Sense and Sensibility

So Women Are Smarter and Richer, What Now?

My friend is a “Sugar Mama.”

She’s got a six figure job, a mansion in a stately Boston suburb, a house on the Vineyard— and a husband to stay home with the kids.

This arrangement has given her pause over the years. There have been acute spasms of guilt when she was ready to ditch the whole stiletto-and-Blackberry thing for Silly Putty and Build-a-Bear. But her less-marketable husband could never pull in the Croesus purse that she does, and so the couple has decided to do what many others have done, have one parent stay in the cave and the other slay the dragons.

Except that in my friend’s case, the woman is the dragon slayer.

And in the eight years that she has been pulling this off, a lot of women have joined her.

A new study finds that married women are making, as Katie Couric might say, a lot of jack.

The study, from the Pew Center for Research, found that more women are marrying men with less education and lower earnings. Men, increasingly, are marrying women who are better educated and make more money.

The Pew study followed news that the number of working mothers who are sole breadwinners in their families rose last year to an all-time high, while the number of stay-at-home dads inched upwards. The U.S. Census reported that in most of the homes with women as breadwinners, both parents had worked until the recession, which sliced with particular ferocity into male-dominated jobs like finance and construction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports hat 78 percent of jobs lost during the recession were held by men, and that women’s wages have risen by 1.2 percent more than men’s over the past two years.

Anybody who had been following education trends was unlikely to be surprised at the findings; women have been outpacing males in college enrollment for some years now. College degrees tend to increase earning power, even in a landscape when women still earn 78 percent of what men earn. At some point, those women were going to marry, produce children and face the thorny question of who was going to sacrifice what.

It seems hard to believe that only a few years ago, hard-core feminists were lobbying grenades into the “Mommy Wars” lambasting uber-educated women for “opting out” of the labor force to spend time with their children. Fewer women are able to do that today; the Census reports that the number of stay at home moms declined from 5.3 million to 5.1 million last year.

All of this is a seismic shift in American marriage; only 40 years ago, teachers, stewardesses and others were summarily fired if they got married. “Marriage is a different deal than it was 40 years ago,” Pew economist Roger Fry, told USA Today. “Typically, most wives did not work, so for economic well-being, marriage penalized guys with more mouths to feed by no extra income. Now most wives work. For guys, the economics of marriage have become much more beneficial.”

Marriage has always been a good bet for men. As Elizabeth Gilbert points out in her new book, “committed,” Married men live longer than single men; . . . married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men.”

And now it’s even better.

None of this means that men are “opting out” of wingtips for Webkinz. Stay-at-home dads represent a mere 1 percent of the population. And many women agonize over the wrenching decision between maternity and material needs. But certain aspects of marriage and society are sure to change. In spite of their increased involvement with housework, men still lag significantly behind women in household chores. The National Science Foundation reports that while married women with more than three kids spend about 28 hours weekly on housework, married men spend only 10.

More critically, as Gail Collins points out in her new book, “When Everything Changed,” for all feminism has accomplished, it has left the question of caring for children in the dustbin. Women still wrestle with questions of child care that continue to baffle, dishearten and divide them.

Most women are not Sugar Mamas. But in two-thirds of American families, according to the Shriver Report, they are either the primary or co-breadwinner. Most of them haven’t the luxury of a stay-at-home Dad. For those women, sprinting from work to home, where they confront the “Second Shift” of laundry, cooking and shuttling kids to and from activities, the news that women make more and are educated better is an abstraction cloaked as a victory. They don’t feel empowered; they just feel tired, and harbor a sneaking suspicion that if men bore children, this question would already be solved.

The incomprehensible effects of suicide

Last week a friend of mine killed himself.

We were old friends but not close friends and in that way that life can geographically scatter you yet leave you emotionally bonded, his death left me shattered.

For days after a friend emailed me the news, I phoned her repeatedly and frantically, before realizing she was likely avoiding my questions because they were her questions, too. And she had no answer to them.

Only a third of suicides ever leave notes and the notes can tease the grieving into scrutiny. Perhaps reason is exclusive to the healthy mind. That, of course, is a faculty fatally elusive to the suicide.

I saw a man jump off a building once. Well, not jump, but land. I was in Waterbury, heading for lunch and the man’s sprawled, contorted body stretched out on a side street like a broken bale of hay. I did not know the man, nor drew near enough to see his corpse, but I could not eat that afternoon and prayed for a mother he may not even have had.

About 33,000 Americans – or 83 people a day —  kill themselves in the U.S. Most, or 24,672, are white men. Women tend to attempt suicide three times more than men but men succeed at a higher rate. Suicide is the 11^th cause of death in the U.S., just behind septicemia and above liver disease. Experts keep all kinds of statistics on suicide – the most common months – April and May – the most common manner – firearms – and the age groups most affected – older men.

You can search pie graphs and Excel sheets and collate data from any number of well-meaning sources, but you will never find the definitive “reason” – singular or plural. By its nature, self-obliteration is as distinctive as a fingerprint.

Whenever a person commits suicide, all sorts of commentary, from the predictable to the absurd and occasionally, the insightful tends to follow. People say things like “How could he have done that to his family:” “Wasn’t he getting help?” or, more productively, “He just didn’t seem like the type.”

My friend Steve would have been among those who “just didn’t seem like the type.” He was tall, urbane, extroverted, wry, sharp-tongued and outrageously successful at a young age. I knew him at college because the woman he married was a sterling singer whose bewitching stage presence captivated campus audiences and gave her the guise of a woman who was “going somewhere.” Steve seemed the only man polished, ribald and confident enough to keep up with her.

They had two children – a boy and a girl. The kids should be in high school now.

More than 90 percent of suicides have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. In a world saturated by prescription drug advertisements, the facile can presume that a mere pill stands between the mentally ill and tranquility.

It is, of course, so much thornier than that.

Steve had bipolar disorder. I only learned of his condition after his death, when donations in his memory were directed to a bipolar support group.

I am not sure why I felt so remiss when I learned of his condition. But it is unbearable realization that a friend was mired in a quicksand of torment to which you were oblivious. No doubt it is hubris to presume that I or any body else who knew him could have done something to alleviate his anguish, could have reached out, could have dissuaded him. But the burden of suicide for the survivors is in those punishing moments of self-recrimination that turn back to just that that slippery presumption: If only.

Speaking once about the obligations of morality, the Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “in a democracy some are guilty but all are responsible.” I thought about that in relation to Steve and the impotence I felt in the wake of his death. Perhaps everyone feels guilty and responsible in the wake of a suicide.

A friend of mine, a Catholic nun, says that she always believes that on the question of suicide, something can always be done. “Yes, but doesn’t that leave us all feeling horribly guilty?” I asked her. No, she said. It shouldn’t. It should only make us a little more aware, a little less hesitant, a little insistent when we press forward and lean inward to get a better idea of how an old friend is really doing.

When You Care Enought To Send the Very Least

This year, the recession and technology combined to produce a simulacrum of holiday warmth: The e-mail holiday greeting.

For those of us who care enough to send the very least, e-mail offered the opportunity to prove our desultory commitment to good cheer. If your office was anything like ours, it was noticeably lacking in the heartwarming holiday cards businesses send to ensure first place in your hearts in the coming year.

Instead, businesses cut costs and talked turkey, finally acknowledging the perfunctory nature of the exercise by mass-mailing e-mails to hordes of near-strangers on whom their fortunes rely.

It was a peculiar acknowledgement of the obvious: seasonal greetings have become empty gestures, one more hollow obligation of civility that we can no longer afford and whose worthy we roundly doubt.

I am one of those endangered oddballs who actually look forward to Christmas cards, ever expectant that they will contain more than a salutation and signature and will, in fact, contain something resembling novelty and earnestness. A lot can happen in a year, particularly a year like the one we’ve just endured, and Christmas cards, from friends, family or businesses allow the opportunity to connect in ways that we have convinced ourselves we are too busy to do the rest of the year.

So desperate am I in my quest for intimate expression that I have come to relish those self-congratulatory “family newsletters” where everyone is smarter, richer and better preserved than I.

In his new book, “Yours, Ever: People and Their Letters,” Thomas Mallon revisits the world where apprehension, hope and the mailbox were inextricably linked. It is, for most of us, a lost and romanticized world, mourned and over as if its demise was engineered by external forces and not of our own making. We have abandoned the letter; it has not abandoned us. And yet most of us pose as victims, rather than agents of its destruction.

“Yours Ever” is a buoyant, wistful ode to what we have discarded, and perhaps a clarion call to resurrect an art form we have come to believe as technologically redundant. No one who knows anything about language or emotion can reasonably claim that e-mail replaces the letter any more than “LOL” substitutes for a friend’s hearty laugh.  What, as Edmund Morris has noted, might have been the effect if Ronald Reagan’s announcement that he had Alzheimer’s disease had been e-mailed. It was the pained rawness of Reagan’s hand-written letter that gave his revelation poignancy.

In a more penurious time in my life, the only obstacle that kept me from letter-writing was the cost of a stamp. In college, my obliging grandmother would send me a book of them along with her hastily penned, rambling and indiscriminate reflections whose receipt I treasured. It was my grandmother who showed me that one could write a letter about anything, even a joke whose punch-line one could not remember. What was important was the spirit behind it and the jauntiness inherent in it.

John Donne confessed to Sir Henry Wootton in 1628, that he “preferred writing little, and that in a rather slovenly manner, to not writing at all.”

But the letter has always been prey to expedience. Writing to Gustav Flaubert in 1869, George Sand bemoaned the effect the telegram had had on the letter and worried about “how full of fact and free of uncertainty life will be when such procedures have been still more simplified.”

Uncertainty, as Sand presciently divined, is the bete noir of the modern world. It is why we have SUVs impaled with GPS’, cell phones, Blackberries and televisions bleating in every public square. Nothing is worse than being out-of-touch, except, as any anxiety-ridden CEO will tell you, being constantly in touch.

And yet in a world in which delayed gratification has taken on the mantle of hard labor, a letter sent from a friend can be a rare and exquisite delicacy, a bit like personal customer service unscathed by a 1-800 number to Bangalore. The letter, reviewer Stacy Schiff notes is part of “that forgiving territory where you could safely park your despair, issue a cry from the heart, offer advice, share the ancillary epiphany, exact revenge; where you might be, in short, melancholy, tentative, beastly, sulky brooding, nuts.”

Every month or so, I receive a letter from a dear friend whose hypnotic Palmer script and juicily sprawling letters have become a singular luxury. My friend typically includes carefully scissored newspaper articles, often with passages underlined. The letters themselves can ramble about anxiety over an impending family visit, or gently grumble about this or that political imbroglio, or share a moment that seemed mundane but turned epiphanaic. I savor them like an after-dinner liqueur, waiting for the precious interval between wakefulness and sleep. They bring my friend nearer in a way no HTML can. They are the gifts that defy imitation, an intimate gesture in a world otherwise barren of them, the last vestige of authenticity in a world in which the simulated will never entirely replace the real.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com