I want to try to say something brief about each of several books I've read lately. I'm not good at being brief, so this may be a challenge.
I read The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin. This was a pleasant enough little novel with some appealing passages; it was also very surface-y. The conclusion, in which years pass in mere pages and intractable mental health problems are suddenly made, well, tractable, is unsatisfying. But it's a quick read, and not a waste of time if you're just looking to while away a few hours.
The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke is also a quick read. The authors' thesis is simple: Two-income familes, they argue, are actually at greater risk of financial failure than one-income families. The force that has driven this is weak public schools, with parents engaging in housing price wars to get into decent school districts, and thus ending up financially over-committed and, since they are earning at the limit of their potential, ripe for a fall if even a minor crisis hits. It's an interesting thesis, and they do a convincing job of arguing that the rise in personal bankruptcies is not the result of individual financial irresponsibility but the result of systemic problems, like housing price increases and predatory lending.
They are so wedded to their thesis that their efforts to discredit alternative possiblities are sometimes strained; for instance, they present evidence that many of the supposed luxuries familes "waste" money on actually take a smaller percentage of family income than they did thirty years ago. For instance, they argue that, although we own more appliances, reductions in manufacturing costs and improved durability mean that families actually spend a smaller percentage of their income on appliances than a generation ago. Something similar has happened with clothes; we own more, but they cost us less both because they are manufactured less expensively and because we dress more casually in general.
OK. But I found myself rolling my eyes when they tried to refute the notion that families spend too much on cars. Turns out all those people driving behemoth SUVs really need them, mainly because the car seats and booster seats that protect our kids have gotten so big. You just can't fit three across in anything smaller than a Suburban, they assert. I snorted at that; I just recently came across a statistic about how few families have three children these days, and it was such a small percentage (I wish I could remember it exactly) that I meant to write it down so I could tell my friends who are parents of three how unique they are.
I've been reading up on the public schools, and it was interesting to find, in a book that doesn't say anything about "schools" in the title, a problem whose solution is changes in school policy. The authors of The Two-Income Trap want fully-funded vouchers and true school choice, to loosen up the tight relationship between neighborhoods and schools, so that parents can get their kids into decent schools without having to buy into overpriced housing markets. They also want banking re-regulated; I found their sections on lending deregulation very informative.
They also have a section on strategies to adopt if you are sliding into financial trouble. Here's the tip I found most useful (not that I expect to need it, knock wood): if you are falling behind on bills, do not consolidate credit card debt and other unsecured debt into a second mortgage or home equity loan. If you go into bankrupty, other debt can be forgiven, but you can't discharge secured debt (like home and car loans) without either paying it off or surrendering the asset. Piling all your debt onto your house can cost you your house. My tip of the day for you.
There was another book to write about, but I returned it to the library and now I can't remember what it was. Oh, how could I have forgotten the book that had me weeping on the couch all Sunday afternoon? The Passion of Reverend Nash by Rachel Basch is the story of a minister who becomes pastor of a troubled church (the previous pastor left after being discovered in an adulterous affair with a woman he was counseling) when her own life is in pretty bad shape, too: her marriage is in jeopardy following the stillbirths of two children, the second of which also cost her her uterus and hence any hope of a baby of her own.
I should not have read this book now. I'm five months pregnant, and I have a blood condition that can cause late term miscarriage and stillbirth. Not that we're worried: I have a very good clinical history, including a happy outcome to my only previous pregnancy, and I'm on a treatment that results in healthy babies most of the time even for women who have repeatedly lost babies in the past. But still. Reading evocative scenes of much-wanted children being delivered dead is not exactly great for any pregnant woman. I couldn't stop crying, but I couldn't stop reading, either.
Early in the book, watching the pastor (whose name I have already forgotten--oh, yeah, Jordanna) try to, for instance, counsel a pregnant teen when her own grief at losing her babies is so great that she sometimes has to excuse herself from the room, made me think about the work of ministry I do. I am on the Worship and Pastoral Care Committee of my Friends meeting; we're the people who arrange meals for the sick, see engaged couples through the clearness process for marriage, support the work of other ministries in the meeitng (like vocal ministry during worship, people who work as spiritual directors, and so on). We're also the committee people call when they're in trouble of some kind. If there were a pregnant teen in our meeting and she wanted help from the meeting, we'd be the ones arranging for a committee of support to sit down with her.
But we serve terms, and we are a committee. If I'd just lost a baby, and a pregnant woman needed support, the four other people on my committee would say, "Let us handle this one, Su." If I'd just lost two babies and my marriage was on the rocks, somebody would say, "Maybe you should step back from the committee work, Su. Take some time." And there would be other folks to do the work while I was gone.
Even when life is going just fine, we commit to terms of two years. Our meeting limits people to serving two consecutive terms on any given committee, and most people do serve the full four years, but it is possible to step away without prejudice at the two-year point. Jordanna had to do this work even when she badly drained herself; my friend Julie, who is a Lutheran pastor, has also made the commitment to do a lifetime of pastoral work. It's quite something to think about.
But I also found myself, as I read about the counseling sessions Jordanna held during this time, thinking that she wasn't very good at the work, and in the end, that's one of the many failures the book chronicles: the failures of her pregnancies, the inevitable collapse of her marriage, and the failure of her ministry in this church. She finds her way to other work, but this is a sad book overall, the story of how a woman's life is diminished in unrecoverable ways following her losses. A good book. But if you read it, and are at all emotional, you may need, as I did, not just some piddly Kleenex but a whole dishtowel to catch the tears.
Posted by Su Penn at December 3, 2003 07:21 PM | TrackBack