not sustain his family & (if lucky) he’d soon be on to something that could. And I hate training people just to have them walk out the door.

It’s things like this that make me so happy to be in my marriage, with my Mister.

For our family, we’ve always been flexible and accommodating to the structural needs of our family as it stands right now. My Mister and I have traded places through the years, he carrying the full time gig while I stay home and nurse babies, me working outside the home full time while he drove kids to school and the park. It’s allowed us to grab onto the gig that is there, rather than the one that may show up later. It’s given us a unique perspective, knowing exactly what it’s like to be in the others shoes. But mostly, it’s allowed us to be the most fulfilled people AND parents we can be.

Working in the theatre allows this flexibility more than the average field, I suspect, though it’s not the most lucrative world in which to work. We’ve traded things for a lifestyle that allows us more time with our kids and while it can be sometimes difficult (I do like things, after all) I cannot imagine life another way.

How do you follow your family needs? Do you have a more “traditional” structure? Have you ever traded places with your partner? Where do you think the shape of a family is headed?

What really happens in fancy hotels

My Mister did a gig up at the Beverly Hilton this last week and on Friday I found someone to take the kids overnight so I could ride the train North to join him in LA.  I happen to love the train.  If we had better infrastructure around the train lines in Southern California, I’d take the damn things everywhere.  Even the train stations are sexy, as evidenced by my quick capture of Union Station, one of the sexiest of the bunch.  Of course, getting from Union Station to Beverly Hills was ridiculous (lack of infrastructure, indeed).  And riding the metro in LA left me wondering why, WHY! would any self-respecting teenager feather his hair?  The 80′s style had few redeeming qualities and I promise you that feathered hair was NOT one of them.  It was all I could do not to take a photo of this kid, show it to him and then demand an explanation.

But I digress.

I did, after all, promise to tell you what really happens in fancy hotels.

Once we finally found each other and, due to LA traffic, missed our drinks date with a local friend from college, the Mister and I took ourselves out for sushi.  Then back to the hotel to check on the concert (The Spazmatics, who were doing 80′s cover music without anyone on keys… seriously) and then up to our room where we… promptly fell asleep.  I think my rocking 20′s are over.

The next morning?  After sleeping in we did this:

Babies R Us?

NPR took on one of our favorite subjects this morning. Here’s the tag:

Is the Workplace the New Babies R Us? Parents with newborns often face a stressful situation when it comes to work. For new mothers in particular, returning to work can mean a wrenching decision to leave a new baby in daycare or with friends or family. A small but growing number of companies are allowing – even encouraging – parents to bring their babies to work.

It’s a nice little spotlight on a big, big issue. Thanks, NPR.

But one small question… Why Babies R Us? Is that cute? Is it clever? 

I’ll be even happier when a major news outlet can address the issues facing the massive ranks of working parents minus the reductionist headline. Or at least without suggesting to the business world that their offices might get turned into color-coded superstore aisles filled with commerce-crazed moms and their toy-crazed toddlers. 

Is that just me?

Flying with(out) an infant

I just spent the weekend in Boston with my brother. And for the first time since August of 2007, I flew by myself.  No stroller. No liquid Tylenol. No origami frogs. No kid. I fully expected to read on the plane,  but there were a few things that took me by surprise.

1) Waiting in line is boring. 

2) Cinnabon is just…Cinnabon. It’s not a potential time bomb requiring that you whip out the graphing calculator and plot blood sugar level over time in relationship to boarding, taxi and take off.

3) I didn’t miss my baby. At all. 

Not only did I read on the plane, I wrote on the plane. I had ideas on the plane. I daydreamed on the plane.

Here’s my question for all of you, parents or no. Is solitude a crucial part of your creative process? When you haven’t had time to yourself for, oh, say…about 19 months…does that affect your ability to generate ideas?

On Gratitude and Compensation

When I posted last week about parenting and theatre, Lisel, Elaine and JBG all chimed in, and their comments reminded me of one very good reason why the theatre mommies of the world aren’t marching in the streets for on-site childcare and better hours. 

We have very little to bargain with.   

As a freelance artist, if you don’t want to work for a company because you’re holding out for a better or different reward, that may very well be your loss. Someone else will. 

