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    [post_content] => Father's Day elicits painful and happy memories about a now aged father.

The words that best describe my father all start with the letter “r”: rogue, rapscallion, renegade, rascal.

Also: Rage. I have been scorched many times by his verbal outbursts; for years at a time, I’ve just had to keep my distance, emotionally singed by the last blast. I have wished often for a father who was calm and consistent. Someone for whom I could find the right Father’s Day card.

My father has four children by four women. I’m the oldest, the only child of his first marriage to my mother, an American he met in the south of France and married a few months later in her native New York City. He took her to his hometown, Vancouver, where they had a glamorous life: they opened an art gallery, and she modelled part-time. Later, they moved to London.

The second oldest is a half-sister I’ve never met and someone, for decades, he didn’t even know existed; I’ve spoken to her once by phone. The next oldest, who I know, is ten years my junior, a successful entrepreneur. The youngest, a man 23 years my junior, is the only child of his second marriage. None of us ever shared a home and only the two half-brothers have a relationship. The two not raised by my father resent those who were.

I lived with him from the age of 14 to 19. My parents had divorced, and my mother’s mental illness became overwhelming. I moved into his home with his girlfriend; she was too old to be a sister, too young to be a mother, and a tough cookie who, at 28, didn’t really know what to make of an unhappy 15 year old. He was often far away for a month at a time, filming, leaving two ill-suited young women alone to make it work.

When he was home in those years, though, he made up for it, and gave me a lot of time with him, alone. We skied and played squash and went for long walks in the country. When I was bullied at school, he tried his best to help me. Our Christmases were lavish. We played Scrabble for hours in front of the fire, the cat scrambling our letters as we drank tea and ate chocolate cookies.

This was the mid 1970s. Second-wave feminism was blooming and he never once, then or later, pressured me to be conventionally pretty or to follow the traditional path of marriage and motherhood. I’ve always appreciated that. Being smart, talented and competitive mattered most to him. He raised me, basically, as a boy — to be fearless, intellectually confident, eager to explore the wider world.

The summer I was 15 we drove across Canada together, just the two of us. We slept most often in a tent, once awakened by a farmer looking down on us from his tractor.

That road trip is one of my happiest memories. We drew, took photos and played endless games of 20 Questions as we drove across the tedious prairies. We dipped south into the United States and attended a pow-wow in one of the Dakotas, where a bag of sugar and some meat were left at our tent door, a welcome for everyone there. That’s typical of the best of my father — always curious, always seeking the next adventure.

That’s the part of him, still healthy and living alone at 91 in the countryside, that I still like and admire. Through his travels making documentaries, I glimpsed tantalizing bits of a larger world. He brought me home bits of it: badges from the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, a caribou rug and sealskin gloves from the Arctic, a woven Afghan rifle case. Much as it was difficult being left alone with his girlfriend—later his wife—I knew he loved his work and understood that his long absences were the price we paid for that. His pursuit of adventure and career influenced me profoundly in my choice of career; I became a journalist, digging up my own stories to share.

But those loving teenage years came to an abrupt end when, in my sophomore year of university, he abruptly sold the house and told me, without warning, to find a new place to live; he and his girlfriend were going to live on a boat in Europe. I was on my own for good, with some money from a grandmother but not a dime from him for tuition, books, or living expenses. Long before the internet or cellphones, the only way to contact my father was by poste restante.

That year was disastrous. I slept around, starved for male approval and attention. I was attacked in my ground-floor apartment where I lived alone, at the back of an alley in a dicey neighborhood—a place no attentive or protective father would have allowed. My grades, previously straight As, plummeted. I moved again and again until finally, that summer, I found safe shelter on the top floor of a spacious house on a treelined street in a much nicer neighborhood, in a sorority filled with other women, one of them my best friend.  Life calmed down and took a turn for the better.

That was the summer I started writing for national magazines, which was exciting but also a source of tremendous pressure.

I was running on fumes when my father sent me a ticket to join them on their small boat in France and I mailed a long letter explaining how fragile I was. Attending university full-time, while also freelancing, had been exhausting. I was thrilled to be taken seriously by national magazine editors, but was emotionally raw, barely a few weeks after having been grabbed through my bathroom’s low open window and hit on the head while bathing. The assailant took off and I never reported it.

My father never got the letter—so he had no idea. And he never welcomed weakness and fear.

That visit ended very badly, with a shouting match in a French parking lot at midnight. I was proud of my writing success which, somehow, he found dubious. Why, he raged, would anyone take me, then just turned 20, seriously?

