mostly about quilts: single parenthood

Showing posts with label single parenthood. Show all posts

...And Now A Word From Our Hamster...

Okay, I rarely throw up two posts so quickly, and I do so at the risk of burying a decent one, but this was just too . . . too . . . Hamstery to pass up.

Ran across this amazing piece of reportage/opinion in the bowels of the Huffington Post (see? TOLD you I was a Progressive...) and almost peed myself when I read this gem: "Why We Shouldn't See Divorce As A 'Failed' Marriage", by Vicki Larson -- self-declared Journalist, Mother, and Thinker (although after reading this, someone might want to verify her CV on that last count). Ms. Larson contends that a divorce is not a "failed marriage". Which is, perhaps, the greatest single example of the Rationalization Hamster going.

Look, it's not that I don't 'believe' in divorce. I don't have a religious dog in the fight over 'til death do us part' and the Biblical underpinnings of modern matrimony. In my tradition we usually pledge "As long as love shall last", which might seem to lack commitment but is a far more realistic measurement of the durability of a marriage these days. Still, my tradition also places a very, very high value on keeping oaths. Especially sacred oaths. If you swear before the gods and your ancestors and all the spirits of nature that you will stay married 'til death do us part', then you have made a vow which should be kept if humanly possible.

Still, accepting divorce as a part of our society is not the same as celebrating it. Contend with it, deal with it, make provision for it, sure-- but celebrating it the way they do at Huffington Post is just pathetic. And Ms. Larson's take on the subject has proven to be among the most pathetic examples of the Hamsterization of Divorce.

You can read the whole thing, but to sum up her point divorce shouldn't be seen as a 'failed marriage' (which would imply someone was at fault -- to blame -- responsible -- guilty -- for the loss) because:

1) She doesn't want to take the blame (" no one better tell me that my marriage "failed." No, it ended in divorce. And, yes, I did start over.")

2) Some people are abused or cheated on, so they shouldn't be blamed either.

3) Divorce is better than staying in a really, really bad marriage.(Or, apparently, even a moderately bad one. Or a decent one but a better deal comes along. But according to the Hamster that's almost like he was beating you, so . . .)

4) Everybody is doing it. ("about half of us can't, maybe even more given how many couples remain married in name only because of financial or health-care benefits.")

5) We might not be designed to be monogamous anyway ("The fact that half of all married couples end up divorced by their 20th anniversary raises some serious questions on whether we are able to be "permanent, monogamous pair-bonders." ) Or it raises serious questions about the flakiness of and ability to trust a commitment from an alleged adult in this day and age. But it really is more convenient to blame evolution.

6) You shouldn't judge me ("who decides what's the "right" or "wrong" reason to divorce? Why should a spouse be labeled a "quitter" or "selfish" if he or she decides the marriage isn't working? ") Um . . . because they quit? Because "it isn't working for me" is an inherently selfish statement? Because when you promise something, you're supposed to live up to that promise?

7) It only hurts kids if we don't prepare them for the fact that their parents can't get it together and manage a simple heterosexual relationship: (" ...the importance of good co-parenting relationships and keeping both parents involved in meaningful ways in their kids' lives. ") So you make great parents? Then you have the possibility for being a great wife or husband. Your unwillingness to make the effort and see it through is instructive of your character.

8) It's unfair to compare children of divorce to "normal" kids. We should only compare them to kids from really, really shitty married households. Kids who grow up in happy, two-parent households are aliens or something. But if you compare kids from crappy divorced parents to kids from crappy married parents, they don't look so bad anymore. And that's how a hamster moves a goalpost, boys and girls.

9) She doesn't want to take the blame. (" We shouldn't slap a #fail label on people who divorce. Let's have faith that they'll do things better the next time -- or maybe the time after that.") Why not? Haven't you failed? And aren't you actually more likely to fail the second time around, since you've already built-in failure by considering a third? That's like buying a car you know is destined for the junkyard . . . it's only a matter of time. After all, it's been in one bad wreck already . . .

While 'prior performance is not indicative of future results', it's usually a pretty serious indicator, a red-flag warning at the least. And since more than half of second marriages fail in the first few years, then a two-time loser should be a klaxon in your ear. I've seen plenty of second-marriages work out just fine, as folks made more mature and reasoned decisions the second time around, and brought some skills from the first marriage to the second. But redefining failure as success doesn't make it any more successful. That's the Hamster talking.

See why I almost peed?

Ms. Larson, perhaps you skipped that day in journalism school when they covered "objective reality", or perhaps the part of English 101 when they went over "words mean things". But divorce, by any reasonable, rational observation, is, indeed, a failed marriage. Like a miscarriage is a "failed pregnancy". There was an expectation and a reasonable level of determining success . . . and you screwed it up. The two of you. That means him AND you.

To be fair, there is usually one party or the other that is at MORE fault, I'll grant you. But the expectations and commitment implied that day you wore that pretty white dress and those darling slippers for your big party were crystal clear. If you are not married before you or your spouse dies, then your marriage failed. And yes, you bear a certain amount of responsibility for that regardless of whether or not you were the 'offending' party. You can stamp your foot and say it isn't fair, that it shouldn't count, that things have changed, but the real, Red Pill objective-reality fact of the matter is that YOUR MARRIAGE FAILED.

You can try to 'normalize' it to make yourself feel better. You can try to come up with great excuses why you shouldn't be judged about that, because it makes you uncomfortable. But where the rubber meets the road, you rated the commitment you pledged about the most important aspect of your life low enough that you could rationalize away the fact that you made a sacred promise that you broke.

If you weren't planning on finishing the race, why bother to start? Did you not understand the level of commitment involved? Did you not comprehend what you were signing on for? Did you give it any more thought, study, and consideration than you gave your cell-phone contract . . . or were you busy dealing with place settings and flower arrangements and sea-foam green bridesmaids dresses?

Your marriage failed. It didn't 'transform', it died. Regardless of any other circumstance, you and your husband chose not to honor the biggest voluntary commitment any human being can make to each other. Therefore, your marriage failed. You can try to blame it on society, on statistics, on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You can try to trash the institution and point out that a high failure rate implies that the whole institution is poorly conceived. You can try to blame the system, the economy, the fortunes of war, the pressures of modern life, or the whims of blessed Hera, Herself, but the undeniable fact is that YOUR MARRIAGE FAILED. And since you were a part of that, as blameless as you might be, yes, YOU failed at being married. You failed at being a wife. Your ex failed at being a husband. Fail, fail, #fail!

Are troubled, sick, dysfunctional marriages better than divorce? Perhaps. I'll agree that you cannot count such as 'successful' marriages. But they aren't 'failed' marriages, they are fail-ing marriages. Regardless of their condition or context, they are still in the present tense. Divorce means your marriage is in the past tense . . . and that means it Failed. A big fat F.

I don't know if you just didn't do your due diligence on your mate and improperly vetted them, or if you decided you could do better, or you just didn't have the character to handle the challenges implicit in a functioning heterosexual dyad, but it doesn't matter. Your marriage failed. You may not want us to judge you for it, but the fact is that some people do, and always will. It amazes me that people who would freak out over the idea of not paying their taxes or doing the volunteer work they signed up for or abandoning a puppy look at the commitment implied in marriage as one of those "it doesn't really count" promises.

I know of at least one employer who will not hire someone who's divorced, if he finds out and learns the details. And since he does a criminal background check and credit check on his potential employees, he almost always finds out. But since he works in an industry where trust is their stock-in-trade, he is very, very cautious about the people he hires. His employees are his reputation, and he understandably doesn't want to risk what he's built because one of them went flaky. When every deal could mean millions of dollars, trust is a serious issue.

But he won't hire divorced people, except in rare cases, because he reasons that if the prospective employee doesn't take a commitment to creating a family -- and family is forever -- seriously enough to work through marital difficulties, then it doesn't matter what other accomplishments that individual has to their name, they are not considered trustworthy. They couldn't keep a sacred commitment, which undermines their credibility on everything else. They are unacceptable risks.

It's almost gotten him sued a couple of times, but being in a right-to-work state and having fewer than the Federal-reg-triggering 15 employees gives him all the legal ground he needs. To him, the integrity of divorced people are suspect, at the very least, until the specifics are known. That's not to say that married people are any more trustworthy, but they have at least one public vow or commitment that they are living up to.

Ms. Larson, this is nothing more than you trying to wiggle out of the responsibilities of adult life. Your marriage failed. Deal with it -- preferably by 'moving on', and not reliving and celebrating your bitter 'victory' in public on the internet. Divorce means your marriage failed. You either did a poor job of mate selection or you didn't do what you needed to to maintain a working relationship, but a rejection of logic and reason as profound as "Divorce doesn't mean your marriage failed!" is not going to make that go away.

You can move on. You can rebuild. You can "start over" (although any man who dated, let alone married, a woman who writes a 'divorce' column is either recklessly optimistic or addicted to drama). You can remarry. You can learn from your failure and try not to repeat your personal mistakes. But you cannot call a divorce a successful outcome of a marriage any more than you can claim a miscarriage is a successful outcome of a pregnancy. Not and be intellectually honest.

That's what the Rationalization Hamster is all about: allowing women to live their lives as they desire without accepting any blame, responsibility, or accountability for their actions. A "woman's prerogative to change her mind" is well known -- but intellectual flakiness at this level, Ms. Larson, strains credulity. You cannot define failure as success -- not really. You can lie to yourself. You can lie to your kids. You can lie to society-at-large. But no matter how hard your hamster spins, it cannot escape the cold, ruthless, uncomfortable objective fact that YOUR MARRIAGE FAILED. And, by extension, YOU FAILED.

So deal with it. Don't celebrate it. It's not something to celebrate. You screwed something important up big time, somehow, and while your attempt to rationalize it away as "not your fault" is understandable, it's also lame and pathetic and childish to try to escape responsibility for your failure. That's not what adults do. You're just embarrassing yourself.

Now, back to the show . . .

UPDATE: Also check out my collection of rum-derived Manosphere Inspirational Posters!

If women don't 'need' a man these days, how come all I hear is "Where have all the good men gone?" from feminists and single mommies?

I was intrigued by venerable OMGBadger’s post over at the Badger Hut today, looking at the intriguing andoft-touted meme that Women Don’t Need Male Providers anymore. While I encourage you to examine his analysis yourself, I did have a few thoughts about it, vis-à-vis feminism.

The fact is, this is one of those “both yes and no” questions. Yes, women can, technically, exist in our society without a male provider assisting them – and I think that it’s only proper that they can. In a post-industrial society there is no valid reason for any adult human being with a basic education to not be able to support themselves. As a matter of fact, I’ve stated this over and over recently to my 18 year-old niece who hasn’t quite bought into the concept.

But there is a difference between being able to support yourself at a subsistence level and actually thriving in our society. As Badger points out, women tend to do better, personally, in two-income households. As a single woman in a blue or pink collar job, the cost of basic living expenses and the “feminine supplies” implicit in being a girl (cosmetics, health-and-beauty, twice as much underwear, birth control, feminine hygiene supplies, 8.2 assloads of shoes), there is precious little left with which to advance either the poor girl’s education and training or her standard of living. Call this the “Laverne and Shirley” mode. As a young single woman you have a job that pays for your basement apartment and food, and you work part time for pizza-and-beer-and-gossip-mags money. This is “subsistence living, industrial style”.

Add even a single child to this equation and suddenly you’re in poverty.

Luckily (for women) there are plenty of service jobs that pay slightly more than the blue/pink collar jobs out there. As long as a young woman pays for all of her necessities and is thoughtful and careful about her spending, she should be able not just support herself, but to gradually improve her standard of living and/or invest in her education.

Of course the number of young women who understand budgeting and saving and investment – not to mention thoughtful and careful spending – is so statistically small so that what usually happens (according to a veteran financial planner friend of mine – I got nerds) is that the young lady in question racks up a lot of debt early on and ends up using up most of her expendable income in finance charges.

Add a kid to this equation without a second income, and you’re back to the Laverne and Shirley subsistence-level, or worse.

For dudes, it’s a little easier. For one thing, our basic living costs are lower. Not only do we not have all of the expenses associated with having a vagina, listed above, but we also don’t tend to indulge in the kind of shopping that breaks a lot of our female contemporaries. A 25 year old dude will often have a quarter of the wardrobe that a woman the same age does. In addition, according to my financial planner pal, dudes are more likely to start saving earlier, and tend to hold a lower debt threshold. It helps that after their main expenses are paid their capital tends to go towards consumables, technology, and transportation (beer, videogames, cars).

This is the Puerarchy, that happy land where you work hard, come home, drink beer, and play videogames with your buds all week, and then sarge the bars on the weekends -- Valhalla, in other words. The occasional addition of a girlfriend will reduce a dude’s expendable income, of course, but thanks to hook-up culture the cost of dating without a commitment has gone down dramatically. Saving and financial planning is also more important to a dude than, say, a 70% off sale at Lane Bryan. Of course he might turn around and spend $300 on comic books, but . . . hey, some of those are worth something.

I know a dude I went to High School with who skipped college, turned his tech skills into a full-time data management job at a hospital, and by the time the rest of us were struggling to graduate and living at home, he had moved out of his shitty apartment and bought a house. At 23. By 25 he cashed in his equity and appreciation and upgraded. I don’t know of a single female peer who showed as much financial initiative. Indeed, three of my wife’s friends from HS had filed for bankruptcy by the time they were 25.

So being a woman who can make her own money is great . . . as long as she doesn’t care about her own future or want children. You go, girl!

Of course, if you do want kids . . . well, without a dude in the picture, it’s gonna get expensive. Even with a dude, it's expensive. But without one, the problems become more than just things you can throw money at. A woman in my neighborhood tired of not finding Mr. Right and ended up adopting a little girl from overseas to fulfill her maternal urges. Without additional assistance she has to pay for a housekeeper, before and after school care, yard crew, home maintenance and repair service and a part-time nanny . . . and sees her precious bundle of joy about nine hours a week, because she has to work plenty of overtime to afford her lifestyle.

Sure, it’s a personal choice. That’s fine. But a woman who has a child without a second income (much less a second parent) not only suffers economically, she also affects the development of the child. I’m not going to argue that a one-parent household can’t produce competent, capable adults, because I know that it can. But the penalty paid by these families is steep, and the kids are the ones who suffer with that legacy. I see all sorts of kids in my community, from school to scouts to my children’s friends. It doesn’t take a genius to realize, once you’ve been interacting with them for a while, that there is a definite difference between how the two-parent kids act and how the one-parent kids act. I’d even go so far as to say that socially and culturally, all other things being equal, the two-parent kids tend to perform better.

But what about the feminist dream of the strong, hyper-capable woman who can be a full-time career woman who is also a successful mother and (possibly, if she feels like it) wife? Do these women exist?

Yes. I’m married to one. And she couldn’t do half of the shit she does if it wasn’t for my support and income.

My wife makes good money, and on paper she should be able to afford to care for all three of the Ironwood kids without any help from me – she’s brilliant and very, very good at what she does. However, despite her high earning potential, she could not manage the children and the household at their current level without me. Or at least not at our present standard of living. That second income is a substantial factor in our budgeting. And that second pair of hands is vital in the rearing of high-quality, championship free-range children.

I’ve seen the Mommies who try to do it all without a man in the picture. It’s sad. Divorced or never-married, it doesn’t matter what kind of career these women have or how successful they are, even if they get Susie to soccer on time and manage to pay for camp they are often unhappy, miserable wretches who end up taking out their frustrations on their kids. They should be enjoying the rich bounty of endless horizons and personal fulfillment through their careers while effortlessly raising non-violent, non-sexist, productive little members of society untainted by the evils of patriarchy, according to feminist ideology. Take the bicycle away from the fish, and it will swim just fine, right?