The American theatre exists in its current form because of people who are willing to work for free or for a pittance. Some folks are happy to donate their time to something they love. We hear a lot that “we aren’t doing this to get rich.” (And isn’t that the truth!)  Other folks think of themselves as resume building, or putting in their time, looking forward to the point at which they break through to another level of theatre and start making a living wage. 

And some folks do. It’s a complicated ecosystem. There are a number of companies that can pay people enough to live on. And there are many companies that can’t. In the gray area between, there are companies that pay some folks a real salary and other folks gas money. And there are freelance paychecks that are enough if a freelance artist can just get enough of them.  

The whole system is based on a numerical imbalance between the number of artistic jobs and the number of people who want them. Actors are a dime a dozen. You’ve heard that. It probably isn’t really true. But…people who want to be actors certainly are a dime a dozen. If you don’t want it, fine. Somebody else will.  

Sometimes the work itself becomes a commodity. Opportunities and titles can make a little bit of money go further.  At MOXIE the paycheck is padded with childcare, flexibility and the privilege to bring our kids to work. That’s why I’ve talked so much about the pleasure of sharing my work with my baby. 

However, my total adoration for my son and appreciation of time spent with him shouldn’t make it sound like I stay home because I want to. In actuality, I stay home because I can’t afford not to. I’ve had two jobs in the last year that paid me enough to cover my childcare expenses. One of them was as a stage manager, which income is negotiated by my union, Actor’s Equity Association.

As a director, I have often received the signal that I’m lucky to have the work at all, let alone any crazy perks like health insurance. How can I even start talking about child care?  It’s so expensive and difficult to execute the production, that if a producing organization commits to this Herculean effort, I’d have to be crazy to ask for any additional reward. Take it or leave it.  

But if it’s my privilege to do the work, then doesn’t that mean that theatre is a hobby?   This makes the whole professional vs community theatre distinction a little less clear.  And this is why, as JBG suggested, so many of us leave the theatre, or leave and come back and leave and come back.  

So, what should we be asking for?

This is all a case for bringing back the craftsman guilds from the Middle Ages. I’d really like to be able wear a belt that tells you how good I am at my job, based on the assessment of my peers. Because as long as the value of the artist remains subjective, putting in your time comes with no guarantees, and theatre artists will continue to take what we’re given.

The breastfeeding majority

The last week of conversations has me looking at just about everything through a lens of “normal” and “not normal.” This has to do with our next show, The Butcher of Baraboo, in which a Midwestern family practically becomes a circus act trying to contain their lively collection of skeletons. I’m fascinated by the way that the women of Baraboo, as well as women closer to home (at least the one sitting in this home) seem to sort the behavior of our sisters and friends into “okay,” “okay for her but not for me,” and “not okay at all.”  At least, that’s what we’d like to be doing. What I’m afraid of is that the last two categories have a very messy overlap.

A week or so ago I posted an article to my Facebook page called “The Case Against Breastfeeding.”

I should tell you that on the spectrum of American moms, I’m pretty far to the granola. I give birth at home, I didn’t circumcise, and my 19-month-old is still nursing. I’m looking forward to a tandem breastfeeding adventure when my second child is born sometime in May.

But I appreciated this article.

It was written by Hanna Rosin, whom I follow on the XX Factor blog at Slate Magazine. (She’s the one who did this stunt where she and her husband spent the whole day no more than fifteen feet apart, which I totally want to try.)  

In my opinion, and I think this is often true in this world of high impact page headers, the headline doesn’t accurately represent the article.  The actual text was about what I might call the breastfeeding mandate: the power of the collective to make you feel bad if you don’t “do the right thing for your baby,” or if, for some reason, you can’t.  Like, for example, maybe you’re a man.

Okay…no, the article didn’t shout out to male caregivers, that was extrapolation, but it did address the difficulty moms in some circles might feel in actually hearing their own voices over the sound of the collective breast pump.

