WONKESS

Pride before the Fall...

It's been a hard year.  Without going into boring details, there's been unemployment, pay cuts, addiction, moving, discord.  But still grateful.   So grateful that I still get another chance (and another, and another).

Marriage is hard.  So hard that sometimes, you get to the point where you're talking to a family lawyer (yes, that kind of family lawyer), and reading books with cringe-worthy titles like, "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men," and "The Emotionally Abused Woman : Overcoming Destructive Patterns and Reclaiming Yourself."  And then you have these endless battles with yourself; on the one hand wondering if you are just a narcissistic whiner and on the other hand wallowing in abject anger and self-hatred, with a dash of hating the fact that the struggle itself may serve to invalidate women who suffer real abuse.

And then there is Pride.  I love that there is a wikipedia entry on Pride:

Pride is an inward directed (feeling) emotion that exemplifies either an inflated sense of one's personal status or the specific mostly positive emotion that is a product of praise or independent self-reflection. Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that pride is a complex secondary emotion which requires the development of a sense of self and the mastery of relevant conceptual distinctions (e.g., that pride is distinct from happiness and joy) through language-based interaction with others.

Pride is sometimes viewed as excessive or as a vice, sometimes as proper or as a virtue. While some philosophers such as Aristotle (and George Bernard Shaw) consider pride a profound virtue, most world religions consider it a sin, such as the Old Testament of the Bible used by Christians and Jews, in Proverbs 2:11.

We live in such a pride-driven society nowadays.  Everything is about pride: we talk about developing self-worth, realizing self-worth, being proud of our achievements (whatever they are).  We have politicians who make it a point of pride to never to back down, and an entire corporate ethos that celebrates those with the most cojones (which is, let's admit it, just super-pride).

So that's where my marriage was - an endless match between two adversaries, each one believing himself absolutely correct, taking no prisoners, right right right right right.  

So the inevitable question: does being the one to take a step back, the one who disengages, the one who submits... does that automatically make you the abused?  Is that all it takes?  And what about the gender politics of it all?  Masculinity is so often tied to the pride of righteousness, the alpha male self defined by being right against the face of corrupt authority (whatever form it comes in).  And the new woman-hear-me-roar, all about standing in her truth (her truth, not his truth, not their truth, not even the truth, but her truth), and putting it foremost, and not conventionally one-step-behind-your-man.  Can a couple emerge victorious when these are the rules?  Or must one side always lose?

I suppose I've lost the battle.  For now.  I make no guarantees that something won't come along to appropriate my mind and set me on another battlefield.  For now, I look at my happy, happy children, and they are so happy.  And it is enough. 

Mother's Day, Whatever...

I am not a big holiday person.  The Buddhists don't have many holidays, and the Chinese mostly have agricultural-based holidays (planting, harvest, winter solstice festivals) which were (obviously) not on the calendar I knew as a child growing up in the US.  So I grew up in a largely holiday-free zone.

As an adult, my nonchalance towards holidays has served me well.  I feel no guilt (and my mother foists no guilt upon me) if I can't make it home for Christmas or New Years or the 4th of July.  I rarely gift or am gifted by my immediate family.  As a family, we have even extended our holiday-free mentality to cover birthdays.  A birthday is considered feted if it involves a mylar balloon and a cupcake.

But clearly, as I've become a mother, things have changed.  Partly because holidays are an important part of my husband's life.  His family goes absolutely defcon one over holiday logistics.  They exercise an excruciating calculus of "how much time does each (grown) son spend with each divorced parent" with a holiday weighted point system (with Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, and each parent's birthday getting extremely high points, obviously).  And partly because even heathen I believe in the sanctity of the child's belief in holiday magic.

But mother's day is doubly strange to me.  It's a holiday for (presumedly) me, so there is no holiday magic to be preserved for my daughters (outside of the requisite mother's day homemade gift, which Loo did this year for the first time in pre-K, and which was adorable).  And I seriously don't care.  So for the time being, J and I have turned mother's day more into grandmother's day, and we took our mothers out (jointly) this weekend for a "fancy" meal, and so that they could spend some time with their granddaughters.

