A Man is Not a Financial Plan

That headline is not mine. I stole that line from a recent book called Get to Work, which made a very persuasive argument against women leaving the workplace to spend years as homemakers/mommies.

Even though I didn't coin the phrase, I find myself agreeing with the author's argument more emphatically with each passing year.

Privileged upper middle-class women have made a mini-trend of opting out of the workplace for two or ten years while their kids are young. This is a romantic but misguided decision, as the author so compellingly points out.

Why? Because a large percentage of women will find their man-based financial plan fails them due to the four D's: death, divorce, disability, and derailment (i.e. layoff/firing). If you stop working and your husband loses his job, divorces you, dies, or becomes disabled, you are out of luck. You then find yourself at age 40 or 50 jobless, with an outdated resume and skill set but the same financial obligations.

I know several women who stopped working for years, only to face a divorce. Two ended up supported by their parents; a demoralizing prospect in middle age. Another is rapidly running through her inheritance. Another had to scramble to find a less well-paying job. But of course welfare is where their less fortunate peers end up in the same circumstances.

I also know several stay-at-home moms whose husbands lost their jobs. All three men were ultimately able to find jobs just before their severance pay ran out, but wouldn't that experience have been far less stressful for everyone had their wives had jobs to help support their families? We are likely to see many, many more job losses in the next couple years in this precarious economy, and many fewer who actually find a new job. Why would anyone take that risk?

Finally, there is death and disability. Many people with children have life insurance, but that money goes very fast when you are supporting a family, paying a mortgage, facing college costs, paying private health insurance fees, etc. You'd have to have a $1 million or more to make up for the loss of a family's only wage-earner.

Actually disability, as my own family found out, is far more likely to be the fate of younger people. Yes, good disability insurance helps (better check yours though; most company-paid policies only pay out 60 percent of your salary and are taxable on top of that), but who is going to save for retirement and pay for health insurance? My friends who were employed when their husbands had strokes are doing much better than those who were unemployed or freelancing.

Given the percentages of women who will end up in one of these situations sometime in their adult lives, I am incredulous at how many still opt for the mommy track. Before you make the same choice, please think long and hard about it. Because a man is not a financial plan.

Old Parents

Note: The following screed is a hard one because I'm one of the guilty parties. Nevertheless, given how stylish it has become to be an ancient parent (for just one example, see this week's People magazine with its glowing article on old celeb moms), this rant's time has come.

One of the many experiments we Baby Boomers have embraced is geriatric parenthood. We wanted to marry late, travel, party, and just generally not settle down to diapers and PTA until we absolutely had to. So it was that—thanks to the twin facilitators of high-tech pregnancy assistance and international adoption—many of us became first-time parents at 40, 45, 50, or even older.

Why not? We were still young (we said)! We were more mature now, more financially stable, more ready to nurture. Given our yoga classes, organic produce, and low-fat everything, we planned to live to 100—plenty of time to raise the little tykes we were taking on in middle age.

Well, guess what? Illness, death, and disability happen more often to old people than to young ones—even old people who run 5 miles a day and don't drink. My evidence is anecdotal, but it's alarming nevertheless: I know dozens of middle-aged parents of young children who are sick, disabled, or dead.

There's the mother of two girls adopted from China who died of lupus right after bringing the little one home. Or her peer, who died of cancer last year at age 58, leaving a sixtysomething husband with two grade-school girls. Or the two adoptive moms I know who are struggling with ovarian cancer, and not likely to win. Or the other mom with a 60-year-old spouse, whose diabetes has rendered her nearly blind and barely mobile. Or playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who finally got pregnant in her fifties with a donor egg and soon after died, leaving an 8-year-old behind. Or my own husband, hit by a stroke in his mid-forties (our girls are 8 and 12) and permanently disabled.

And these kids are all under 13—how many of their geezer parents are even going to be around by the times the kids finish college? Or able to help them financially or emotionally when they're in their [still unstable] twenties?

There's a very selfish aspect to taking on parenthood in your forties and fifties. We boomers wanted to experience parenthood, and even if nature didn't cooperate, we could afford it through means technical and bureaucratic. But is it truly fair to our kids? Let's ask them in 20 years.

Tour de France

When did it become necessary for every bicyclist to wear, even on the shortest of jaunts, togs fit for the Tour de France? Unless you are entered in a race or planning to cycle at least 40 miles, please confine yourself to normal clothes. The funniest example of this I saw (in precious Linden Hills, of course, my home turf but admittedly full of self-important types) was a middle-aged guy hauling two screaming kids in a Burley, while fitted out as if he were planning to meet up with Lance A that very afternoon. Stick to Dockers, dad.

Baggage

I am going to turn into the Andy Rooney of bloggers; perhaps my blog's title is giving me license to do so? But then isn't that what the blogosphere is all about? Finding a place to hold forth on stuff without making your friends actually listen to you?

My next subject is one that has bugged me for awhile: Why do people carry so much junk with them everywhere they go? The classic example, of course, is packing for a trip. If you're going away for a weekend, you should only need a small duffel bag. Why is it then, that so many people traveling for two nights carry two huge suitcases plus assorted carry-ons? Do they need dozens of choices at each moment? Do they need a coat for each micro-climate? What are they so afraid of?

Where this trend manifests itself most ridiculously is the upper middle class moms with their uber-strollers. It may be just a simple walk to the park but it has the appearance of a sherpa mounting the final assault on K2. The bloated strollers are strapped down with juice boxes, extra sweaters, snacks, diapers, board books, and God knows what else. Probably a musk ox and oxygen canisters.

What to me feels like a suffocating load of junk and an assault on my freedom must feel to most people like safety and security. Okay, I can accept our differences. Except when your giant suitcase has landed on my head because you can't lift it into the overhead compartment or when your stroller on steroids is blocking the way to my latté.

The Professionalization of Kids' Activities

When my 8-year-old daughter entered a new school last fall with less music in its curriculum, I signed her up for a girls chorus. She has a beautiful voice and loves to sing; what better outlet than an all-girls chorus, I thought.

Wrong. Before you could sing Do-Re-Mi, the choir directors had sent memos about two separate uniforms that had to be purchased, assigned 17 different pieces of music (half in foreign languages), and arranged five concerts in December alone, not to mention extra rehearsals. What had started as a casual and fun way to keep my grade-schooler singing had been transformed into a nightmare of scheduling and practicing and stressing out.

Unfortunately, this is all too often the case with any children's activity these days. Back in the 196os, when I was an 8-year-old going to lessons, we just weekly practiced our ballet or Scottish dancing (yes, I took both) and performed one low-key recital—wearing homemade costumes and watched mostly by parents—at the end of the year. Not anymore. Now apparently anything worth doing is worth overdoing, kids and family life be damned. The fun slowly leaks out of everything, replaced by the premature need for excellence. All of which is driven by adults with their own ego agendas, of course.

But leave them alone for a few hours, and you'll see what kids really like to do: Put on their own shows. Shortly after dropping out of the overachieving choir, this same 8-year-old had a friend over to play. Three hours later they put on a puppet show of their devising, complete with hand-made paper puppets and officious looking tickets. We parents sat on the bed and watched the show unfold, as two happy grade schoolers giggled their way through their own fun. No uniforms required.