I think conversations like that are important. I think that debunking absolutism can only help those of us who do want to breastfeed, especially those of us who want to breastfeed our two-year-olds in public, since some find that behavior teetering out of “okay for her but not for me,” and maybe headed for “not okay at all.”  I think that the more we recognize that babies thrive when they are cared for, and that parents are qualified to make informed decisions about how to care for babies, the more of a chance we have of spotting the things that really hurt kids, like poverty, violence and abandonment.

But now I’ve gotten a couple of emails regarding this “attack” on mother’s milk. I’m hearing a call to rise up and defend breastfeeding (as if we aren’t the majority), and it’s making me feel guilty about supporting the other side. 

Is it too much to hope that we can have a dialogue about empowered choices AND also be supportive of breastfeeding?  Or is this desire to empower female and male agency in early parenting just feeding the culture wars?  

Society and the Single Girl

Since I’m thinking about families again today, I’m moving up this comment by Jo Anne from a post about love. This is MOXIE Theatre’s Managing Director:

I have been experiencing the “do you have a boyfriend?” question when I go home to Texas since I was 19. Now it’s morphed into “are you married?” or “do you have a family?”

To which I used to give a meek, head down, “no, not right now,” which then became a defiant, confident “Nope” – loaded with all of the “and I’m perfectly happy that way, thank you very much, so please get off my back” that I could fit into that little word.

But, the best part was always the look of thinly veiled suspicion and pity that followed. Always leaving with that “wow, I’m a freak” feeling.

And, I think your point about that push/pull that happens between trying to assure ourselves that we are ok, and reconciling that with the fact that we really would LIKE to have a partner, is such a valid one.

I’ve often wondered what the solution is to feeling not quite right about being single. How do we let it be TRULY ok to be single – giving AS MUCH value to that life experience – as we do to families? Even in MOXIE – our emphasis is on supporting families – with very little outright validation to the single person. Not that I would necessariy change that – I think this is part of our purpose on this earth. I just have often wondered how, as a society, we could make change that gives value to the individual, even unpartnered. I’m not sure what that is, but I just wonder if we’d feel more comfortable and easy in our search for a partner, if we didn’t feel like there really would be something WRONG with going through life single. 

At yesterday’s design meeting for The Butcher of Baraboo, we discussed the violence that can be done to an individual by a group. A community (which is, of course, made up of individuals, and that’s where the theatre comes in) sometimes invalidates characteristics of an individual that threaten the values of the group.   This happens in conservative communities. And it happens in liberal ones.  See Noelle’s comment on the “normal” post for a personal example of liberal outsider-shaming. 

Is offering “support” to our singles another way to shame people into conforming, potentially at their expense?   And if so, how do we let it be “TRULY okay to be single?”

Feminist Theatre Mommy Blogging

I couldn’t help but wonder today, as Nick and I were cheering for Milo as he put small scraps of wood from the rapidly disappearing Sugar Syndrome set into the big plastic trash can at the edge of the stage…

Are there any other theatre companies at which an 18 month old gets to help with strike? And I don’t mean sitting in the house with mommy. I mean he actually helped.

Are there any other toddler moms who think it is good training to teach their toddlers to safely navigate a theatre full of big people breaking up masonite and hauling platforms?  

I know there are. 

Milo doesn’t think any of it is terribly odd. His day was a lot like any other day. The greatest trauma of the afternoon was over a stolen cookie, which he knew perfectly well was out of bounds. His biggest complaint was about the “noy” (that’s”noise”), from a binding screw gun, which is exactly what he says when I bring out the vacuum cleaner. And the sweetest moments of his day were of communion and communication with his loving parents and guardians and grown-up friends.

At MOXIE we’re more aware of our limitations than we used to be. We didn’t have kids at load in for this show. We learned on Bleeding Kansas that having all four of the under-five set running around is nothing less than annoying. And I personally have had to deal with the realization that sometimes my kid just isn’t up for it. Maybe it’s teething. Maybe it’s stranger anxiety or a burst of clingyness. In cases like that, both of us have to compromise. But we keep figuring out a way to get it done.

