Sunday, July 21, 2013

quaking with fear


It is now nearly 24 hours since and earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale shook central New Zealand, including me and my family here in the capital Wellington. 
This quake was preceded by two other strong earthquakes, one which shook us awake just after 7am on Sunday morning and the other which caused office workers to dive under their desks on Friday morning. In between times, there have been numerous aftershocks, which have also continued since last night’s quake.
It was terrifying.
Even though I have been in moderately strong earthquakes before both here in New Zealand and also in Japan, seen at a distance the deadly damage wrought by the Canterbury earthquakes, and know that Wellington is built on a series of major faultlines meaning that we can definitely expect a ‘Big One’ at some point in the future, I was not prepared for quite how terrifying the experience would be.  Not so much in the moment when you just react - and I think the actions we took could probably do with a little fine-tuning for any future event - but afterwards when you start thinking about what just happened, what is continuing to happen, whether you’re adequately prepared or not, and how you’re supposed to ever calm your racing pulse again.
I think my nearly 3-year old daughter probably coped with this experience better than I did. Even though her heart-rending ‘mummy, mummys’ still ring in my ears, once she was with us and under the table she seemed calm and was even laughing and dancing round the living room as the evening wore on.
I wish I could have been that carefree. Instead, any of the moderate after-shocks I felt made me grab her and head for the table. I was on edge all evening and slept poorly, unable to relax, especially after a strong after-shock around 4am.
My baby, on the other hand, slept, well, like a baby. 
It didn’t help that the earthquake struck just after 5pm, as the sun was going down, and the power cut out. The primal fear of the trembling earth was further enhanced by a fear of imminent coldness and darkness. We then had to figure out how we would cope without electric light and heat for the night. Fortunately, the Canterbury earthquakes meant that we had stocked up on torches, candles, matches and even a portable gas stove. Just as we were contemplating baked beans in the living room by torchlight, however, the power came back on. Big thanks to those lines-people who worked had to get the power back on. There’s nothing like warm food, light and heat to jump-start a feeling of normalcy.
It also didn’t help that I’m 29 weeks’ pregnant. I checked with my midwife this morning and could tell she was trying not to be too dismissive when she told me that an earthquake is extremely unlikely to bring on premature labour. Last night, in the dark, my tummy heaving as much as the earth below my feet, it didn’t seem like such a remote possibility. I had visions of either having to try to get to the hospital or trying to have a baby without professional help at home.  Neither was doing much to calm my fears.
This morning, though, has brought a little more reassurance. Regular updates from the Wellington Region Emergency Management Office have helped. So have Facebook, email and Twitter feeds (finally starting to see the point of Twitter a little more). It’s not so much the information - though that it is certainly helpful - but also the sense of connection: the reassurance that others are also going through this and that there is still a way to go yet. We checked on our elderly neighbour who lives by herself: she assured us that she was shaken but OK, and we’ll probably check in on her again soon. 
Particularly heartwarming have been the messages from Cantabrians who know better than anyone what the impact of large earthquakes can be, both physically and emotionally.  Even though the earthquake last night was nowhere as severe as those they experienced - and I have everything crossed that it stays that way - the expressions of support (like this one and this one) have been really helpful and extremely generous.
It has also helped that the aftershocks recorded on Geonet so far today have been barely perceptible, although we have been told to expect aftershocks, some moderate to strong, for several days if not weeks.
When I woke up this morning, I was extremely reluctant to let either my husband or daughter out of my sight. The thought of going into work in the centre of town - which we were mercifully advised not to do - was paralysing. The thought of being separated from either of them, particularly if another big earthquake strikes, was almost impossible to bear. My mind began racing with all the emergency preparedness things we hadn’t quite got round to doing: the emergency water should’ve been changed a few months ago, those large imposing shelves in the living room still weren’t secured to the wall, we had no getaway bag prepared. At the same time, however, the list of normal, everyday activities I had to do was whirling away in my brain: a piece of work with a deadline to finish, the bathroom to be cleaned. I realised trying to process all this along with the actual event of the earthquake and its aftershocks had sent my stress-levels sky-high and nothing I tried to do to calm myself down was helping much (this, when I was wide-awake, some time in the middle of the night).
Getting up this morning, I realised the way to deal with my still wild-eyed stress was to do something rather than just sit (or lie) around feeling anxious. So the water has now been changed, the shelves secured to the wall, a getaway bag prepared, the car filled with petrol, and some cash put aside. All this activity, and checking in with various people, as well as the ground staying comparatively still this morning has helped me relax little by little. My tummy is still churning a bit, but I feel much more confident that the baby-to-be, along with the rest of us, is in little imminent danger.
But, every so often, I catch myself thinking ‘what if’. What if another big earthquake comes? What if the next one is much bigger? What if we are all not at home when it happens?  These mental ambushes are almost worse than the earthquake itself.
So I have decided to write this post while my toddler is asleep on the sofa.  Marshalling my thoughts to shape some words has helped them not to stray too far into the wild reaches of fear and and ‘what ifs.’ 
For now, at least.
Kia kaha to all those living in the Wellington and Marlborough regions: let’s do our best to get through this in whatever way we can.

Friday, July 12, 2013

we can work it out


I’m counting down the days that I have left at work before I go on parental leave (24 to go!) Both that and the thought of the different kind of labour which awaits me got me thinking about the nature of work, specifically the role it plays in people’s lives.

In previous posts, I have been bothered by the focus on the career / motherhood question that appears to be heavily slanted towards elite women. In this post, I will be guilty of a certain narrowness of frame of reference too, as I am going to talk about the role of work for me: someone who has the luxury of choosing what kind of work I might do, even if I'm not compelled to become a CEO or political leader.

Before reflecting further on my own working life, I do want to draw attention to some recent research on the inequalities among working women. A 2013 British Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) study found that the gap between women who have a university degree or professional qualification and those in low or unskilled work was a whopping 198 per cent (for those born in 1958) narrowing to 80 per cent (for those born in 1970). By comparison, the gap between professional men and men in low or unskilled work was just 45 per cent (for those  born in 1958) rising to 61 per cent (for those born in 1970).

Dalia Ben-Galim, the associate director of IPPR, comments "many of the advances for women at the top have masked inequality at the bottom. The ‘break-the-glass-ceiling’ approach that simply promotes ‘women in the boardroom’ has not been as successful in changing family friendly working culture or providing opportunities for other women to advance. Women are still concentrated in low-paid and often part-time work. Women with lower qualifications and those who have children at a younger age are finding it harder to secure good jobs and opportunities at work." 
Work, then, is a feminist issue, and comprehends so much more than the fantastical notion of ‘having it all’.  I believe a feminist approach to work should be about changing the paradigm of what work is like: transforming working environments so that women are not unfairly penalised for having had limited educational opportunities, for becoming - or not becoming - mothers, for not wanting to work round the clock or conform to old-school leadership models (a particular pet peeve of mine: bullying bosses are bad news whether they are male or female). I believe this transformation would enrich the lives of male workers too.
When I was young and naive, I remember saying to a co-worker that she shouldn’t work past the hours she was paid for - she routinely worked an extra hour or so at the end of the day so, as she put, ‘she could feel she was on top of the job’ - because it meant our employer was ‘stealing from her’ i.e. by working extra for nothing, the company was taking a free-ride on her labour. Needless to say, I don’t think she appreciated my two cents.  But in my way, I was alluding to something that much greater minds than me have traversed at much greater length: as a worker, rather than employer, the thing that you have to ‘sell’ is your labour power (regardless of whether it is physical labour or intellectual labour).  An employer ‘buys’ your labour power, but, even among the well-recompensed, at a much lower cost than what he/she/they will profit from it. This is (very) basically how power operates within capitalism.

The job I was doing at the time I gave my well-meaning but not well-received advice, was not something at which I planned to make a career. I was on a working holiday in London, so the work I was doing had a larger function: to pay my living costs, yes, but also to help me enjoy my ‘OE’. While I didn’t slack off, ambition was definitely not the driver of my working-life at the time. For my colleague, however, work helped her provide for her family, and she wanted to progress as far as she could with it, even if it meant putting in some unpaid overtime.  However unconsciously, she calculated that the extra effort would pay off for her in long-run. 

When I grew up and started working in more career-oriented jobs, I became much less sanguine about my work-life balance without really thinking about it. This was complicated by the fact that my chosen career involved ‘flexible’ work that didn’t always require being in an office. Many aspects of it were enjoyable, challenging and rewarding, so much so that it didn’t ‘feel’ like work. Suddenly, work seeped into evenings and weekends. After some soul-searching about whether the trade-off was worth the increasing lack of a personal life, I decided to leave the career path that I was on. 

Since I left that career path, I have been fortunate to engage in work I felt was both socially important and personally satisfying. However, I still hadn’t quite learned all I needed to about work-life balance. One particularly demanding job resulted in a serious overuse injury that can still flare up during particularly stressful working periods. 

In this post, however, I want to reflect a little on how pregnancy has affected my attitude towards work. 

During my first pregnancy, I worked full-time. I didn’t often work evenings or weekends (learned my lesson there, but I did make the odd exception) but I certainly worked about 110% during the day to make sure that I didn’t work evenings and weekends. The primary reason for that was not ambition, but passion: most of the work I was doing was not only challenging and enjoyable, but had a sense of making a difference too. Indeed, just before I realised I was pregnant, I put my utter exhaustion down to over-work. My manager encouraged me to use some of my stock-piled annual leave. It was a few days later that I took a pregnancy test and discovered there might be another reason for the way I was feeling...

That first time, being pregnant led me to ease up a little at work. I knew from previous experience that stress and over-work can have physiological consequences and it was now important that I not only not inflict them on myself, but also on my growing foetus. Again, I did not slack off, but I started saying ‘no’ to more things, asking higher-ups to prioritise what they wanted me to do in the time available, making sure I had at least a 30-minute lunch-break every day and didn’t just eat at my desk and so on.  

The sky didn’t fall in. As far as I can tell, no-one thought any the less of my ability to do my job. And I saved myself some unnecessary stress. Being pregnant gave me the incentive to be more protective of my self at work, to set boundaries and realise what a healthier attitude to work could have been all along.

This time around, I am in a slightly different position. I work three days a week in paid employment, and try to avoid saying that ‘I don’t work’ the other days (because, census-takers, it most certainly is work). Once I was back at my job, and especially before a job-share partner was found to share the full-time role with me, it took me a while to realise that I wasn’t a full-time worker anymore and adjust my work-habits accordingly. Early on, I even made arrangements to come in for an ‘important’ meeting on one of my non-work days. Watching the clock with increasing anxiety as I listened to others witter on, I made that the first and last time I worked outside my nominated three- day week.

Because when you work part-time and come in for a meeting on a non-work day or take some work home ‘just so it gets done’ (how my former colleague would smile at me now!), you could - and should - be being compensated for it. After the first time this happened, I realised what my younger self already knew: I might earn brownie points for dedication, but I certainly wasn’t earning any money. The person I was cheating was myself, and - if I continued to do this - my family.  I agree with Guardian columnist Zoe Williams' exhortation that women part-time workers should not be apologetic for the fact they work part-time and should, instead, lobby hard for their own interests.

There has been a further twist in my working life while pregnant this time round. Through the whole course of my current pregnancy - and well-beforehand too - my organisation has been going through a review process that is, next week, to culminate in the final announcement of a re-structure that will mean some people will lose their jobs. A substantial portion of those who don’t will, however, have their positions ‘disestablished’ and will then go through a process of being ‘reassigned’, ‘redeployed’ or made ‘redundant’. It’s a salutary reminder that whilst one may be working to pay the bills, to do something meaningful, to achieve work-life-balance, or even to try and ‘have it all’, those in positions of power ultimately have the ability to determine whether you work at all. 
In some respects, assuming that I keep my job, being pregnant at this time gives me a kind of ‘get out of jail free card’. By that I mean, I will shortly be taking just over a year’s leave from what is likely to be an unhappy, uncertain and difficult time for my colleagues. When I return to work, the blood will have been spilled and - hopefully - cleaned up, and I will be able to assess whether I want to stay there or look elsewhere for a job. Of course, I am not suggesting that looking after a new-born baby is not work or that it’s an easy option. But, in my current work environment, it does give me just that: another option. Score another point for the value of work-life balance.
But work-life balance for an individual doesn’t solve the collective problem of inequalities at work: working that out requires a major transformation of all our working environments.