At soccer practice last night, charging for a ball I split open my brow against the head of another player doing the same. Didn’t come home from the hospital until one AM, starved for dinner, stinking of practice, and stitched across the top of my eye. Poor Anna. She was still awake when I got in. She knows how important sport is to me and is willing to watch Ada into the night for it, but this, combined with her usual ongoing worries, really had her exhausted. Makes we wonder how the ski season is going to turn out, if at all.
All parents make sacrifices, yet women make more of them, if in ways men don’t always see. A father curtails his activities, goes on a few less fishing trips or stays in on a Friday night. All the while the mother is changing most of the diapers, waking in the middle of the night to breastfeed, fretting over the best ways and means of caring for the child, reading books and comparing notes with other mothers, concerned to her core over the smallest detail of car seat and baby rattle. Men think, oh, the baby’ll be fine. One way or another, the kid will turn out all right, as long as we give her plenty of love and keep her from running out barefoot in a snowstorm.
The next morning, wrecked as I was, it was the least I could do to wake and get to work on time — both because we need the money and because I’d brought the situation on myself. That was my sacrifice. Anna wanted me to sleep in. But what was a touch of discomfort all day if it meant not losing a few hours wages? A touch of discomfort: isn’t that what parenting is all about? A skin-deep sliver of pain or anxiety or sleep depravation, ameliorated by the infusion of love you feel for your babe? The love that keeps you going, that larger force, despite the raggedness of your parts?
Heard Obama on the radio defending the effectiveness of the bank bailouts, how without Fed chairman Bernanke shoveling dough at the banks that were “too big to fail” the whole show would’ve caved in on itself and the recession would’ve become the next Great Depression. Part of me says, Oh, yeah, let’s see about that, let’s try that experiment. Obama won’t admit it, but Bernanke’s plan is but a continuation of trickle-down economics. I’d like to see some flood-up economics. Give that 900 billion to the working people (by way of tax breaks, WPA style work programs, reinforcement of social institutions, or hell, straight cash in installments) and I guarantee you the stuck economy will get moving again, from the ground up. People who can’t afford to invest money, but must spend it on rent and real goods to get by, will do the greasing of the gears that “credit flow” ostensibly does. Let the upper towers tremble a little. Those fat cats climbed up there, let them get down on their own. So long as our economic foundation — village economics — still has bricks and mortar with which to rebuild itself, I don’t fear a little glass falling out of penthouse windows. Let the mega-corporations and chain stores and the big banks crumble. The people will still be here; and they just may rediscover the old American can-do spirit that has, up until the infantilizing effects of corporate takeover, made this country strong.
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