<Theofragen>

I graduated from high school in 1997. I recently realized that my high school years--like the blue, puffy shirts of the late seventies--are forever emblazoned with a symbol...the variegated pager. Now I wasn't one of the "cool kids" important enough to own a pager. I think the idea behind the pager, which appeared in myriad colors and styles, is that the pager-bearer is sooo important that their friends need 24 hour access to them. To be honest, that never really made much sense to me. In the age before the ubiquitous cell phone, the pager- bearer was often times forced to find a pay phone to find out who was paging her. I never wanted to do that.

For those of you who are too young to remember, or too old to understand ;), the pager was a veritable status symbol for high schoolers in the late nineties. The pager was a fashion symbol as well. No one wore their pager like business professionals or doctors do today...on their belts. Instead the teenage pager-bearers would tuck the pager in the front pocket of his jeans. Some of you know what I'm talking about.

Alright, don't be ashamed. Who was a teenage pager-bearer in the late nineties?

I recently read an interesting article discussing the recent cultural phenomenon of women who reject the maternity vs. monetary dyad. Such women have become somewhat disillusioned with the feminist mantra: arbeit macht frauen frei. However, these women are not rushing home to don their mothers', or better, their grandmothers' corset. The article articulately cuts through the oversimplification often typified by traditional versus new gender roles. Many women today are choosing to have both careers and stay at home with their children. With the ever-expanding technology surge of teleworking, real-time video feeds and the ubiquitous e-mail, women are finding innovative ways to have their maternal cake and eat it too.

As a man married to a women exploring the possibilities of childrearing while launching a career, I am quite interested in the best way this might come to fruition. Many of my mother's generation (the boomers) burned their bras and eschewed the machismo patriarchalism that kept their mothers bound by the fetters of domesticity. So my generation (sometimes called the latch-key generation because of this very phenomenon) experienced the shift of the cultural pendulum in palpable ways.

When in college, I met many women who expressed a "calling" to be stay-at-home moms. Now, some of this "call" language may have been an evangelical attempt to baptize a vocation that the emerging culture was pooing on. Nevertheless, such women expressed a deep-felt conviction that their place was not in a corporate suit and black pantyhose but in a pair of yoga pants and a minivan.

I appreciate the insight of the above-mentioned article for splitting the working mom/stay-at- home mom dyad and recognizing the multifariousness of women's lives. I am left wondering though, will women ever be able to alleviate the squeeze of feminist pressure to be a successful professional on the one hand and the maternal pressure to be supermom on the other? What might this look like? What role might a husband play in this endeavor? Peace.

Carbon Dating

The Double X Dyad