Well, why not?

I had arrived desperately needing a relaxing break but, as usual, I disappointed him for reasons that made no sense to me. He wasn’t paying for university or any of my living costs and I didn’t need him financially. I sure didn’t need him emotionally if this was to be my lot.

For the first time in my life I stood up to him and flew home early.

They came back and re-settled in a small town 1,200 miles away from me, and I tried again, in my mid-20s, another summer vacation visit. They now had a son who was five or six.

There was another explosion of rage at me, and my father flung a heavy glass goblet into a metal sink, shattering it. I didn’t leave that time. Why was he always so angry with me? I rarely spent time with him and his second family, and had become a successful young journalist any parent would normally take pride in.

In the decades since, I’ve been the brunt of his anger —verbal, never physical—too many times. There’s never an apology, just the assumption this is the price of admission to our relationship. He’s had quieter arguments with my husband. After each one, we withdraw for months or years and hope he’ll be civil the next time.

He was wonderful at our wedding in 2011, terrible when I got breast cancer in 2018. He came out to support me at a successful event I organized, elegant in jacket and tie, beaming with pride – then a few years later excoriated me in front of others for a minor mistake.

He was cordial in our most recent conversation, just before his birthday. Relieved, I enjoyed it and wondered how many years we even have left to mend fences for good before it’s too late.

But, let down too many times when I really needed his help or support, I never know what to expect and learned not to rely on him years ago.

I keep trying because he’s my only parent.

Because his own father, a self-made businessman who died before I was born, was apparently very tough—and who knows what he learned to become?

Because I just do.

People wonder why I persist and so do I—how can a woman who considers herself a feminist keep tolerating such abuse?

I don’t have a tidy answer.

I just know that one day I won’t miss his anger—but I will miss the best of him.
    [post_title] => A daughter reflects on a volatile father who brought out her best and hurt her the most
    [post_excerpt] => I have wished often for a father who was calm and consistent. Someone for whom I could find the right Father’s Day card.
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A daughter reflects on a volatile father who brought out her best and hurt her the most

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    [post_date] => 2020-06-11 18:30:26
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    [post_content] => By failing to invest in child care, the U.S. government is placing mothers in an impossible position.

Ashley Patrick was thrilled to land a full-time position at a prestigious publishing house in July 2016. The job came with smart, bookish colleagues, opportunities for advancement, a regular salary, and health insurance. For a Brooklyn-based writer and editor, it was a rare and valuable opportunity.

At the time she had two young sons, a husband who also worked full-time, and no flexibility. By the end of 2018, Patrick and her husband had three children. The combined monthly cost of full-time daycare for the baby and after-school programs for the boys was an unaffordable minimum of $3,250. In February 2019 she made the painful decision to leave her job.

“A big part of my decision to leave was the cost of child care,” Patrick told me in a recent phone conversation. “Which was a great disappointment because I was on an upward trajectory in the company.” She had been promoted shortly before the birth of her youngest and was on track for another promotion in the next year and a half. Getting that second promotion “would have made a big difference in terms of mobility from one publishing house to another.”

The kids are now nine, seven, and 18 months old. Patrick has managed to carve out a thriving freelance business, but, with schools and daycares closed due to the pandemic, she is now trying to work and supervise her boys’ online lessons from her small apartment. Her husband, who had been earning a good salary at a major company, was laid off eight months after she quit her own job—in part, Patrick suspects, because he took the family leave he was entitled to when their third child was born. She does not know what they’ll do when schools reopen—there is still no ideal option for the baby, and the boys attend schools in different neighborhoods with different start times, making pick-up and drop-off complicated and time-consuming.

Patrick and her family are hardly alone in finding the demands of child care and full-time employment increasingly unmanageable.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), there are only four countries in the world where couples with young children who earn the average wage spend more than 30 percent of their salary on child care: New Zealand, the U.K., Australia, and the United States. In Korea, Austria, Greece, and Hungary, the average couple spends less than four percent of their income on child care. Mothers in Sweden, France, and Canada report being satisfied with the overall quality, availability, and cost of child care in those countries, all of which have government-run or heavily subsidized child care systems.

Erika Gubrium, a professor at Oslo Metropolitan University who has two sons, ages eight and 11, explained in response to questions sent by email that child care in Norway is offered through a mix of public and private day cares partially subsidized by the state. The cost of a full-time spot at a daycare in Oslo is approximately 3,100 Norwegian krone per month (around $302 USD). Some families pay reduced fees if they earn less and in some areas, day care is completely free for children of certain ages. In Gubrium’s words, “There is NO opposition to government funding of child care, as there is strong sentiment across the political board that the state should support measures that enable both parents to work full-time.”

When child care is consistent, affordable, and easy to access, more women work outside of the home. Quebec’s government-subsidized child care program led to a workforce participation rate of 85 percent for women ages 26 to 44—the highest in the world, according to University of Quebec at Montreal economist Pierre Fortin. The increased tax revenue covers more than 100 percent of what the government spends on child care. “In other words, it costs zero, or the cost is negative,” Fortin told CityLab in 2018. The program also saves money by reducing the number of families on public assistance.

Hannah Selinger, a freelance writer in East Hampton, New York, has two sons, ages three and one-and-a-half. Finding convenient child care for both, she said in a phone interview, has been a “nightmare.” She quit her well-paid job to be a stay-at-home mother when she became pregnant with her first child because her partner’s salary was double what she made. Since then her freelance writing career has taken off, requiring more of her time, but the logistics of child care are making that nearly impossible. The fee for her eldest son’s preschool is $12,000 per year for three half days per week, and it’s a 30-minute drive from her home, meaning she spends six hours per week driving him (and his little brother) there and back.

Carolina Gonzalez-Villar lives in California’s Bay Area with her husband and their four-year-old son. Her father, who is retired, took care of her son until he was 18 months old. Without her father, she said, her family would have had to bear the expense of a nanny. She and her husband decided they couldn’t afford another child, given that child care where they live costs up to $2,500 per month.

A shorter workweek would reduce both child care costs and parental stress. “We have doubled productivity since the 1960s; there is no reason we shouldn’t make the same money or better and work fewer hours,” said Erin Mahoney, who lives in Queens with her 2-year-old child. Mahoney described the search for child care as one of the most stressful parts of her pregnancy. “A month before my maternity leave ended, I was still trying to figure it out.”

The burden of navigating America’s patchwork child care system falls disproportionately on mothers. Ashley Patrick recently wrote on Facebook, in response to a comment about child care centers refusing to disclose their fees until parents have scheduled a tour, “The last thing I wanted to be doing while uncomfortably pregnant and frantically prepping at work for maternity leave and scheduling and attending a zillion doctor’s appointments was making still more phone calls and sending more emails to check tuition fees.”

Liz Grefath, a mother of two young sons who lives in Brooklyn, recently wrote on Facebook that “people use words like ‘challenge’ to describe [the search for adequate child care] but that is such a neutral word.” What most U.S. parents are really engaged in, she added, is “all-out scavenging, plotting, and survivalism.”Another problem with the U.S. system is that child care providers and preschool teachers are among the worst-paid workers in America. As of 2018, 58 percent of child care workers in California were paid so little that they qualified for public assistance. Some cannot afford to have children of their own.

“One thing I find really frustrating about child care is that it’s almost prohibitively expensive for parents yet the teachers are paid close to minimum wage,” Arielle Harrison recently wrote on Facebook. Harrison, who lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two young sons, continued: “I don’t see how the economics work without some form of government subsidy.”

The U.S. provides limited subsidies to low-income families, she acknowledged, but providers are still grossly underpaid.

Historically, the U.S. government has found the money for child care when it needed women to work. President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort (remember Rosie the Riveter?). The centers were shut down under the Truman administration, despite a battle waged by mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators and social workers to keep them open. That was the last time the United States offered universal child care.

In May 1971, two New York congresswomen—Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn and Bella Abzug of Manhattan—introduced a bill that would have set aside billions of dollars in federal funds for child care. A watered-down version eventually passed the House and the Senate, only to be vetoed by Nixon, on the advice of his special assistant Pat Buchanan. Nixon described the bill as “radical,” “family-weakening” and tantamount to endorsing “communal” childrearing as opposed to “the family-centered approach.”

Jen Sunderland, a child care provider and mother of a 14-year-old in New York City, pointed out in a phone conversation that the U.S.’s “family-centered approach” is the problem. Instead of acknowledging that the entire society benefits when children are well cared for, our system places “all of the burden of that work on individual families.”

For women, child care decisions are inextricably tied to stagnant wages and unequal pay. The majority of mothers who “choose” the work of childrearing over a paying job do so because they would earn less or only marginally more than they would have to spend on child care if they worked.

