I’ll deal with that tomorrow. I had a lovely day reading the paper edition. But tonight I wrote a letter to my grandson-in-law who finishes his paternity leave tomorrow and goes back to his day job. (I’m not going to say work, because he has been working.)

Dear Matt:

You have been much in my mind the last few months as you have been experiencing a huge lifestyle change and a very large learning curve. You are in the vanguard of a generation of men who have not experienced this before. I’m sure it was a shock.

Oddly enough, I experienced the opposite after I was widowed as I realized what men go through and what I took for granted. E.g. when I went out at night with my husband, all I needed was a lipstick, which I put in his pocket. He had the driver’s license, the keys, the money, everything he needed to take care of me/us. Later I needed all that plus my glasses (for driving), and always with the consciousness that I was my children’ s only parent so I had to be very careful.

I remember, too, as I was trying to make a living for all of us, I was in a meeting trying to get an assignment to write a documentary film script (which I didn’t know how to do), and time was running out. I had promised to meet Matt and a friend with two kids to take them swimming in my apartment pool. But I could not leave that meeting, and I realized the pressure on men who have to meet similar requirements, with no choice but t to hang in there.

So, I imagine you discovered the opposite side, when you had to make a decision for Mia and you had to handle a situation you were not familiar with. Previously with the new baby you performed tasks that had been laid out for you but now you found that you had too make the plan to follow. It’s different, isn’t it?

I keep telling you about Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923-1992). Her book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976), was in every feminist bibliography when I was writing my book about women’s diaries. Her belief is that the status quo won’t change (even now with #MeToo) until men share equally with the nurturance of their children. That next generation will have a different mindset because of it. It’s not going to happen overnight. It will take a generation – or two? But you are in the vanguard.

You fill me with admiration and hope.

Bless, Bettyjane

If you don’t mind, I think I’ll make this my blog for today. It’s important.

Wouldn’t you know? —Shakespeare had something to say about immigrants. This is from the TLS, a clipping that I’ve saved for some time (since October, 2018). The reviewer, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, quotes the bard as an introduction to three books he is reviewing about refugees and migrants. He says that the only surviving example of William Shakespeare’s handwriting is supposed to be in a co-authored manuscript of a play, The Book of Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare’s hand-written contribution is a speech by More as deputy sheriff addressing a mob rioting against immigrants. He asks them to think what they would feel like if they were in the shoes of the “strangers” exiled from home:

What country by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province,Spain or Portugal,

Anywhere that adheres to England,

Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’d

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That breaking out in hideous violence

Would not afford you abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, not that that the elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But charter’d unto them? What would you think

To be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ case

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.