But there was no breakfast in bed, no flowers and gifts, no night out for me.

Though I did mention to J that my ideal (this year) would have been the freedom to go watch the new Star Trek movie.  Two guesses whether my wish got fulfilled or not.

Nonlinear girl took this series of mother's day questions from the Motherlode blog.  They intrigued me (from an archivist POV) so I thought I would indulge on this not-so-busy Monday-after-Mother's Day.  As Nonlinear Girl did, I am answering these as I might to my daughters (or to my own mother).  I've also deleted some for lack of present relevance.

1.    What’s the one thing you would have done differently as a mom?
I'm sure this will be a more important question once I have more years under my belt.  But I wish I had spend more of my young adulthood preparing (economically) for my family so that I wouldn't feel the same kind of tension right now between providing for them economically and providing for them emotionally/spiritually/ mentally.

2.    Why did you choose to be with my father?
This is pretty easy.  J is the smartest man who has ever been interested in me.  I'm a sucker for a nerd.

3.    In what ways do you think I’m like you?
Loo is unfocused and lazy, which is also my default personality.  My ability to succeed has been entirely a function of my ambition.  Strip away the ambition, there is nothing I love more than a warm TV and a basket full of brownies.  Kali is aggressive, which I think is the toddler expression of ambition.  So Loo and Kali are the Yin and Yang of my personality.

4.    Which one of us kids did you like the best?
As Metrodad has said, whichever one isn't pissing me off at any given moment.

5.    Is there anything you regret not having asked your parents?
My mom and I have have a very weird, and yet very typical Chinese mother-daughter relationship.  She has been a very pure source of steadfast guidance and support my entire life.  She has been a fount of good advice about the most difficult situations.  But she's also devastatingly critical.  I've never felt that I've been able to do even one thing right by her standards, which then means that we've never been able to share things beyond a fairly superficial level. 

6.    Is there anything that you wish had been different between us — or that you would still like to change?
I want desperately to stop equating status with a good life.  I think I do this a lot.  And status is not just money, but also intelligence, education, and even liberalism.  And mostly I want to figure out a way so that my daughters can distinguish between the desire for status and what it takes to have a good life.  I think right now, I'm imparting too much of my desire for status onto my daughters.

7.    When did you realize you were no longer a child?
For me, this had nothing to do w/ being a mother.  I knew I  wasn't a child when I stopped being a drama queen.  Which probably happened at around 28/29.  I stopped acting like a petulant child whenever things didn't go my way, and I stopped thinking that the world owed me anything.  Interestingly, I would also say that this was the moment I turned into my mom.

For all you mother's out there who do take Mother's Day seriously, I hope you had a very lovely Mother's Day and that you were all able to fully bask in the love of your children.

Men are Absurd...

and women are not much better.

True story.  When I was in high school, I had an absurd crush on an "older" man.  He was two years older of me, the love was perfectly unrequited.  So, of course, when it came time to decide what college to go to, rather than going the route of my life-long dream (air force academy), I chose instead to go to snotty liberal arts college, because that is where L had gone.  Long story short, believe it or not, L and I started dating after I visited him for the pre-freshman days, we dated for like 3 months, and then broke-up right before I started my freshman year.  Way to make a gigantic life decision based on pretty damn stupid reasons.

A lot of my financial strategies are based on J's logic.  I know I talk an awful lot about economics, but I'm a complete doofus when it comes to my own financial well being.  It's partly because I didn't have much growing up, and partly because I took a pretty unconventional path (meaning, not lucrative) for the decade right after college, so I never had too much in terms of assets to worry about growing and protecting.  Luckily, I've also been imbued with a strong "living-within-my-means" ethic, so I've rarely had any consumer loans, and I managed to pay off my college loans in under a decade (and I hope to similarly pay down my law school loans on an accelerated timeline).

