May 21, 2012

Stay at home dads: logical choices

Recent discussions about money, higher-earners and expectations, external and internal to the relevant family members, has conveniently coincided with the point in time where we start talking about trajectories for the future.

I was fascinated, and disturbed to see, value judgments still being passed on choices like whether dads should stay at home with the kids. I completely understand having a strong personal preference one way or the other, but I’m not a fan of declaring one way right or wrong when harm isn’t being done in the pursuit of building and rearing a family.

I wandered into a parenting forum that disgusted and outraged me on the subject. One woman was stomping all over the thread (population: single dads/stay at home dads/dads being the primary caretakers for other reasons) telling all the posters that they were second class citizens, the second but worst choice, that they were harming their children by choosing to be home with them instead of leaving them with the women in their lives, because “women are naturally better at caring for children”. Her claim was that at childbirth, women are gifted with the skills and a level of cognition that men can never achieve, so men are bumbling incompetents apt to do more harm than good interfering with the women’s right to raise the children.

In this day and age, that was difficult to see.

When people are constantly decrying the deadbeat dad, the detached dad, the long-gone dad, how on earth does someone have the gall to decry those men who are choosing their children over their career or choosing to make their career work with their children as the first priority? And what about those situations where the mothers/females are not in the children’s lives because they simply cannot be or choose not to be?

I can tell you this much: giving birth to a child means you are capable of giving birth. I have never in my anecdotal experience of seeing dozens of cousins, first, second and third degree, and coworkers, have children, seen it confer any level of parenting expertise that outmatched anyone else’s if that person didn’t have a brain to begin with and resources to coach them. I say this from having learnt how to care for three children alone, a toddler and two infants, while their idiot mother swanned off for several hours to hang out. Because she figured a seven year old was appropriate childcare for her 3 kids under the age of three. And from watching more than one coworker smoke and drink her way through pregnancy and then wonder why her kid was on a respirator at birth.

So what makes the “choice” more or less “ok”? If it’s not a choice and one has to be forced into the situation due to unemployment, disability, or other circumstances beyond one’s control?

That was the situation my relatives found themselves in: the husband was becoming obsolete in his field due to rapid technology changes and the cost of staying up to date was beyond their means. With the kids, it made sense for the dad to stay home with them. Yes, they were poor but they weren’t latchkey kids. And for all I know, that could have been the choice that saved our family from eventual meltdown.

Good friends of ours consciously made that choice. Dad could have kept a horrible commute to make more money but his wife made good enough money for their household and it was better for their peace of mind to always have Dad with the young ones rather than babysitting with family (which meant no rules!) when mom wasn’t home so that’s what they did.

Let this pessimist declare that judgment system flawed.

I’d much rather try to make as conscious a choice as possible and plan ahead. I know what it’s like to be raised with not much in the till or on the table, and I saw how much my parents struggled with not having anything at the end of their lives. In the middle here, I’d like to attempt some informed choices that include all possibilities.

I like to think I’d choose to be a mother who stays in the workplace because I don’t think I’d be stellar at caretaking while I know I’m awesome at professional work. I know this because I’ve spent over 20 years caring for family and children, related or not. I love them dearly but it’s exhausting and I simply didn’t have the instinctive biological yearning that my mother did to want to continue to care for children. I’m not bad at it, in fact, I am a great sitter in a pinch, but I’m no Child Whisperer. In contrast, love or hate my job at the time, I’ve always been good at it. And even if I’m in pain, I can do my job. And when it’s really bad, I can work from home or take a sick day. You cannot take a sick day from your kid!

PiC, on the other hand, may not have 20+ years under his belt but he is goooood with kids. They love him. They love uncle to distraction. At any age, at any time of day or night, Uncle is awesome. And he has so much more energy than I do. And to him, a job is a job is a job. It’s there to make a living, he’d rather be (fill in the blank). He understands how to live life – which is what grounds me when I’m willing to be grounded away from work.

He’s never loved his work to the degree that I do. My theory is that he would be way better at home with kids than I would. I have no real idea if he’d survive nap times and setting structure but he’s so good at ignoring a clingy Doggle that I’m certain he’d set boundaries after a while. Men parent differently and I know he’d make it work.

Financially, it could be a little tricky. Frankly, at the moment, he has far superior benefits. Mine are mediocre. If we had a family, I’d want his coverage. I make more now but I need to make way more if we were to lose his salary. In part, because we’re still covering my dad. But things could definitely change. I could find a better gig with better benefits, or at least different benefits, and then it could work.

At the end of all this, this is only the Right Now.

My health hasn’t improved appreciably over the last ten years and has in some ways, declined. This is a reminder that we cannot take our health and capabilities for granted.

There are so many unknowns:

What’s my actual health and earning life span? (No idea.)
What if he takes a break and has to go back to work? How does that work? (we could sort of plan for that)
What if I have to be the one to take a break?
How does that affect earnings and savings?
And what about cultivating alternative income?

And honestly, we could just change our minds and want something totally different from what we thought we wanted. I not only want, I need and expect that to be ok. That’s why any of this: choice.

March 9, 2012

Money in my 20s

Balancing acts in adulthood

I’ve been enjoying the conversations over at Wandering Scientist on work life balance. As I teeter into my thirties, I’ve been examining some of the financial and professional choices I’ve made during this decade and reflecting on how effective those philosophies have been and whether they will continue to hold true for the upcoming decade. I suspect that life and money and career in my thirties will be just as interesting a trip, but beyond that? Well, so far I’ve been terrible at prognosticating so I’ll just leave it at that.

As for my twenties ….

These were absolutely the foundation years: completing the final years of undergrad, deciding to hold off on graduate school until I knew better what I wanted out of it, throwing myself into my career at full tilt while digging out of debt and then building up a nest egg.  My approach to my career and my money was the same: more is better.

Philosophically, the natural, deeply ingrained, unthinking element was an intrinsic need to achieve something, a drive to have a discernable growth pattern, to do something that seemed tangible. I wanted to build a career, I wanted to have achieved something substantive.

The logical, considered, and reasoned plan was to aim for a position where my work-life balance wouldn’t be dictated by the company because I was highly placed enough where they didn’t care about niceties like when I showed up or how many hours I worked as long as the job was done well.  Essentially, I wanted to achieve the ability to talk terms with the company I worked for as long as I was an employee.

***

In Oil and Garlic’s post, A Precarious Balance, she discusses the ignored constraints in finding work-life balance when your income doesn’t stretch to buying flexibility and help. She lists a number of things that one can do to earn or achieve more flexibility from her perspective as a non-manager with a mid-level salary in a HCOLA.  That combination probably describes a fair number of us who simply don’t have the ability to buy out of the choices that we have to manage to run households and feed mouths, day to day.

Meanwhile, she notes: At my company, those in manager positions and above enjoy a higher autonomy.   They don’t have to ask permission to work from home.  They also have the money for nanny and cleaning help, something that my household has paid for but at a great sacrifice (and only temporarily).   They can still enjoy many luxuries like massages, travel and dining out.  True, they have greater responsibilities, too, and they’ve earned it.  But their solutions often aren’t applicable to those those in lower income brackets.  In other words, they can buy some balance while many people don’t have that same privilege.

I very much agreed.  Having worked many years in retail and other similarly low-wage environments while going to school, I’d observed very early on the vulnerabilities of being in the middle and lower tiers of any organization. One typically has less negotiating power in terms of responsibilities, is considered more expendable or is less valued as an asset to the company, and blends in with the rest of the equivalent employees holding the same role.

In that position, an individual’s power, and the choices one would like to make for oneself tend to lie in the advocacy and kindness of an immediate superior and his or her ability to persuade at least one or more rungs above if flexibility isn’t part of the company policy.

***

In the long-term, that was far too slim a reed for me to rest my life and my family’s lives on, particularly when I had the additional concern of a chronic illness for which there were no immediate prospects for improvement.

Superficially, need and circumstance dictated that I simply earn a living but I was compelled to steer my career trajectory as steeply as I could, as early as I could, while building a strong reputation in my chosen field. My theory was that should I be derailed for any length of time, for any reason, that reputation would serve to smooth my way.

Cloud, of Wandering Scientist confirms, whatever choice you make to take a break for family reasons after you’ve established yourself, you’re usually starting from a better place:

Once you have kids, you can decide whether or not you want or need to ease up on your career, but whatever you decide, it will be easier to keep your career viable if you have a strong reputation built in your earlier years. Whether you keep working or take a break, that reputation will serve you well. I think that one reason I haven’t suffered from much “working moms are slackers” bias in my own career is that I have a sterling reputation for productivity- and have maintained it. But we are also actively recruiting someone right now who is coming back after about 5 years off with young kids. We actually sought her out and asked her if she was ready to come back, on the basis of having been impressed with her work before she took the break.

Details will differ a bit across industries but the basis makes sense to me – someone who had a solid reputation before taking a break would have a leg up on someone who hadn’t established one.

***

My personal net worth has gone from -$50,000 in family debt to around $100,000 in assets over the course of nine years in addition to paying for all living expenses for a family of four. While it’s no great shakes, it’s certainly a fair start at a real financial basis with which to start a family.

I haven’t taken a break yet, and I don’t know if and when I (or we) will decide that it’s time to, but right now, I’m in a strong building phase of my career and striving for higher earning power. It’s only partly a joke that I’m trying to outearn PiC before the end of this year. That’s partly ego, and partly practicality. If I’m the higher earner, and we start a family, there’s a stronger case for him to stay home with the kids! 😉

In the end, my choices throughout my twenties were tailored to setting the scene and creating opportunities for freedom and better choices in the future.

