My son met a Ukrainian girl over the summer, and after telling me it was a summer fling because she barely speaks English, he started learning Russian and seeing her all the time. The relationship became a race – could she learn English before he learned Russian. Her school is in an enclave of all Russian and Ukrainian kids who escaped the war, so she is not learning English as fast as you’d expect.
Actively integrate various types of information.
She told him he should be in high school instead of homeschooling. I didn’t say to her, “The only reason he learned Russian in six months is because he doesn’t go to school.”
I agreed to be her “experiential learning mentor” and signed on a dotted line that she’s my intern. My son warned me not to interrupt and talk over her: “She’s not your coaching client!”
The internship became me listening to her stories. Her city was one of the first to be bombed by Russia and in one day all but one of her friends died. She was one of the only Ukrainians able to take a train to Poland: only women with children so someone gave her a child to hold.
Repeat back to the person what they say. In their words, not yours.
Of course I try to squash my penchant for confrontation and just listen. But we talk for hours and one day I point out that the she always says “I’m European.” But the only people in the world who say that are Ukrainian. Europeans identify themselves by their country.
The girlfriend says Ukrainians have “a different sense of their own country” because they define themselves only in terms of not Russia. She said the train was stuck for more than a day because the tracks were blown up, but almost no one talked because they didn’t want to speak Russian but most didn’t know Ukrainian.
While the person is talking do not rehearse what you’ll say next.
While she is studying for finals, my son signs up for extra sessions with the Russian tutor. The Russian tutor teaches my son the word borscht and says, “Do you know that word?”
My son says, “Yes! I’ve had borscht. It’s a Ukrainian beet soup.”
The tutor says, “No. It’s a Russian soup.”
My son laughs. I do not tell him to get a new tutor.
While the girlfriend does homework all weekend, my son finds a Russian book that teaches odd grammar by way of propaganda posters. The girlfriend tells him to get a regular grammar book. I do not say the book is genius.
Make time and space that is free of distractions.
I make tea and the girlfriend and I sit at the kitchen table. She tells me that Poland did not want Ukrainians to stay unless they were willing to do the job Polish people cannot: talk to old people in nursing homes who only speak Russian. The girlfriend went to Latvia to go to school but the school would not let her speak Russian. She didn’t know Latvian so at the end of each lesson she’d ask a kid next to her to write down the homework. At home she used google to translate the Latvian to Russian so she could do the homework, then she’d translate her Russian back to Latvian and turn in the homework. She got straight A’s.
Convey interest and comprehension so they’ll continue sharing information.
My son cooks her meals to quell her anxiety that he is not learning enough as a homeschooler. She does her homework in bed and he finds things to do so he can be next to her. He finds etymonline.com. He tells her boyfriend and girlfriend were not widely used until the 1990s. It’s hard to charm her with language: in her mind the five languages she speaks are souvenirs of war.
While she’s in school he shows me slopes of word usage to see how words are invented. We find that the word dad didn’t get real traction until millenniels.
I tell him girlfriend and boyfriend are probably the result of gen x not being parented. And dad is a result of parents spending more time with kids.
My son tells me we don’t have to turn everything into me giving a lesson. Which brings us back to the girlfriend.
They break up before spring break. I tell myself it was a good experience for him to see how much time kids waste in school.
He tells me, “It was a good experience because I got to see you try hard to be a good listener.”
Update, March 22, 2024. In a video released today Kate Middleton said that following recent surgery her doctors found cancer, and she’s now undergoing chemotherapy. I think a lot of what I wrote below still stands. But I have so much admiration and respect for Kate and that extends beyond my need to be right. So I’m posting this news, and I’m going to give her space, because that’s what she wants.
William is done being heir to the throne. Not completely surprising since ruling the royal roost destroyed the lives of everyone before him.
Maybe the throne would have been manageable for William if women he dated wanted to be royal. But only Kate would put up with it. Maybe the throne would have been manageable if Harry had played along. But that’s over. Now Charles has pancreatic cancer which means he’ll be dying imminently. And this is ruining all of William’s plans. Read more
Detail of The Cholmondeley Children at Houghton Hall by Dickinson
Last month I spent tons of time going to the hospital for cancer tests. Which means I got clarity about what was really important: getting dressed for doctor visits.
I felt way too tired to stick to my regular routine of promising to post on my blog and then not doing it, but I didn’t want doctors to think I’d given up on life. So I tried to dress like a glass-half-full person. But all my clothes are either work-from-home-pajamas or pitch-a-company-black. Whatever, it turns out that focusing on being optimistic is not a way for me to feel in control. Read more
It might be cancer. I have two more doctor appointments on Tuesday and maybe even more after that. My mom is coming to Boston to go with me so I am not going alone. My brother comes three days later. Read more
You know how if you have to be somewhere early in the morning and it’s super important then you can’t sleep the night before? That was me. I finally went to sleep at 3am and then I was an hour late for my 9am appointment. The courtroom was full and on one side were white people and one side were Black people, so I was like, okay, here’s where I belong. And then someone asked me if I was a lawyer, and I said no, and just as I was getting ready to go to the other side I heard someone calling my name.
Read more
I thought the good friend test was who do I tell that I got a job at Harvard. But I ended up telling everyone. Then I thought maybe the good friend test was who can I reach out to when I’m having a total breakdown? But again, the answer is everyone, because no one solo person can actually deal with me calling them, repeatedly, so I have to just tell you all, here on my blog. Read more
I don’t make Nino pay child support and I pay him back for almost all the money he spends when he’s with the kids. He just sent me an accounting for all the times I haven’t paid him back in 15 years. I owe him $8540. I told him he has to wait because I’m currently being evicted from an apartment I love, and if I kill myself over being evicted and people see I just paid Nino they might think I killed myself because of him.
Read more
When I announced I’m doing research about autism at Harvard, people said, Academia requires too much patience! You’ll lose your mind!
Undaunted I came up with a new paper every week for the first year. The papers were awful, but as a writer I didn’t mind writing to learn. So it turned out that my transition to academia was, indeed, an exercise in extreme patience: for my co-authors. Read more
In the 70s my family’s knowledge of plastic exceeded our knowledge of gerbils, so we bought two girl gerbils and a plastic Habitrail cage because it didn’t look like a cage at all. The two girls made babies, and started eating them. We thought that meant the cage was too small, so we bought more Habitrail stuff. Read more
After 20 years of blogging, learning to do academic research was a steep learning curve. People told me to ask for help from professors at Harvard because they’d feel obligated to help me because I’m at Harvard as well. In fact most did not even feel obligated to reply to my email. But Claudia replied.
She told me what I was asking for was best accomplished with an econometrics grad student and gave me some ideas. So basically I asked a professor who was six months away from winning the Nobel Prize in economics if she wanted to be my grad student.
But really, now we know how much Claudia Goldin helped people throughout her career.
Is there an equation for how many times I’ve cited Claudia Goldin’s research on my blog to determine how brilliant I am about women in the workforce? When I called Melissa to tell her Claudia won the Nobel Prize Melissa immediate recognized the name as the one she cuts when she edits because I drop Claudia into every post I write.
I think my blog is like a Claudia Goldin book club. Each week we read blog posts that are in some way about her research. Sometimes we talk about policy. Sometimes we make it all about us. Sometimes we’d read a bit of her book, or read a nod to her research at Jezebel . But Claudia’s been with us the whole time
When I first started reading her, I wrote about The End of the Glass Ceiling. In 2005. People thought I was nuts, but I was hooked. I trusted Claudia’s research. The same year I cited her when I wrote you can’t get respect for work and for parenting, right after I had a baby. And it was Claudia’s research, in 2006, that made me realize most high-earning women quit after maternity leave and we should just own it.
Claudia would never tell people what to do. She’s not like that. But I am.
So I told you in 2013 don’t be the breadwinner. Because Claudia showed that if you have a stay-at-home husband you’re likely to get a divorce. In 2016 Claudia found that even paying professional women more than men could not get women to keep working after they had kids. So I ranted about don’t pay for an MBA or law school or medical school when you won’t even stay in the workforce long enough to pay back loans.
People always ask me, “How do you know that my job is stupid job if you don’t know what I do?”
And I say, “Because you told me that your husband works full time and makes a lot of money and you’re also the primary caretaker of the kids.”
That’s Claudia Goldin right there. She won a Nobel Prize for showing us that it’s impossible to have two parents doing “greedy jobs” — which is her term for jobs that are serious enough to earn the parent respect. Because if both people have greedy jobs then no one is parenting.
The other thing people say to me is, “I have a friend who has a great career and she’s a great parent.”
And I say, “No you don’t. She’s lying to you.”
I started calling out the liars. Claudia’s data gives me confidence to go one step further and say to women no, you are not an exception, stop posturing to other women. Stop pretending to be superhuman to make other women feel bad.
Let’s pause right there and let it sink in. Someone just won a Nobel Prize in economics for saying that you can either be a high performer in your career or a good parent but you can’t be both. This is revolutionary. It’s important because we have known since the 1960s that parents who can manage on one income should have one parent stay home.
So why does the second parent work if we have fifty years of research saying the second parent shouldn’t work? Emily Oster, an economist who writes about parenting, cites this study in her first book, Crib Sheet. In the book she writes that she knows the research and she doesn’t care, because parenting is not as interesting to her as work.
It takes a special person to go to work when everyone knows the family does not need the extra income. Goldin shows that the majority of women, even the very educated of those women, choose to drop out of the workforce because they know they can’t be a good mother and also be good at their job. Whatever good might mean to them, they know they can’t be good at both.
I say this as a parent who did everything wrong. I wanted to have a really interesting career and I wanted to be very involved with the kids. And there was no room for my marriage. I wanted to get everything. Be everything. And be respected for everything. And that’s probably why I’ve been entranced by Claudia Goldin for 20 years.
I see Claudia’s research as a celebration of humanity. She traces women’s rights from the 60s and 70s where almost 50% equity was achieved, through the 80s where women fought for a lot more. So by the time Generation X (my generation) got to the workforce we felt mostly equal.
Her research resonates with us because my generation didn’t want to fight. We wanted to raise our kids. All her data now validates us, because we lived counter to what the baby boomers were doing yet had no voice of our own. She discovered that the more power women have the less women want to work.
Claudia Goldin is so ahead of her time. She is so post-feminist. And her Nobel Prize is a celebration of what can happen when we are committed to elevating each other. And trusting the data.