J, on the other hand, is a man obsessed.  It drives him nuts how much general disregard I have for money.  For example, I'm more likely than not to throw any extra dollars I have into a conventional bank CD and then have it roll over, year after year, with nary a thought about how I might be able to maximize its earnings.  I also had like 20 shares of a company I worked for back in the early 90s that I lost for like 10 years, before it rediscovered me because the landlord at my old address decided one day to send me years of old mail (I know, so sweet, right?)

Anyways, the point being, J's convinced that we are facing financial apocalypse.  We are literally frozen in our financial options, because even if there was anything he wanted to purchase, he doesn't trust any bank or brokerage or financial institution not to dissolve, and even if those institutions happen to be guaranteed by the FDIC or the SIPC, J doesn't trust the US government not to dissolve.  Yes, my husband is a gem of a man.  (Oh, and add the fact that I'm an attorney to the mix, and need to go through a complex conflicts check whenever we want to purchase or sell any securities and... let's just say frozen in place is almost euphemistic).

The interesting point being that this weekend, I wanted J to convince me that we would be able to survive on his salary alone (given that the untimely demise of my career is visibly on the horizon) and, in extension, what exactly TF should we do should his financial apocalypse come to pass.  It was then that I discovered, to my great amusement, that although J apparently has no faith in the ability of our national government to survive, he hasno problem believing that his itty-bitty college would be able to weather the storm without having to resort to cutting professors (assuming tenure).

Wow, talk about men being supremely confident of their own... what, judgment? abilities? even in the face of global catastrophe. 

Bug Racist and other Rants...

My husband is an arborphile (as am I, though to a lesser degree).  Part of the reason that we both love the US so much is because of the vast areas of wooded wilderness that are still scattered across this immense country.  J strives to have an encyclopedic knowledge about trees, and he's relatively good at identifying the various species of evergreens and deciduous trees.    

So one of his biggest pet peeves is the devastation that has been wrought by invasive insects on his beloved hardwoods (maple, poplar, birch), specifically, by the Asian long-horned beetle.  And in the great tradition of irrational patriotism, he has extended his hatred of the specific to a broader hatred of the general.  At this point, if it destroys his beloved forests, it must be an Asian invasive species (which, it goes without saying, must be eradicated).

So yesterday, I showed J this NYT article about a menace that has been destroying millions of acres of pines out in the West: the mountain pine beetle.  Without even glancing at the article, his immediate retort was "I bet it's from Asia."

At which point, your Chinese-born blogger went berserk and declared him a "Bug Racist."

Just for those who have no interest in reading the article, it turns out that the mountain pine beetle is indigenous, but has been seeing exponential growth due to, among other reasons, "softening" weather conditions in the West (i.e. less cold).  Thank you global warming.

****

This morning, as I was just about to enter my place of work, a worker who had been loading stuff into a ginormous truck parked near the back entrance of the building dropped an entire crate filled with what looked to be mugs.  My last glance at the scene as I entered the building was a sidewalk full of smashed ceramic, with the lone intact mug drifting into traffic.

I was thinking at the time that the worker was probably not going to be held liable for destroying the mugs.  When I used to work retail, if one of my girls (I was an assistant manager) accidentally ripped or stained or otherwise destroyed a piece of clothing, we had a checklist to go through: see if it is salvageable at the retail level, salvageable at the outlet level, or marked for destruction (total loss).  To some extent, this is risk distribution at the most micro level.  I imagine that in a less industrialized society, if you break the wares of your employer, you might see your pay docked until that cost is recouped by the employer.  Now, every company probably budgets a certain percentage of their costs to cover these incidents (which are then spread out via increased costs to their customers or decreased pay to their employees - but basically spread out to a broader group of people).