September 21, 2011

What’s your type?

First impressions rarely survive the heat of examination

“You don’t seem to be the kind of girl/lady who [fill in the blank with any of my hobbies, interests, or responsibilities].”

Talking to @thefitlounge on Twitter about first impressions, I was amused by the idea that anyone could be offended by a wrong first impression.  They were pretty standard in my experience whether I meant to give them or not.

In college, I was described as a “Forever-21 seeming kind of girl” as someone’s confessed first impression.  As a skinny-@$$ed kid who wore tank tops and jeans on a West Coast college campus teeming with a million other lookalikes, that was not out of line as far as superficial descriptions went. I did buy tank tops at Forever 21. They were cheap, and I had other priorities. (Bills.) That’s not what he meant, of course. He meant: some variety of a spoiled Asian girl with more time and money than brains, at college because her parents made her go not because she had any goals or ambitions beyond pledging a sorority or following the trend of the month, and seeking the most fashion I could find to catch the eye of the hottest guy on campus.  We were surrounded by the like, after all.

Since then, I’ve been pegged as all kinds of other similarly superficial, very stereotypical, “female types.”  I’ve been pigeonholed professionally by bad bosses as the “bait” for vendors, clients and colleagues (ick, ugh, and laughable), I’ve been initially dismissed as “only a girl” by people who thought I couldn’t possibly deal with the pressure of X, Y, or Z because of my size or my sex, I’ve been blinked at by people who didn’t expect that I’d bleed geek or finance if you cut me.

Growing past the stereotypes

The people who mattered got past the notion, or the outside face if it was an intentional wall I kept up not to let them in at all, that I was not just a 2-D female.  They found that I was a person with a brain and the gumption was of my determination, not dictated by size, sex, weight or anything else.  They discovered that while I could be just a simple country girl, I’m a little more complex than that.

I’ve lived a bit of life.  I’ve flown in a home-built two-seater plane with a oil tycoon to hear the story of how it was built and why it flew better than his other planes; I learned how to ride horses and practiced martial arts; I learned basic car repairs and diagnostics with mechanically savvy friends so that mechanics couldn’t just pull a fast one because gee whillikers, lil lady, this here part that doesn’t exist needs replacing.  (Though, shady mechanics will try that with anyone, male or female.)

I’ve adventured to Comic-Con in many phases: as a volunteer, as an attendee, alone, later with friends, and still later, brought friends who had never been.  And for the love of money planning, should anyone in real life accidentally ask me a finance-related question, they’ll trigger a flood of information accumulated over the years.

Then there’s all of my background and history that only lives here on my blog – none of my family or financial life is really casual conversation so on meeting me, you might assume that I had a normal family with a normal childhood and had financial support to go to college and maybe held a job or two afterward.

Working with me, you’d be really confused because I still look like some really young age but I hold an incredible amount of responsibility and I’ve got a very strict code of professionalism so I must be old, but … am I?  And I’ll never tell how old I am either.  Because where’s the fun in that?  😉

The Value of the Superficial Judgment

In all of this, I’d come to realize that while it was valuable that I didn’t actually care what certain people (the average person on the street) thought of me, the fact that in general, people tend to judge based on appearances meant that any efforts put into directing those thoughts could make a difference where it’s important.

I do care whether people think of me as a “young professional” or don’t really think about my age at all because my physical attributes are just groomed enough to walk a middle ground of dressing for success at the level I want to be at but not being casual (like our C-suite) or overly gussied up.

That’s where Shelley’s suggestion of creating a “uniform” of sorts makes sense to me. I can’t afford a fully kitted out wardrobe with a huge variety of options and I don’t need it either. But a small, carefully crafted professional set of clothing to last a week is just about right.

I rely on the first impression that my professional dress will convey: that I’m someone to take seriously because I’m well-groomed and take my job and career seriously, to offset the first impression that I know my usual lackadaisical self would have given.  And then my work speaks for me.

In everyday life, I’m a casual person so I dress accordingly so as not to give the impression that I’m anything different.  In that “version” of me, I’m not motivated to dress much more nicely on average since I like to be able to play with dogs, read, work on the computer, do household chores, cook, clean, run errands, or any number of random things.  And I’m often reserving the good stuff for work. 🙂  I might be cleaning up my act a little bit overall and eliminating some of the far-too-casual from my wardrobe as I creep toward my 30s but on the whole, comfort is the watchword for the weekends.

:: Have you been commonly stereotyped in the past or present?  Was it a stereotype that bothered you or worked for you?  
:: Are you a different version of yourself in different places? 

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