Should the First Lady get paid for what she does?

Last week, Lauren Stiller Rikleen wrote in the Washington Post of the strange office that is the First Lady’s, with its full-time supporting role to the most powerful job in the world and everything that comes with it. But no pay. What the First Lady needs, Rikleen said, is a job description and a salary.

Today, a Minnesota stay-at-home dad, Mike Smith, counters that notion.

“Get real,” says the self-described “First Gentleman of the Beige House in Plymouth.” He too gave up a career as a mechanical engineer to stay home with the kids. He too has an undefined job which includes everything from head cook to gutter cleaner to launderer. Rikleen’s arguments, he says, minimizes the choices he and thousands of other men and women have made.

I think Rikleen has a good point. Michelle Obama ran as hard in the campaign as her husband did, and is set for a job that’s going to consume her life and her family’s. Interestingly, my husband, the stay-at-home dad, agrees with Smith, that it’s a choice Obama made and that all sorts of people volunteer in politics for the greater good. 

Cribsheeters?

Despite the doom and gloom in the newspaper industry, we’ve still managed to retain a few perks at work. A decent fitness center with lunch-hour yoga and spinning classes. A locker room with only slightly icky showers. Subsidized parking.

And through it all, there’s been Emily, who came in once every two weeks to pamper us with back and shoulder massages. She’d set up her massage table in an empty conference room, dim the lights and was open for business. $17 bought us 15 minutes of bliss. An escape from the stress of work. Respite for arms and shoulders abused by hours everyday pounding on a keyboard. The greedy ones amongst us (yes, me) sometimes booked two sessions. 

But now Emily’s gone.   

Emily’s departure wasn’t the result of corporate downsizing. She simply found another gig - doing massages at a chiropractor’s near her home in River Falls. For her, it was a (much) shorter commute and sure-fire business, unlike the sometime unpredictable appointments at the Star Tribune. 

And Kay and I are bereft.

For Emily wasn’t just a pair of magic hands. She was a fount of knowledge and a source of ideas for this blog.

There was her water birth post. Her lesson on bedtime affirmations (It works!).

“What will we do without Emily?” Kay wailed. “She’s our sage.”

Emily, we already miss you.

What are your perks at work? What would you like to have? What have you lost in these grim times?

I got an e-mail with this subject line a couple of weeks ago.

It was from a teacher at Phalen Lake Hmong Studies and Core Magnet School in St. Paul. Her students were starting a school newspaper and she wanted to know if I could come in so they could interview a real, live newspaper reporter.

Well, of course.

In these dark days of newspaper journalism, somebody was actually interested in what we do. Wow.

I showed up Tuesday morning. Seven kids, from Grades 2 to 6, sat around the table.

They had doughnuts on the table and cards with prepared questions in their hands.

They launched in. 

Some questions were predictable: ”How old are you?” “How old were you when you started writing for the Star Tribune newspaper?” ”How old were you when you started being a reporter?”

There were the huge questions: “What do you write in a newspaper?” (I told them we have an army of editors debating this in endless meetings all day.) The practical ones: “If somebody writes something for you to put in the newspaper, do you have to type the whole thing?”

Then the teacher asked me something I should have anticipated and prepared for. But didn’t.

“If you had one piece of advice for them on putting out a newspaper, what would it be?” (more…)

A situation I hope never to be in - trying to figure out who pays who for child support in a divorce. Jean Hopfensberger writes in the Sunday paper about new child support rules introduced last year that takes into account the incomes of both former spouses, not just the non-custodial one.

Mothers rights groups say it punishes the custodial parent - 90 percent of whom are women - and creates a perverse dis-incentive to work since mothers who work harder and make more money will see child support go down. Dads’ groups say even with the new formula, their portion of child support is still too high. 

Lots of Mad Dads commenting. At least, I think they’re dads from the nature of the comments…

…. my four-year-old asks at breakfast.

Phew. Such a simple question. So difficult to answer.

I want to say it’s something you get paid for but then how to explain what her stay-at-home dad does? And then there’s the “work” they do at preschool (Montessori teachers call everything work - as in “put away your work now.”).

I end up telling her a story instead of how I love to write and I’m good at it so I went to the newspaper and they liked me too. And so they said will you work for us and now they give me money for it. And I use the money to pay for food and our house. Long-winded and lame and narrow, I know.

And it didn’t really answer her question at all.

And with that less-than-riveting answer, my daughter gazed out in our back yard and pronounced: “Mommy, that’s a really big spiderweb.”

Her question stuck with me through the morning.

Because you know, it’s a question we ask ourselves all through our lives. I’m lucky enough to love what I do for a living. But there have definitely been ups and downs in my career.

Our enduring quest to answer Zoe’s question - “what is work?” - is why we read books like “What Color is your Parachute.” It’s why something gets caught in our throats when we watch “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” and the bearded, long-haired drifter talks about searching for his “life work” which unexpectedly appears in the form of a flock of wild green and red parrots.

So I asked a couple of people who know a lot about work what they would have said to my Zoe. (more…)