Generally speaking, I like the power of risk distribution.  Given how random some acts of destruction can be, it seems somehow unfair (I know it actually isn't: this is an emotional, rather than rational, response) that the burden would be so heavy on someone who just got the short end of the luck stick.  In large organizations with at least one shared goal (I think it is safe to say that w/in one organization, most of the employees/managers have the shared goal of the organization doing well), having certain of these risk costs born by the collective organization makes sense (partly because it is only pennies for the individual, and partly because there is probably some administrative efficiency to be gained to not have to police and keep track of these risks and their costs).

It is amazing, however, that when you extend the risk sharing beyond a single organization and out to disparate groups that have basically no shared goals, how destructive the sharing can be (relative to the benefits of sharing).  And of course, I'm talking about the asset backed securities (and their extended family of derivative securities).  These were the ultimate expressions of risk sharing.  As this entertaining (and highly recommended) article by Michael Lewis (or Liar's Poker fame) points out: "big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA."  Mathematically, it was possible to take a huge pile of dog shit, carve it up, and come out with 60% gold.  Amazing.

Of course, this was only possible because the company doing the carving was not keeping any of the risk in-house.  They were using their mathematic models to convince the ratings agencies to grant the gold standard to the top tranches of CDOs based on BBB rated MBSs, and then, as quickly as possible, moving those securities off their own books.

It's like this: if you knew that you had a worker (who you cannot fire) who has the weakest arms in the world and his job is to load breakable goods into trucks, would you internalize the cost of the goods he might destroy or would you go out and find an AIG to insure against him? 

A whole lotta nuttin' going on...

Today is going to be a list day:

(1) Loo is a huge TV addict.  Yes, it's shocking that I expose my child to TV.  But I've been long a slave to pop culture and as far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if Loo wants to be a singer/actress/director/producer/president of Pixar.  Surprisingly, Kali doesn't seem to really care that much about TV.  Partly it's because she only gets to watch what her sister wants to watch, which is on some level too sophisticated for her.  But she also gets bored with TV more easily than her sister, so she'll watch for like 10 minutes, then wander away to play on her own. 

The one movie that she loves is Lilo and Stitch.  She'll sit through that one, straight through, time after time.  I think she feels some sort of connection to Lilo, though what a 2 year old living in a big city with her intact nuclear family has in common with a 7 year old orphaned Hawaiian girl living with an alien is kinda beyond me. 

There is a scene (in the original Lilo and Stitch... Kali loves the sequel too) where, after Lilo blows the interview between her sister and the social worker overseeing Lilo's case (Mr. Cobra Bubbles - LOL), Nani (Lilo's sister) is chastizing Lilo for her behavior. 

(Nani has grabbed Lilo's hand to keep her from running off.  Lilo struggles to get away from Nani.)
Nani: Lilo! Why didn't you wait at the school? You were supposed
to wait there!
(pause)
Nani: Lilo!
(pause)
Nani: Do you not understand? Do you want to be taken away?
(pause)
Nani: Answer me!
Lilo: No!
Nani: No, you don't understand?
Lilo: No!
Nani: No, what?
Lilo: No!
(Lilo, hand still held by Nani, face plants dramatically on the floor)
Nani: You're such a pain!

Anyways, J and I think that Kali has taken this scene to heart and anytime she gets really angry at us (just grownups, not her sister), she runs away and face plants on the floor.  What a drama queen.

(2) God, work is slow.  Like watching rice cook slow.  And it's not just me. 

This is one of those really bad parts about being a lawyer at a biglaw firm.  When things are slow like this, the only work out there is probably pretty crap work.  I've done my requisite reaching out to partners to make sure they know I'm available for work, but I've not been doing everything I can possibly do to get work, like talking to the unpopular partners, for example.

Because I'm definitely in a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation.

If I don't get work, I'm (a) bored outa my friggin' mind, (b) seen as unmotivated, (c) feel lots of self-inflicted guilt, and (d) won't make my required hours to get the year end bonus.  But I know that if I get an assignment, and it will likely be of the craptastic variety, it will mean weird afterhour hours (nights and weekends) which I'm currently enjoying spending with my family.