The situation is even more dire for single parents. Nearly a quarter of U.S. children live in single-parent households, the vast majority of which are headed by women. Single parents earning an average wage spend 52.7 percent of their income on child care, which surely contributes to the fact that 30 percent of single mothers live below the poverty line.

Child care was a campaign issue in the 2020 presidential election cycle for the first time since the 1970s. Elizabeth Warren was the first to unveil a plan; Bernie Sanders’ plan was the most comprehensive. Joe Biden has not presented one. Earlier in 2020, he told Fortune that, under a Biden administration, children will be able to attend “high-quality, universal prekindergarten at no cost” and parents “will get up to $8,000 in tax credits” to offset child care costs. In 2016 the Center for American Progress, which advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, recommended offering child care tax credits of up to $14,000 per child.

The pandemic has brought the U.S.’s deepening child care crisis into even sharper relief. Daycares are closed and many schools will not reopen until the fall. Millions of parents are now either seeking work or attempting to hold onto their jobs while caring full-time for young children. In states where businesses are reopening, many now face a choice between returning to work and leaving their kids who knows where, or staying at home with their kids and losing their jobs or part of their income.

In a 1981 op-ed headlined “Congress is Subsidizing Deterioration of Family,” Joe Biden argued against expanding a child care tax credit to include families with higher incomes and labeled day care centers and nursing homes “monuments to our growing unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for those to whom we owe the most.”A lot has changed since 1981. What hasn’t changed is the need for the government to treat child care as a social responsibility, not a personal one.

Whatever happens in November, the U.S. will almost certainly end up with either a President Trump, who has agreed to spend more on child care block grants for low-income families and doubled the federal child tax credit to $2,000, or a President Biden, who has talked about “making sure that every single solitary person needing child care gets an $8,000 tax credit.” The average American family spends nearly $15,000 a year on child care.“We dread the idea that our day care might not come back from [the pandemic],” Josef Szende, who grew up in Canada and lives in New York City with his wife and their 15-month-old son, told me via Zoom. “We don’t know what we would do…we’d move from that lucky whatever percent who somehow made it work in New York City into the majority for whom it’s not working.”

Congress voted to invest billions in child care nearly 50 years ago. It’s past time to make good on that promise.
    [post_title] => The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care
    [post_excerpt] => The United States is one of only four countries in the world where couples earning an average wage spend more than 30 percent of their income on child care. Women are paying the highest price.
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The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care

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    [post_date] => 2020-05-08 03:51:34
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    [post_content] => Want to stop a conversation cold? Tell someone you haven’t spoken to your mother in a decade. Then tell them you’re her only child.

The annual Mother’s Day frenzy culminates with the actual celebration this Sunday, with a sentimental blizzard of flowers and cards that included, in pre-pandemic times, restaurant tables often filled with happy mothers and daughters celebrating their love for one another.

On social media, there will be endless tributes to mothers who have died, recently or decades ago, still much missed and deeply mourned.

That won’t be me.

My mother died suddenly this year, at 85, sitting in her nursing home armchair watching television—in a city a seven-hour, cross-country international flight from me.

I hadn’t seen her in years nor tried to re-connect. I knew better, even though others repeatedly urged me to, including my father, 50 years divorced from her but lately back in touch.

“You’ll regret it!”

“What if she dies?”

“Just go!”

“You never know…”

But they didn’t know the full story.

Every year I sent her a Christmas card filled with the past year’s news, but never received a reply, not even in 2018, the year of my early-stage breast cancer, surgery and radiation. When she had had a mastectomy decades before, I’d flown from New York to Vancouver to get her back home and re-settled.

A few years ago, she told my best friend, a local who went to visit, to tell me to stay away.

How does one end up so estranged?

More easily than you’d think.

Yet no other relationship carries as much emotional freight as the mother-daughter bond.

The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace.

But that’s just not everyone’s experience.

She left my father when I was seven. I was sent to boarding school, and every summer to camp, my battered blue trunk shuttling between them. I shared rooms for years with four to six other girls, summers in a raw wooden bunk, winters in a brown metal bed.

At school, we were shouted at routinely by ancient housemothers, women who’d been widowed or never married, old enough to be our grandparents, to whom we were nothing more than a name on a checklist and someone to discipline, but never to hug or console.

I saw my mother on weekends and holidays. She did throw great, lavish birthday parties for me, with cakes and sparklers and lots of my pals.

There were adult years when she and I got along well, and even traveled together, with adventures in Fiji, Peru, Costa Rica and Colombia as I flew in to visit her, mid-journey. She had inherited enough money to travel as long as she liked and lived frugally. Later, I visited her home in British Columbia a few times.

But her alcoholism worsened, and her bipolar illness blitzed my life repeatedly, usually without warning. That meant hospitalizations, worldwide, and I learned to dread the inevitable phone call detailing the latest mayhem – when, manic and acting out wildly in public, she landed in foreign jails and hospitals or trashed her rental apartment, sometimes many time zones distant.

At 19, living alone and attending university full-time in downtown Toronto, I had no idea what to do. You really can’t turn to someone in your Chaucer seminar and ask for that kind of help. My father, also away traveling the world with his soon-to-be second wife, showed no interest.

And talking about any of it, rough enough for me to handle privately, felt like telling tales out of school. Who could possibly understand, sympathize or help? She would just keep doing whatever she pleased anyway, consequences be damned.

The worst moment for me was when she ended up in a locked London psychiatric ward. I had just finished the happiest year of my life, on a Paris-based journalism fellowship. Her illness, a trio of frosty English doctors told me, could be inherited, while offering me no advice or comfort. I was a young, ambitious journalist with a growing career, now terrified my mind was potentially as susceptible. In a small, highly competitive industry, I couldn’t risk anyone wondering if I would be next.­­

Her weary friends gave up.

Her three American cousins, living many miles away, fed up with her late-night calls and wild-eyed visits, gave up.

No one really knew what was going on but me.

I had fled her care after a terrifying manic breakdown that occurred when I was 14, when we lived in Mexico. She drove a van carrying me and two others down a major highway with the headlights turned off, ending up crashed in a ditch at midnight in a city we’d never seen before. For two weeks it fell on me to care for a friend who’d just arrived from Canada to visit.

A few weeks later, I returned to Canada and moved in with my father and his girlfriend. I never lived with my mother again.

No one ever discussed her illness with me, or offered me tools to cope with it, even though I knew the name of her psychiatrist. Later in life, I intellectually accepted that mental illness is an illness, but at 14, I was too scared and angry at having been so endangered. Nor was this the first time I’d been subjected to a manic breakdown; she had one when I was 12 when we stayed at a friend’s house. I awoke to find a massive potted plant spread at the bottom of the stairs --- but remember nothing after that. I have some gaps in my memory, likely protective.)

Yet, for decades, like a broken robot, I did keep visiting her, hoping, naively and childishly, for the kind of mother so many others took for granted – healthy, loving, reliable, attentive. Too often, I endured another drunken rage.

So, I too, gave up.

Only in the weeks after her death, that little flickering pilot light of hope for eventual reconciliation finally extinguished, did I realize that I’d won more than I’d lost.

Without her, I’ve created and navigated a successful life, living and working in five cities and three countries. A life filled with loving friends, a strong marriage and a successful writing career.

No one taught me how to dress or apply make-up or cook or any of the skills mothers traditionally pass on to their daughters, let alone how to handle finances, work or relationships. I learned, even as a teenager, to rely on a few others, happy to help me out when needed.

The more I figured stuff out, most of the time successfully, the more self-confidence I gained. I didn’t need a lot of direction or advice.

I learned to challenge authority – or, more crucially – not genuflect to it in the first place. Would my mother disapprove of my choices? She’d never even notice. That itself offered  substantial freedom when I see so many women miserably buckling, sometimes deep into middle age, under the weight of their mothers’ disapproval --- of their bodies, their partners, their work or their parenting.

And I learned to celebrate my own triumphs.

When I graduated university, all of which she’d missed while traveling, she refused to attend my graduation, even in a huge hall with thousands of others, because I’d also invited my father. So, I asked him to stay home; when I called her back, she’d already committed to the graduation of a friend’s daughter instead.

So, friends became my  closest family.

The Christmas Eve my mother threw her gifts around my living room in a drunken rage, I fled the next day to a friend’s home in Pennsylvania, racing from my New York home down the highway to a place I knew for sure --- never having met his parents -- would be calm and kind. As usual, the homes of others were my refuge.

When I married for the second time, a friend stood in as my witness and helped me with  the last-minute primping every bride craves before heading down the aisle. For decades a friend 10 years my senior welcomed me into her home, year after year, whether I was single, divorced, re-married.

The world, I learned, is full of other mothers.

 
    [post_title] => On Mother's Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother
    [post_excerpt] => The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace. But that’s just not everyone’s experience.
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On Mother’s Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother