Written with wit and perspective, these short takes on integrating home and job will be balm for guilt-stricken parents and...
A tell-it-like-it-is collection of short essays that cheerfully and comfortingly address the conflicts between life as a spouse and parent and life as a working person.
Belkin (Show Me a Hero, 1999, etc.) gets right to the point: “It cannot be done.” It’s impossible to be a 100% parent, a 100% worker, and a 100% human being, she writes: “So what?” Her verbal shrug is not an attempt to downplay the importance of the multiple roles that women and men assume, but to reassure all the fretful people who try to reconcile work, parenting, and relationships, plus diet and exercise, that something—maybe lots of things—have to give. Some of the pieces began in Belkin’s New York Times column, “Life’s Work,” then were updated as she followed events (the dot.com crash, September 11); some are original. The author achieves a graceful balance between personal anecdotes and reports from others (families, couples, retirees, and singles) who juggle job and life. Key chapters go to the high-powered, two-career couple who plan to lunch together often to keep their relationship meaningful. Work pressures short-circuit their lunch plans, so they quit their jobs and take a sabbatical in Bali, reassessing their priorities. Another tale reflects on a wired entrepreneur who, when he found that he and his wife were going to have a baby, planned to restructure his company, embracing parental leave, day care, and shorter hours for all his employees. Those plans fell apart with the technology downturn. Belkin also deftly discusses jet lag, filing expense reports, and pets in the office, issues not as trivial as they might seem. There’s an insightful epilogue on how little September 11 changed the pattern of work vs. life conflicts.
Written with wit and perspective, these short takes on integrating home and job will be balm for guilt-stricken parents and harried workers.Pub Date: May 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2541-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
In traditional Jewish ritual, men are usually the primary subjects or objects: They are circumcised, they take a woman in marriage, they say kaddish over the death of a loved one. Recently, Jewish women have been plumbing the tradition in an attempt to become the subjects of their own ritual lives. Bat mitzvahs were only the beginning: In recent years, Jewish women have created new, or revised, ceremonies to mark all the joyous, and sad, transitions in their lives, from birth to becoming a parent to aging. Here, Rabbi Orenstein, who teaches at the Univ. of Judaism, provides a compendium of these rituals. Rabbi Einat Ramon explains how she and her husband, also a rabbi, wrote an egalitarian ketubbah, or marriage contract. Rabbi Amy Eilberg adapts traditional mourning ceremonies to mark the grief of a miscarriage. Barbara D. Holender offers a ceremony on turning 65. A useful resource for the paradoxically ever-evolving tradition of Judaism.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-879045-14-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Jewish Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.
A memoir of a woman in progress, this volume describes the 20 years spent raising two sons to be sensitive, responsible, independent—and, hopefully, to pick up their socks.
"Do you mistake me for June Cleaver?'' says Blakely (Wake Me When It's Over, 1989) with heavy irony to a member of the adolescent male pack that moved in and out of her house chomping on Oreos as her sons were growing up. Not a chance. In these reflections, Blakely often mirrors the experiences of middle-class women who were reinventing themselves and their roles during the feminist wave of the 1970s and '80s. Married, working first simply to bring in money and then to build a career (as a writer and lecturer), divorced, strategizing as a single mother (never kite checks on the grocer, advised a more experienced friend), Blakely early on refuses to accept the burden that mothers are solely responsible for the behavior of their children. "Even if I had managed to prevent my sons' exposure to sexist or violent images at home, I could not have prevented encounters [in]...locker rooms...movies...newsstands that displayed women as cheesecake every day,'' she says. Among the best chapters is the dramatic recounting of Blakely's own mother's metaphorical shock treatments at the hands of the psychiatric establishment as she sought help for her manic-depressive son, Blakely's brother. Also thought-provoking are telling discussions of the economic and societal obstacles facing single (or would-be-single) mothers and surprisingly empathetic observations about the surge of physical power in the adolescent male. Yet Blakely frequently refers to her sons as "jocks,'' to many, a term as derogatory as "airheads'' would be for daughters. Parallel to that, she seems to regard sports as a male prerogative—a serious lapse of the feminist consciousness she eloquently espouses.
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-052-3
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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