And this is absolutely true, because the one assignment I've had in the last 3 weeks was a call at 5:30, with an emergency research assignment where the partner wanted a memo by 11am the next day.  I was here until 3am to do that.  Thankfully, it was only a one off.

(3) J and I are (sorta) trying to be more understanding? sympathetic? to each other's plight, but I will only give J 2 stars for his success rate.  J doesn't know/realize/believe it, but he is seriously passive-aggressive.  He hates my inability to control my time at the firm, and I understand his frustration, I really do, but he cannot accept that I have almost no ability to rectify the situation.  Whenever I call at 5:30 or 6 to tell him that, once again, I have to stay late at work, the chill that he sends down the line worth of comparison to the deep freeze in "The Day After Tomorrow".

Truth is, right now, J has more absolute childcare hours than I do.  He spends an extra two hours with them in the evening, pretty much every evening, because my commute into the city and my late quitting hour cuts into our family time (yup, I'm in one of those firms that demands "face time" so I can't leave before the secretaries, even when I have no work).  However, we've extended our nanny's hours, so that he's rarely alone with the kids - our nanny is around, lending a hand and, more importantly, starting dinner.  Compare that to the weekends where J has to go off on one of his conference or other academic jaunts.  I never ask the nanny to help those days and it's me and the girls, all by ourselves.

J thinks somehow, that equal means equal hours spent with the girls, and he give me no credit for the time I spend washing dishes, doing laundry, running the errands that keep the girls in diapers, clothing and miscellaneous.  He also gives me no credit for taking the girls alone, when compared with his time with them with the nanny nearby as back-up.

I'm so tired of the attitude, I don't know what to do.

(4) I know I biotch about J alot in this blog, but, not to mislead anyone, we're not actually in trouble.  And I know that there are probably those out there that wonder WTF I stay in this relationship.  I know it'll sound seriously geeky, but it's because being married to J is like being in school perpetually, which I love.

I know that some may find this hard to believe, but I was a serious fuck-up my first two years in college.  I was such a fuck-up, that I got a "D" in both semesters of a year-long intro Economics course and had to drop out of the gut "Rocks for Jocks" course because I was failing and I didn't want a failing grade.  There was also a smattering of "C"s in there for good measure.

J basically rescued me from that.  (Yes, we have been together for a very, very long time - almost 20 years.)  As a prerequisite to dating him, he made me go to the library for hours every evening to study, he made me do my readings, start my papers in advance.  And he would get really angry at me when I got bad test scores.  And I kept getting better and better at school just so I could "please" my man (ewww... I think I just threw up in my mouth a little).  I was 19/20 at the time, give me a break.

I know - how nuts is that?

He was also an econ major, and got me turned on to econ ten years after the fact.  Everything I know and blog about the economy, finance, etc... now is due to my tutelage under J.  (It certainly ain't from the friggin' 2 econ classes I had 20 years ago.) 

I owe him pretty much all my smarts, and to some extent, my law career.  Had I kept on the road I started in college, I would have had a GPA that was utterly unacceptable for any law school.  As it was, I managed to eek out a reasonable GPA that got me, by the skin of my teeth, into my Tier 2 school.

(5) Citymama has a wonderful entry about buying organic/local.  I admit, I don't do enough in this area, though I keep promising myself that I will, once I climb out of the biglaw hole.  I was great at doing the organic/local thing when I was in law school, but it has taken a back seat to my job.  I'm lucky in this respect, J is quite the skinflint but, especially now that we have children, he is strongly aboard the whole organic/local/good food/slow food band wagon.  He's willing to work with me to cut out other things in order to have the money to buy organic and buy local.

For us, it's really about the time crunch.  Our schedule is so unstable and erratic that we have a hard time planning our meals, which means that if we were to depend on a farmer's market, it would probably mean a lot of wasted food.  We also depend on our nanny a lot for shopping and cooking, so we give her a lot of free reign on the kind of groceries that make it into our home.  Luckily, she's quite a good cook, and she doesn't use much processed fauxfoodstuff.  She shops almost daily (for her, its a fun excursion with the kids) but is only comfortable at the local Stop & Shop. 

But we have a few musts: organic milk and yogurt, organic fruits and vegetables when they are available at the Stop & Shop. 

Now that I've been tracking my spending to the penny, I would say that for our family of four, we spend about $1000/month on groceries.

The (not so) Perfect Storm...

There's definitely a storm a brewin.

With the new year has come a fresh wave of work (it seems) I've put it about 5 late (as in 1-3am) nights over the past two weeks, and it's only the 16th of January. It's weird: you would think all the bad news in the market would be keeping deals form happening, but you wouldn't know it around here.

And now that J's class have started as well, we've begun to have our little fights again (so tired of have the whole, who's slacking more in their responsibilities as parents fight). In terms of time spent with children, I'd have to say that I'm clearly the loser, but there are so many things that make this comparison unfair.

(1) We have a full time nanny. Her hours are supposed to be from 8am to 6pm, Monday through Friday, but in actuality, she works more like 8am to 10pm three or four days a week, and then usually one day out of the weekend. As I have pointed out in Boston Gal's blog, we spend $3000+ on childcare each month. I know this may seem weird, since J is often home at night. But J doesn't cook, doesn't do the laundry, doesn't clean, and refuses to take care of both kids by himself. (He'll take care of one, but not both.) He's very interactive and great with the girls, but (trust me) he truly is incapable of handling both girls alone, so if I'm working late, the nanny has to stay. Thankfully, our nanny is willing to do light housework (I take care of the rest when I'm home) and also make dinners when I'm not home. Even with the high cost, as far as I'm concerned, she's worth her weight in gold.

(2) J and I have a combined income of just under $200k. About 70% of that comes from me. However, being an academic is just a world of weird. First, J was in his post-graduate degree program for 8 years, which is clearly a huge money pit in terms of both debt and lost earnings. And after all that, J graduated into pretty insubstantial earnings. And it's not like his quality of life is that great. Yes, being an academic strangely flexible. Outside of class, his time is his own and he basically doesn't "work" in the summers (though he did teach one class last summer). However, the competition is fierce, which means that J is always off doing research or working on papers. And the worst part is, he gets really agitated when he's spending time with me and the kids because he thinks that he should be spending that time writing. He's a slow producer, which is the kiss of death in the academic world, so I know that it's like a mountain that is slowly crushing him. He feels a constant need to spend more time working because unless he can go tenure track, he'll be trapped in the whole low pay/no stability world.

But like I've said before, he was BORN to do this. He loves his work, in some ways, more than anything else in the world. He is never as happy as he is when he is doing his research or preparing his classes, and when he actually gets somewhere, he's like a little happy puppy. Having never really felt that kind of professional satisfaction, I both envy this satisfaction and resent it. Resent it? Why? Well because...

(3) What do you do when one person makes the money and hates her job and the other person makes no money and loves his. I can downgrade, which is really what I'm hoping to do, since I think we can definitely live on less, but all of my sources say that the best way to move is to have 2-3 years of experience under your belt. Well, I'm like 1-2 years away from that and I'm just not sure we'll survive in the meantime. J could give up his job and allow me to go whole-hog on mine, but (back to point 2) I think that would literally break his heart. So we just keep plugging along, meanwhile, I really feel like crap, especially when, like that one dark period last year, the girls spent 3 days exclusively with the nanny (and they didn't see either me nor J for those 3 days because I was stuck at work, and J was away at a conference).

(4) Finally, it's just been so hard in my marriage recently. J and I aren't together much, but when we are, we're engaged in one vicious fight after another. It's all recrimination and I'm not fair (which I can admit here in the blogosphere, much harder at home) and he's not fair (which I truly believe J doesn't not see at all - he's not the most introspective person on the planet). There's a lot of bad marriage stuff happening all around the blogosphere, but there, it just seems so cut and dry. I mean how do you NOT leave your marriage when the spouse is (take your pick): a spendthrift distroying his and your financial future, an alcoholic or substance abuser, an abuser, a neglectful parent, an adulterer. Those seem so clear. No marriage is hard to leave, but at least some divorces seem more easily justified.

What happens when the two people are just not compatible anymore.

I feel like J and I are so on the brink (J totally disagrees, again, not the most introspective person). And he's one of those people who would turn down marriage counseling if suggested (his father refused to go to counseling when his parents split due to the father's infidelity). I think I remain rational about all this - I still see all the good points about J, the reasons that I married him. It's just that as our lives have gotten more complicated, I don't quite feel like he's evolved to match.

Every time I mention the money thing (summary: I really want to make sure we have enough saved for retirement and the girl's education and as of right now, we pretty much have 0 assets, lots of liabilities) he gets really huffy and calls me (i) materialistic, (ii) wasteful, and (iii) inflicted with keeping-up-with-the-Jonesitis. On some level, I know it's a reaction to my misspent youth, when every penny earned was a penny spent. But it is also grossly unfair, as I've gotten my spending (outside of childcare) hugely under control and, for the first time in my life, I'm fully contributed to my retirement plan. And although there is some part of me that cringes because I have made it a foregone conclusion that we cannot live on J's salary alone (since I know what others live on and they seem to do just fine), I came to the conclusion not without some serious self-searching. When I was in law school, J had basically the same salary, we had no kids, and we got ourselves seriously in debt (yes, mostly school debt, but we borrowed above and beyond that to cover extra expenses once Loo was born, and then some more when J was between jobs without insurance and Kali was born).

Oh, there are so many unpleasant things that I've been accused of - I can't even stand to rememeber them sometimes.

I know that there are going to be people who say that this isn't one of those disaster scenarios, that I've got to try to make it work, if nothing else, at least for the girls. But there are days when I feel like there is absolutely no motivation to make it work.

J and I have been together for almost 15 years. Believe me, it's taken a lot for me to get to this point.

Dark and twisty me...

I heart Grey's Anatomy, though for a long time, I had a real problem with Meredith.  I mean, she's always up to so much damn drama, and wtf with the whole I love him/I love him not relationship with McDreamy.  Hard time committing to a guy like that?  Please.  But then I remembered that as often as not, when I dislike someone, it is because that person reminds me of characteristics of myself that I don't like.  Not that I'm a drama queen - sometimes I'm so non-drama, my husband has to poke me to convince himself that I'm alive.  No, it's the dark and twisty.  I'm dark and twisty.

So now that the tumultuous year of the first year associate is drawing to a close, and we're all breathing a collective sigh of relief, hubs and I are finally revisiting the issue of how we should be restructuring our lives.  It's been a hell of a year, with childcare cobbled together through friends, family, a generous nanny, and some crying jags at the office.  My mother, who helped us for well over a month, was unfortunately here during the cold season and caught a nasty bug from the babes that has, in quite dramatic fashion, apparently turned her asthmatic (I had never heard of such a thing, but it is what her doctor says).  She has come to me, quite apologetically, and said that she didn't think she would be able to do that again, which given her age and health, is hardly surprising.  J's family are no help whatsoever: the MIL is a raving lunatic and has very bizarre notions of what "watching" the grandchildren means (mostly it means doing absolutely everything that I ask her not to do with them) and the FIL (they're divorced) is so distant from his son that J has said that he's uncomfortable asking his father to sit with the girls for even a few hours because FIL has never indicated any interest in helping out. 

Last night, at the firm holiday party, I ran into the partner who helped me get this job (he's on the board of overseers at J's school) for the first time since I joined.  He asked me how things are going and of course, I cautiously divulged that things have been rough between the hours and the girls.  He made some noise about how the firm was looking into ways of helping associates find better work-life balance and I could barely suppress my whatever guffaw (yes, there is theoretically "part-time" available here, but you can't take it until after you've been at the firm a couple of years, and I heard a nightmare story this year about a part-time associate who still billed over 2000 hours for the year).  The motto of my firm should be: if you have a life, you must not be working hard enough.

The "talk", as I lovingly refer to our ongoing conversation about our jobs, has been progressing in fits and starts, mostly because there is actually very little time when hubs and I overlap, are not busy with the kiddos and are not exhasted.  But with two slow weeks behind me, and a renewed sense of energy, I've tackled the "talk" with new vigour.  Basically, I'm trying to convince J that it's time to let go of the dream.  J has agreed that everything I say logically makes sense.  I make more than double what he does, and my bennys are better.  Furthermore, despite the income disparity, J often works into the night, usually past the girls' bedtime (though he has, thankfully, been around almost all weekends).  But everytime we have the conversation, he looks at me as if I'm repeatedly slashing him with a large and very sharp kitchen knife.  His arguments: but if I leave now, I'll never have another chance at the academe; what if we enter a recession, you get laid off, and we need my job; I have no other marketable skills.  Fine, I say.  You don't have to leave your job if you could just get yourself a more stable tenure-track position.  J's been at this for a decade now.  A decade of low-paying, three-year long associate positions with no possibility of extension.  Each in a different part of the country.  In short, I (bitch) want J to be successful.  Unfortunately, J's published very little, has a caustic and wry personality (which has caused an inordinate amount of fisson in his work places) and is not personable enough to be a star teacher.  So I tell J that if he can't do it, then he needs to be at home with the kids so that I have reign to be successful instead.  At this point, he huffs and puffs, yells about how I'm a superficial bitch and how I knew what I was getting into when we got married and shouldn't be changing the terms now, and then refuses to talk.

The truth is, I don't really want to be the sole provider.  I miss being a mommy.  I was, for the most part, a full time mommy to Loo for the first two years of her life and to Kali for the first six months of hers.  I can't imaging being a SAHM, but it has been physically painful to abdicate the role completely, which I seem to have done over the past few months.  I would love it if J and I could just both find reasonable jobs with reasonable hours so that we could be home more.  As it is, I feel that K&L and experiencing real reprecussions of having absentee parents: Loo, who has been potty trained for over a year, has been having daily accidents for the past few weeks and Kal has such a insatiable appetite that her pudgiliciousness is interfering with her toddling.  There is no proof that these are connected to our parenting, but call it a mother's sixth sense.

I know that this isn't forever.  Just like (it seems) every other biglaw associate out there, I'm just in it for the short term experience and cache, which will hopefully get me to something more stable, manageable and family friendly.  But right now, the short term has filled every corner of my foreseeable horizon, and it's hard to be optimistic.  See, dark and twisty.  Dark and twisty me.

***

We went to a holiday party this weekend at a local hotel.  It was an adult affair, but they actually welcomed children with open arms so we decided to bring K&L (well, it was also partly because we just couldn't line up any babysitting).  I was a little apprehensive about the food situation, so I went armed with sammies and jarred babyfood.  As it turned out, the kidlets were thrilled with the butternut squash soup and there was some nicely grilled flounder? trout? that they gobbled down as well.  Of course, Loo couldn't sit still for even a minute (and where Loo goes, Kal goes as well) and so it was me with a plate of food chasing after them for a good portion of dinner. 

At one point Loo befriended one of the other little girls at the party, a 7-year old, T.  They were inseparable for the rest of the night (with T acting as hen mother).  Loo has been calling T. her "best friend" for the last three days. 

When dinner segued into dancing, who was first on the dance floor, with all of her foot stomping glory by little (and by little, I mean roly-poly) Kal.  My baby is a dancing fool.

We left at 11 and the girls did not nod off until midnight. Bad parents.  But a good time was had by all.