For the last few days I’ve been searching the blogosphere for MOXIE’s peers. We don’t have a list of links in the sidebar right now. I believe that this is not only bad blog form, but also a failure to participate fully in the culture of blogging. But I’m having a hard time knowing who to link. It isn’t a shortage of deserving blogs. There are hundreds of blogs that interest one or another of us in important ways. There are the political blogs, the theatre blogs, the feminist blogs, and the mommy blogs. And there are many blogs that combine one or another of those interests. Lots of mommy blogs talk about feminism. Lots of theatre blogs dabble in politics. What we can’t find is the conversation about theatre and parenting. 

Delicia and I were just chatting today about the phenomenon of invisible moms in the theatre. How is it that some people still think it is impossible for theatre people to have kids when so many of us have done it? The greatest obstacle for parents in the theatre is the bizarre myth that we don’t exist. If we don’t exist, then there never need to be provisions made for us. There will never need to be daycare at the theatre. There will never need to be a business model that supports artists who don’t want to travel. There will never need to be rehearsal schedules that allow us to be home in time for dinner. 

I participate in a couple of blog-universes. There are regular commenters who share passionate interest in certain issues, who may or may not ever meet each other face to face. We use the blogosphere to make our individual voices louder, by grouping them together. We learn that there are others who feel the same way, and we combine our forces towards the possibility of change. 

Are there other people in cyberspace who want to talk about parenthood in the theatre? Or theatre via parenting?  If you know of any, send them our way. We’ll link them. We’ll write about them. We’ll try to make the sea of invisible theatre artist parents into something more like a family.

Actually, I Owe MOXIE a Play Two Weeks From Yesterday, or Mighty Mouse vs the Ten Excuses

The following are intended to rebut the ten creativity-smothering excuses I posted yesterday. If you haven’t read them, do that first.

1) Pregnancy equals fertility equals creativity. And my left brain is too tired to muster significant resistance. It’s a great time to write a play.

2) My last play wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. In fact, I really liked the part where the one girl said “Hi,” and then the other girl said, “Hi,” too. … Right? … No? … Maybe you had to be there.

3) I don’t need my neck for writing. This is actually one of the great advantages to writing as an occupation. At least, I can’t think of very many others.

4) Just what do I think I’m going to do over my morning coffee, restructure AIG? Rewrite the budget bill? Give Hillary Clinton some useful tips regarding political discourse?

5) I am selfish. Trying to get other people to make me feel less selfish is really selfish. To be human is to be selfish. It’s hard to be human, don’t you think? We should make some art about that.

6) Two words for the phone call excuse. Time. Management. Am I pretending that I’m not a stage manager?

7) Am I pretending that I have something to say to you?

8 ) I have Jen Thorn to thank for finding out that picky Penny doesn’t prefer her veggies home-cooked. One fewer reason to feel bad about yourselves, fellow parental units.

9) It’s true. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has already been written. But it doesn’t have a dragon in it. Or two girls that just say, “Hi.” Or the internet.

10) On fear, and why we do it anyway.

I Owe MOXIE a Play Today, or Ten Excuses

I enthusiastically helped arrange an in-process table read for Jen Thorn’s play more than a month ago. I check in with Amy Chini about the status of her play(s) almost every time I see her. Meanwhile, my own project, Annabelle and the Dragon, is half-drowned in excuses.

Top these, dear ones.

1) I’m pregnant.

2) My last play wasn’t as good as I think it should have been.

3) My neck hurts.

4) Every time I open my computer I am reminded of twelve dozen things that are more important than me, like AIG, and rape as a weapon of war, and the expanding federal deficit, and the fact that another one of my friends just got laid off, and Kathleen Sebelius, and whether or not Hillary can do even a little bit of good in the Middle East.

5) Writing makes me feel selfish.

6) I really need to call Jacob. And Janet. And Emily. And…

7) You need me to call you.  Don’t you?

8 ) My toddler should eat more vegetables.

9) Someone has already written a play that’s better than the one I’m currently not writing.

10) It takes a long time to write a play. What if this one is like a really annoying acquaintance and I get sick of it after a couple of weeks but it keeps inviting me to come over and watch reruns of, like, Bugs Bunny, and I feel that I can’t say no because I made a commitment even though one of the things I fear most in the world is that I’m going to be zoned out in front of somebody’s TV, with my mouth hanging open, just a little, while a king crab nonchalantly walks into the Pacific Ocean with my life?