Only that isn't what's happening. If I was a betting man, I'd say that in nine out of ten cases these single mommies -- divorced or never married -- would prefer to have both financial and practical assistance in raising their kids, even if it meant putting up with lackluster sex and a few annoying habits to do it. Hell, most of these women would walk over hot coals at the possibility of a reasonably decent date, let alone a marriage proposal. The gilt of feminism has worn off of the prospect of a professional career, and these women -- capable, intelligent women -- are seeing the stark reality underneath. Feminism isn't empowering anymore. In the Middle East and Africa, perhaps, it's about women's civil and human rights, but in the West? Feminism is what persuaded them that they didn't need the men who (in many cases) would have been happy to have a larger role in their kids' lives (in those cases where the father was identifiable . . . Ecstasy is, apparently, a hell of a drug).

Men were supposed to respect their career aspirations and factor their career goals into their own, equally, according to feminism. Not drop you after a second date when they realize that you have to work 70 hours a week to afford your condo and your crappy car. Feminism said that men were supposed to value you as a colleague at work (eventually) and respect you for your contributions, not see you alternately as a hateful bitch in competition with them or a potentially easy lay. Feminism told them that the sisterhood of women everywhere is a powerful force that should help propel them from languishing at the bottom of the corporate ladder to the top with their mentorship and assistance. It didn't mention the part about female subordinates using the power of their position to socially bully your entire department, claim credit for your ideas and continuously sabotage your own efforts at success. That was supposed to be what men did.

They struggle through and suffer on because they have kids who depend on them and they are good moms, despite their issues. And each, not surprisingly, will rise to defend feminism if you dare attack it as a potential source of their problems. Feminism, to them, means never having to take any shit from a man . . . while the rest of their life shits on them in giant bucketloads.

It means they never have to go back to cooking and cleaning for a man (although they do enough of it for themselves and their kids), never having to ask a man's permission to buy anything (although there's precious little money left over to buy anything) and never having to have sex with a man if they don't want to (although quite a few of them will admit that they'll have sex with a date out of sheer boredom, even if they don't like him much, because to do otherwise would imply that they aren't sexually-active adult women who can make their own choices about their bodies). It means never having to worry about their father hitting her kids (although she desperately wishes someone would straighten them out, because they sure as hell aren't listening to her). It means never having to bow to her husbands wishes about where the family goes on vacation, which neighborhood to live in, or what car to buy (although vacations are nearly non-existent, they live where they can afford to on one salary, and they drive whatever car they can afford to keep alive -- especially since NOT ONE of them to my knowledge knows anything about automotive repair, so they go to expensive mechanics for even simple repairs or routine maintenance).

They are, in other words, by-god FREE from the tyranny of male oppression! They have slipped from the surely bonds of the Patriarchy and have created loving families on their own, without a man! They are living the feminist dream of being a professional career woman AND a mother, with no good-for-nothing-but-child-support father around.

That doesn't mean they don't have complaints. Their top complaint? It’s not about the glass ceiling or how hard it is to be a woman in a male-dominated workplace, or any of the traditional feminist memes, as you would expect.

It’s “Where have all the good men gone?”

They ask me constantly, anxiously, rhetorically and practically, because I know a lot of dudes.

Unfortunately, I don't know a lot of dudes interested in a middle-aged mother of two who works 70 hours a week and pays for a gym membership but never goes. I mean, why would they be? But these single mommies keep asking me, and if I don't have a specific answer ("Oh, there's one over there! Careful . . . don't move to quickly. And be careful how you handle him. If his wife smells you on him, she'll reject him from the nest.") then they ask me in general terms. "Where have all the good men gone?" they ask, relentlessly, like I'm hiding the answer. They want to think that there's a secret cave where the good men get lured, and there are thousands of big-dicked billionaire Alphas just waiting to be freed from their underground prison, or something. They don't want to heart the truth, at all: