Before Barack Obama joined the Presidential race, I was an Edwards supporter for a time. He had bold Progressive ideas, charisma, and he was a home-town guy from Chapel Hill. It was intriguing to have a presidential campaign operating from Chapel Hill. But we were all taken for a ride by the smooth-talking former Senator.

Edwards’ ego, hubris, and lies were unbelievably cruel to his wife Elizabeth. For those in media or journalism who report that Elizabeth was full of anger and rage, or that she was paranoid, (see for example, the book Game Change) I say, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT????? Her husband was telling the biggest imaginable lies while Elizabeth was battling terminal cancer. Everyone around her was trying to act like things were okay (or were actively covering up the affair). And all this while he was running for President!

When John and Elizabeth renewed their wedding vows on their 30th anniversary in July 2007, Rielle Hunter was pregnant with John’s child. If that’s not enough to make you go crazy, I don’t know what would be.

I met Rielle Hunter once, at an Edwards event, a social event with a small group of supporters. His daughter Cate was in attendance as well. Elizabeth Edwards was not there. Rielle was introduced as the new campaign videographer. I don’t remember her and Edwards being in the same place at the same time during this event, so I didn’t see them interact. Rielle seemed pretty nice–she didn’t really strike me one way or the other. I certainly didn’t want to think “oh, she’s probably sleeping with the candidate,” and that is one of the pieces of fallout of this affair I have not heard discussed very much. It diminishes campaign workers and their credibility to have that question lingering in the air.

And it still makes me wonder what blinded me to the faults of John Edwards, and what I can learn from that for the future. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is. When the candidate who says he is the champion to end poverty builds the most expensive house in the county, that should have been a clue right there. (I rationalized that at the time by thinking, if he’s going to be President, this would be like his southern White House, so it would have to be big.)

I ended up catching Rielle in a snapshot from that night, in the background, by accident. Ironic. Here’s one absurdity: When I briefly talked to Rielle, I said what turned out to be one of the dumbest things ever. Since she was the campaign videographer and we were campaign volunteers, I said something like, “Oh, we’re the characters in your story.” Ha! Now we know that Rielle was the star in her own twisted romance, happy to be the mirror to reflect John’s narcissistic bliss back on himself.

So we all know that John Edwards is a rat fink liar of the highest degree. But what of the legal charges against him? I am not a lawyer, and I don’t understand all the legal details. It seems to hinge on the exact wording of the campaign finance laws as well as the donors’ intentions. But there is something completely absurd and fishy about our whole system when one the one hand, people can give only a maximum of $5000 to a campaign, and have to fill out paperwork and disclosures to do so. But on the other hand, Edwards wants to argue that his “friends” could give him more than $1 million to hide his pregnant mistress, and that’s not relevant to the campaign? And one of those “friends,” Fred Baron, was his campaign finance chair? Common sense says that these secret millions were necessary to keep the campaign going by covering up the affair, and were therefore campaign contributions. The reclusive 100-year-old heiress benefactor, the interior designer with boxes of “Bunny Money” to give to Andrew Young, and the cross-country journey to hide the pregnant mistress–you really could not make this stuff up.

But, it is not funny when you remember the sadness and betrayal of John Edwards’ family, ruining Elizabeth’s last months of life; disillusioning his older children; bilking campaign donors by raising money when the campaign was hindered by this secret fatal flaw; and potentially ruining the election for the Democrats and handing over the Presidency to the Republicans. Even in the South, I don’t think those are forgivable sins.

I for one wish campaign donors could sue Edwards for raising money on false pretenses. No candidate trotted out their “perfect family” image more than Edwards, using his family as a bolster to his credibility, and balancing out his good looks and charm with dedication to his smart, down-to-earth wife and three children. Yet it was all a flawed farce, from the first day of his campaign to the last. I am also still trying to figure out how the mainstream media utterly failed to follow up the investigative reports by the National Enquirer, which turned out to be true.

I don’t know what the legal result will be, but for all the absurdity of how Edwards got his secret cover-up money during 2008 election, now there is probably a legal way to do that through a SuperPAC, thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision. That is the lingering absurdity that should trouble us all.

[updated May 18, 2012]

Then, as we were still coming to grips with the election result, by 3 pm President Obama had announced his support for marriage rights for gay couples! This is a huge advance and I want to thank President Obama for reaching this point of public support. It made all the difference in the world to hear this on the sad day that North Carolina wrote discrimination into our State Constitution.

