Waking Up

I will forever remember this as the year I woke up. To so many things.

I turned 50, kicking and screaming just a year ago. It was honestly traumatic. I was working in a job that I hated with a passion, and was not only miserable myself, I was making my entire family beyond miserable.

I had returned to college when I was 45 and in four short years earned a bachelor's and a master's degree. Mind you, I still had three fairly young children at home so it was challenging - but the exciting kind of challenging.

I had always been a small sort of entrepreneur in order to be able to stay home with the kids. Also, since I didn't have enough formal education at that time, I couldn't have found a job that would have paid enough to cover the childcare/clothing/transportation/taxation expenses it would generate. For us, the answer was clear: I would stay home and sell stuff on eBay and raise the kids. During the gravy-days of those pre-2nd-Great Depression years, this worked out fairly well. Not the greatest financial security, but lots of security knowing I really didn't have another option and that the kids would be better for it.

When my mother died abruptly I entered a new phase of my life. My children were all in school full-day and I was in my middle forties. It was time to finish my education. It had always gnawed at me that I didn't have a college education. I felt like in some way I was a terrible example to my children. My husband had a Ph.D. and I was a high-school drop-out. It wasn't hard for me to figure out that at some point in the future my children would look at me and wonder why I was such a slacker.

So, I took the plunge. I went back to my local City College and picked back up where I had left off more than a decade before when I had started having children. I plunged in and had the best four years of my life. I loved school, I loved almost every teacher and assignment. I found out I had a gift for art history and for writing. I spent hundreds of hours on papers because it was pure joy to do the research and then the crafting of my analyses.

I soon transferred to UCR and then after my B.A. to CSUSB for my M.P.A. I was formally, officially educated now, according to two of the largest institutions of education in the world. My kids were now even older, and I was ready to enter the professional market, specifically in the field of Public Administration. I was supposed to walk in with my smoking new degree and my "mature" abilities and land a local city government job in the range of $50K or so, to start. But it was understood that with my abilities I would quickly earn more.

Did I mention that I started my last class of my education in September, 2008? The day of the big WaMu panic and crash. Yep, I got my fancy education completed about four minutes before the Second Great Depression began.

The Two Income Trap

I just read a great article which is based on a book by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi called "The Two Income Trap - Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are going broke." The authors present a compelling and clear argument about why we women are in this horrible place in history.

According to the authors, and along the lines of my own thinking, pre-Women's Lib, the American mother was a blanket disaster insurance policy for the family. Middle class women were generally college-educated, and also worked in significant jobs prior to marriage and childbearing, events which took them away from the labor market.

Once out of the market (a market in which a single income could support a family in solid middle class), the women became not only mothers, but a back-up system that the family could count upon in hard times. Because they were college educated, and generally had at least some business experience they were able to step into the market if needed due to a spouse being ill, or even losing a job. Mom was there, able to step into the market and help to keep the home economic fires burning until Dad recovered from illness or found a new job.

The American dream was safe with this kind of back up. Families had a stay at home parent who could easily spring into action when needed outside of the home. The fact that most of their time was available to running the home also helped them to maintain their children's entrance into middle-class as they left the family nest by helping to ensure that they were properly educated and inculcated in the ways of the world and the ways of middle class.

According to the authors, in a theory that makes brilliant sense to me, this bulwark of safety for the middle class family was lost the minute women entered the market as dedicated second income winners. The reason for this is that the income that came from Mom going into the labor market was not used to create a new kind of safety net to replace that which they were giving up. They did not use the extra earnings to build a large and comfortable emergency fund, but instead they used it to enter a bidding war against other women and families.

The Holy Grail of Middle Class existence is the Good School. We search out the highest performing schools in the best neighborhoods and then we let the bidding begin. As women earned higher salaries (and farmed their children out to increasingly less educated women to raise, which is a whole 'nuther issue) they began a bidding war for the properties in the neighborhoods of the Good Schools. The effect of this bidding war was an inflation in home prices the likes of which have rarely been seen in post-WWII times.

Home prices rose so steadily and so rapidly that the "second income" from Mom wasn't just a bonus anymore, it was a necessity. The same happened in the consumer goods markets as the new purchasing power was wielded to furnish the Good School homes, homes that grew disproportionately large in short time, and which required a mountain of new items to furnish.

What did women and families get for this new purchasing power? They got over-inflated properties, huge credit card debt, work-exhaustion, and lower rates of return on their labor. They also got children who were no longer under the steady and constant guidance of Mom's watchful eye, they got long commutes, they got over-booked schedules, closets full of "work clothes" and bills from gardeners, dry-cleaners, nannies, day care and sports camps, all of which were now doing the very valuable work that Moms previously executed.

We can see all around us the results of this movement: childhood obesity, sky-rocketing female and child poverty rates, a crushed housing market and the highest EVER bankruptcy rates for women in US history are among the many ills and disadvantages that can be teased out of this mess. And sadly, we women and our families are trapped by those earlier policy decisions that we and our mothers made in the effort to create a new set of opportunities for women.

I don't argue for one minute that women should be able to compete fairly and freely in the labor market, but I do argue that a family needs at least one person at home, be it the father or the mother, to properly raise children and to re-assume the blanket insurance policy position that used to keep their families safe from the winds of mis and ill-fortune.

What we have to do now is figure out how to shift our own lives back into that meaningful balance, and that is going to require a major shift in how we see the world and what we determine is valuable to us and worth fighting for. I don't think a McMansion is it, anymore.