What does this mean for progressive causes? We should pick up this success and RUN WITH IT all the way to November, building coalitions and working together. I am disappointed that so many progressives are downplaying the significance of President Obama’s announcement, saying that it took too long, didn’t go far enough, or was done for political reasons. We need to shake that off and embrace what has happened. The President of the United States has said he supports marriage rights for gay people. That is a historic milestone. And by the way, from where I sit in North Carolina, a swing state, it took a lot of courage, leadership and vision for the President to make this announcement on the day that the state voted against marriage and partnership rights.

Democrats and Progressives need to get organized and disciplined between now and November. We are up against a very well organized Republican opposition with tons of money. (Actually the Republicans are in a world of hurt, with their coalition ripping at the seams, and a weak candidate in Mitt Romney but they are still very powerful and funded with unlimited secret money this time around.)

Thoughts on what Progressives need to do now:

We will win our causes by addition, not subtraction. We need to build our coalitions. Gay people need civil rights. In North Carolina, even with yesterday’s defeat, advocacy organizations could celebrate the amount of new supporters they had brought together. For example, Equality NC grew from 26,000 supporters to 100,000 supporters since last November. And, the LGBT community saw that their straight allies were willing to make equality a major issue in their political lives, with donations, letters to the editor, yard signs, phone banking, and voting. We had a huge voter turnout. 831,788 North Carolinians voted against Amendment One. How can we mobilize those 831,788 people between now and November?

Who else needs to have their rights protected? Women, whose reproductive rights and health care are under attack. People of color, whose voting rights are under attack in NC. The environment–all the people whose clean water and air would be threatened if fracking came to NC (hint, that is all of us, and particularly farmers and rural citizens, many of whom strongly oppose fracking). Students, who face crippling student loans as well as large cuts to educational funding from birth through college.

How can civil rights groups, economic justice groups, reproductive rights advocates, and environmentalists come together in a disciplined way and work our butts off to have greater wins in November? There are excellent groups doing this work and I will give a shout-out to Blueprint NC, which is a leader in our state.

We need to keep focused on finding Progressive allies wherever they are and not allowing ourselves to be divided. One trend I saw in the conversation on Facebook yesterday was people from the urban Triangle area where I live saying, “I’ll never set foot in the counties where they voted for Amendment One.” That is a huge mistake. We can’t write off those voters. We need to engage them–those areas won’t necessarily be a stronghold of liberal views, but how can we make a case about the economic recovery, health care, clean air and water, and other issues that we share? We need to bring more people into the fold, and come November, each and every vote will count.

Finally, this is probably a good subject for another post but I will touch on it here, I have thought a lot about the asymmetry of Tolerance versus Intolerance. It is harder to organize Tolerance because it naturally comes with a worldview that understands shades of gray and differences of opinion. A tolerant person might be personally turned off by abortion or gay marriage but would still vote in favor of other people’s rights to conduct their lives differently. The intolerance of the Right is naturally more organized because they see the world in black and white. It infuriates me that someone like Rick Santorum somehow thinks his own morality is offended if I use birth control. Intolerance is terrible social policy–and it feels threatened to the core by Tolerance itself–but it makes for a disciplined political approach if a coalition can be sustained.

So for those of us who are tolerant, Progressive, Independent, or Democrats, it’s time to seriously come together. Don’t let the Republicans divide us and for heaven’s sake don’t divide us ourselves!!!! Give President Obama credit and thanks for his support for marriage equality. See the seeds of political progress when they are in front of our eyes, and water, nurture, tend it it and GROW a movement.

Onward to November.

As I have written over the years, I believe that “Motherhood is not a job, it is a relationship.” I still think this is the most useful way to conceptualize motherhood, but I understand that motherhood is a big, emotionally laden idea that is not easily contained in one simple sentence. Motherhood is culture and gender. It is an essential role that is both idealized, and dismissed. Being a mother is a heck of a lot of work, yet motherhood does not typically provide many of the rewards or recognition that a paid job does.

Some cultures and societies may treat motherhood as a career, but typically in the United States we do not do that. I am more comfortable thinking of motherhood as a “calling” rather than a “career.” And I would hope that parenting is a calling for men, too–a calling, a role, a relationship that is incredibly meaningful and intense, but one that is not all-consuming. We can be parents and take on other roles and identities as well.

It is time to untangle the knot of motherhood, by separating motherhood, the relationship, from caregiving, the work. Now in real life that is hard to do, but a separate understanding of family relationships and caregiving work may help us in the future. Not all of us have children, but all of us have parents, and I truly believe that the aging of the Baby Boomers will force us to confront the full spectrum of the realities of caregiving.

I have been there. My mother was there in her late 60′s, in the thick middle of the generational sandwich herself, as the person in charge of overseeing her 92-year old father’s medical care, legal needs, and family business; while also babysitting her 10-year old granddaughter on a regular basis.

Six months after my grandfather father died, my mother got sick, and I became her caregiver as she went into hospice care.

I am still a caregiving daughter for my father. And my husband is a caregiving son for his mother. Even if the elders don’t live in your home, looking after their affairs (accounting and taxes, home maintenance or downsizing), managing medical care, appointments, and transportation; and maintaining a relationship with your elder is a major time commitment.

Elder care is an inevitable part of life and I try not to begrudge it, though I will say that while caregiving can be an honor, it can also be a heavy burden. With elders, you experience the work of caregiving in a setting that is more scary and sad than the hopefulness of raising a baby. It takes the romance away from caregiving. And, while many people assume that mothers should drop everything to care for their kids, I ask you to turn that assumption on its head: expecting working adults to drop everything to provide unpaid family caregiving for their parents is totally unrealistic and would be undesirable–a recipe for financial crisis as well as emotional and physical burnout.

What can we learn from looking at caregiving through the lens of elder care? Caregiving is real, essential work with an economic value. Yet that work is often invisible and uncounted. Ideally people would have a healthy support system with many strands. Unfortunately, typically the work falls disproportionately on women, daughters.

According to Thomas Day, the director of the National Care Planning Council,

Informal caregivers are family, friends, neighbors or church members who provide unpaid care out of love, respect, obligation or friendship to a disabled person. These people far outnumber formal caregivers and without them, this country would have a difficult time formally funding the caregiving needs of a growing number of disabled recipients.

Depending on the definition of caregiving, estimates of the number of informal caregivers range from 20 million to 50 million people. This could represent about 20% of the total population providing part-time or full-time care. The typical caregiver is a daughter, age 46, with a full-time job, providing an average of 18 hours per week to one or more of her parents.

Among adults aged 20 to 75, providing informal care to a family or friend of any age, 38% care for aging parents and 11% care for their spouse. About two-thirds of those caregivers for people over age 50 are employed full-time or part-time and two-thirds of those–about 45% of working caregivers–report having to rearrange their work schedule, decrease their hours or take an unpaid leave in order to meet their caregiving responsibilities.

A recent study estimates these people lose about $660,000 in wage wealth over their lifetime because of work sacrifices. And estimates of productivity losses to businesses because of time off for caregiving range from $11 billion to $29 billion yearly. The average amount of time informal caregivers provide assistance is 4.5 years but 20% will provide care for 5 years or longer.

Seventy-six million Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age. We have an elder care crisis looming over our heads that will require us to grapple with the economic work of caregiving as well as the intangible value of love and relationships. Families provide love and caregiving–but there is no reason that we have to “go it alone” when it comes to caregiving. What this country needs to do is wake up and make that invisible work visible. Instead of talking about the “productivity losses” of caregiving, why not count informal caregiving as an “economic contribution,” which is surely is? In our current system, where informal caregiving is treated as little more than missed hours from paid work, caregiving activity is an economic loss to the people providing unpaid care.

We need to find common ground in our discussions about family, and craft policies that honor both the fact that most parents have to work outside the home to support a family, and also that the “informal” care provided by family members (be they parents or children) is an essential service that provides genuine economic value.

Looking at caregiving from the perspective of adult children caring for elders takes the most pernicious aspects of “choice” out of the discussion–I believe we focus too much on the individual choice to have children in a way that is bad for public policy. We leave families out to dry with little support by saying “You chose to have kids, so deal with it” when raising the next generation is in fact essential for society as a whole. Women from around the world are aghast that American women accept the status quo of not even having paid maternity leave. Our American exceptionalism can be wonderfully optimistic, but it can blind us to the fact that we are getting an incredibly raw deal when it comes to family caregiving policies. Worldwide, 178 countries offer paid maternity leave, with the few exceptions being countries including Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and the United States. Over 50 Western countries also provide paid leave for fathers.

No one “chose” to have a parent, and looking at caregiving through that lens exposes some of the absurdities of our current approaches to social policy. We each have the family we were dealt, and for the most part we are all working hard to do the best we can.

There is so much common ground here for the interests of mothers, fathers, and adult children–if you are a parent or have a parent–that is just about all of us! Let’s not let ourselves get caught up in Twitter wars and divisions that separate us and keep us fighting with each other. We need to come together to fight on behalf of sane and compassionate public policy that supports all families.

Worth reading, both from Slate.com:

The Faux Mommy Wars
There is no such thing as the “women’s vote” and the Mommy Wars were never real.

By Dahlia Lithwick and Jan Rodak

Amy’s note: this is a brilliant piece and I wish I had written it!

*****

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women
Entry 1: Attachment parenting seems awfully joyless to me.

From: Hanna Rosin|Posted Tuesday, April 24, 2012, at 6:55 AM ET

Amy’s note: I really disagree with the way Hanna Rosin is framing this discussion. For starters, you cannot judge breastfeeding as a whole through the lens of women who have experienced painful and disappointing problems breastfeeding. I can write a lot about my experience with attachment parenting, which was both joyful and difficult and ultimately not for me. I’ll probably piss off everyone on both sides of this discussion in the process. I do remain a committed supporter of breastfeeding, including public policies and individual support to enable women to breastfeed. I would never denigrate a mother who could not breastfeed for any reason, but I would fight for the support that enables her to do so.

Many of my life challenges still revolve around the fact that I am a mother, especially as I see the teenage years about to unfold; but other pressing issues are related to being a caregiving daughter, an activist who sees a war on women raging in the US now, a creative person, a child safety advocate, and/or a writer-producer-educator launching a new project. I will have a lot more to say on each of these issues in upcoming posts.

I am granting myself the freedom to explore all these issues and more here on my blog. This new approach is reflected in the new banner for the website, where I come out from behind the “Mojo Mom” name and icon to step to the forefront as Amy Tiemann, Ph. D. — exploring issues of courage, power, leadership, and change, wherever I encounter them.

Last week I finally had a chance to unplug and unwind–and not a minute too soon. My husband, daughter and I went to a warm, remote getaway, where I took a whole week off from computers and work. I still had a lot of creative ideas in between sailing, eating and naps, but I let other people do the heavy lifting for a week. It was magical.

While we were in this peaceful, relaxing setting, I had very weird, intense dreams, as if my mind had been waiting for a quiet moment to unload a whole bunch of intense thoughts. Many of the dreams were just incredibly busy–I had to get to The Today Show! In a snowstorm! Jumping over fences! And the elevator was broken!

More significantly, for the first time since my mother passed away 19 months ago, I realized in a dream that my mom had died. This was sad, since I like seeing her alive in my dreams, but in a way seeing that truth in a dream made me feel that I could finally come face to face with losing her. I can survive without the dream shelter from that reality. When she died, at first I thought I could never be happy again. It took a long time, but now I can say that I am at least open to the possibility of happiness on a regular basis.

As our beautiful week in paradise together as a family came to a close, we began our trip home, which promised to be a long and boring 16 hour journey. Our first leg started with a short ferry ride back to the main island where the airport lay. Shortly before the ferry landed my daughter asked me, “Are we here yet?” I set aside the thoughts of the trip that lay ahead, looked out at the azure water and islands in the distance, and replied, “Yes, we are here.”

On our Doing Right by Our Kids website, we just released a free “Talking about Touch and Boundaries” starter kit, with safety rules spelled out clearly, discussion & practice coaching tips for parents, and a free Kidpower coloring book and pages from the Kidpower Safety Comics for you to share directly with your kids.

Just sign up on the www.DoingRightByOurKids.com home page and you’ll receive instant access to our Digital Library of free resources.

and, this time next week, on Tuesday April 17th at 1 pm ET, Irene and I will be leading a live Q&A session on “Keeping Our Kids Safe” on TheMotherhood.com

We’ll hope you’ll join us and bring your top questions about child safety to be answered in the chat.

Sign up on TheMotherhood.com to participate in this free chat. We hope you’ll join us!

Lots of women need and use birth control, including married women and mothers, but it is not up to anybody to question who or why. Contraception is a basic part of women’s healthy care. Insurers absolutely should cover it. Why is there so much upset over contraception, and not Viagra? Why is it anyone else’s business what a doctor prescribes for a patient? Why do extremists like Rush Limbaugh label women who are in charge of their sexuality and stand up for their rights horrible names like “slut” and “prostitute?” There is a deep thread of misogyny, sexism and desire to control women that Limbaugh is both exposing and tapping into. Anyone who believes that women deserve human rights and autonomy must stand up for Sandra Fluke and support all women. Let’s remember that Limbaugh slandered Sandra Fluke not only in judgement of her behavior, but in reaction to her even daring to speak her mind.

What I want to know is how extremists on the right can get away with the incredible hypocrisy they practice. People like Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney want liberty and freedom from government intrusion–but they seem to mean THEIR liberty and freedom alone–with no concern for the rest of us. If you are a woman, Santorum and Romeny want to intrude in your most personal decisions and relationships, including what goes on in your bedroom and what your doctor prescribes. And Rush Limbaugh will call you a slut in the process.

Am I volunteering for President Obama’s re-election campaign? You bet! If you believe in women’s rights and liberty I invite you to join me:

http://www.barackobama.com/

And, here is a petition to Rush Limbaugh’s bosses at Clear Channel to cancel Limbaugh’s show:

http://signon.org/sign/clear-channel-discontinue.fb1?source=s.fb&r_by=2686123

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