We have a situation in our house. A three-year-old lives there. She’s very short and very smart and very strong and wants to do everything. Here are some examples of life with her:

Person A: Person B, can you please pass the salt?

Three-year-old: I’ll do it! I’ll do it! I’ll do it! I want to pass the salt! Give me the salt, I want to do it!

Then Person B ends up getting the salt, handing it to the Three-year-old, who then hands it to Person A (knocking over a cup and getting her sleeve in someone else’s food in the process), or the salt ends up with Person A, who has to give it to the Three-year-old before using it, and then ask for it from her, acting as though the whole Person B interference never happened.

Person A: Persons B and C, can you help me bring in the groceries from the car?

Three year-old: I’ll do it! I’ll do it! I’ll do it! I want to bring in groceries from the car! I want to carry them in!

This means she has to stop, drop, put her shoes on the wrong feet, get out the door, run to the car and get handed a grocery bag which Person A has emptied most of the contents from to make light enough for Three-year-old to carry on her own.

The soundtrack of my life these days is that “Helping” tune from Free to Be You and Me, the one that Shel Silverstein wrote and Tommy Smothers sings:

Agatha Fry, she made a pie
And Christopher John helped bake it
Christopher John, he mowed the lawn
And Agatha Fry helped rake it

And some kind of help is the kind of help
That helping’s all about
And some kind of help is the kind of help
We all can do without

On an album all about feminism and equality, I always thought that was an odd selection. But, it’s my landline these days, because that Shel, he knows kids. He’s been there and back and given us the word. I guess the point of including it on that particular album was to show that boys and girls, black, white or purple, are all equally annoying when they’re three. I sing that last line like it’s part of the Lord’s Prayer. The Three-year-old just thinks I’m funny.

But, the sad thing is, somewhere along the way, that enthusiasm fades away and we realize that the things we were so eager to help with before are actually work and we acquire an aversion to work. It’s also quite interesting how our enjoyment of work decreases at the same rate as the expectation of work increases.

Think about what YOU could do in your adult body with your adult brain if you had the enthusiasm and reckless desire to do good of a three-year-old. You’d be freaking Wonder Woman! Shit would get done. But, you don’t. None of us do. We sit and think Aww, shoot, do I really have to get up and do that, or can I put it off…or make someone else do it? Because that’s what being an adult is. We pace our energy expenditures and use our big brains to figure out ways of avoiding expending too much energy.

This cross over seems to happen in my house at around the age of 8. Maybe it happens at a different age in other houses, I don’t know, Shel hasn’t written a poem or asked a Smothers Brother to sing a song about that yet. But, I can tell you in my family, the thirteen year-old has passed through and is on our grown-up side now. He can spot a bit of work a mile away, no matter how well you think you’re dressing it up. He knows work and will do it if you make him (or compensate him for it). But, otherwise, he’s got better things to do, like lying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling and whining about how bored he is. The first part of last year, the middle one could be “Tom Sawyered” into doing something for you, but then she’d realize at some point during the task that it was actually work. So, we got a lot of windows cleaned, surfaces dusted and floors swept part way through before the grumbling started. Now, at nine, she knows better.

I guess the point is, take the help now while you can get it. A little clumsy, but enthusiastic and eager to please isn’t the worst thing a kid could be. They mean well at this age and really want to help. So, buy those miniature Dirt Devils that really vacuum, get the broom with the turtle face on it, invest in Swiffer products, because this isn’t going to last, so exploit it for all it’s worth.

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As?�? the cashier began scanning my items at Trader Joe’s the other day, I heard a woman behind me say in a loud, impatient whisper, “That’s not 15 items.”

I felt my face go hot. I knew she was talking about me. I turned to look at her. She was holding a single bottle of wine and looking very annoyed.

I looked up at the sign hanging above my head, which read “15 items more or less.” I quickly scanned my items and counted exactly 15. OK, so what the heck was her problem? Was she counting my 4-pack of muffins as four items or something?

Now, to be fair, I’ve been her. I’ve stood in line behind the elderly guy at Rite Aid and actually felt ire for him as he insisted on paying his entire bill in change, counting out every. single. excruciating penny. I get the frustration. But, at the same time, it pisses me off. The uptightness of it all. I mean, we seem to be a people with our panties constantly in a bunch. Why is that?

Is it all the time we spend in traffic every day, combined with all the time we spend at work, combined with all the time we spend hauling our kids here and there to activities? Are we just so busy doing so many things that we really, seriously don’t have time to wait as someone in a wheelchair crosses the street in front of us? Is it really necessary to honk at them impatiently? (I kid you not, I’ve seen this happen.)

I know it’s not like this everywhere in the world. When I lived in Italy, I remember being shocked when I would find a business closed during its operating hours. I soon came to find out that just because the store was supposed to be open from 8am to 7pm, didn’t mean it would be. Sometimes store owners had family emergencies and had to open late or leave early. Imagine that! There’d usually be a note on the door that said something like, “Be back in an hour.” No one complained or stomped their feet or took it out on old ladies by honking at them to “move it along” as they hobbled across the crosswalk. No,?�? people just accepted it and went on their way. Because they were laid back like that.

Why aren’t we laid back like that? Why do I have to deal with snide remarks at the checkout aisle by a too-young-to-look-that-tired thirty-something in line behind me? And for that matter, why do I have circles under my eyes already? Maybe we should give ourselves a break, do a little less and relax a little more.?�? Maybe then we could get rid of our collective wedgies. Cuz damn, wedgies are really uncomfortable.

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Sometimes it helps to put things in perspective:

Around 9:30 p.m., when most families are getting ready for bed, she escorts her two sons, aged 6 and 13, down a narrow carpeted corridor in their concrete highrise. Clad in flannel pyjamas, backpacks over their shoulders and sleeping bags and pillows in their arms, the boys wilfully, though not eagerly, accept the journey as part of their routine. They reach a doorway and, with a final hug, their mother leaves them in the care of a neighbour for the night.

Outside on the deserted rain-soaked streets near the intersection of Martin Grove Rd. and The Westway, she catches a city bus and travels north. She transfers to another bus further on, one that eventually drops her off at a condominium where she will mop hallway floors, empty garbage and scrub toilets from 11 p.m. until dawn.

“My sons, they always say, `Please stay with us.’ But I can’t,” she says with a mix of sadness and regret. “I have to leave. I have to work.”

As I read the cover story of today’s Toronto Star, I am even more conscious than usual of the spaciousness of my home, the computer on my lap while my husband plays on the xBox in the basement, my little girl surrounded by a heap of electronic toys.

Too often those of my economic class defend the differences by saying, “I worked hard to get where I am.” I defy any one of them to tell me that they work as hard as Puvaneswaran:

For her labour, Puvaneswaran earns no more than $1,150 in an entire month, often less. The rent for her small one-bedroom apartment is $849.

Puvaneswaran, who is paid $8.50 an hour, borrows money from friends to get by. She has relatives who sometimes send clothes from England. She rations food during the week ???��??? one glass of milk for each boy at morning and one at night. She won’t allow herself any. After 3 p.m., she lets her sons have some fruit, a banana or apple.

Their main meal of the day alternates between rice (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) and pasta (Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays). On Sunday afternoons, they look forward to a hearty meal at the Hindu temple where they worship. In short, she pays a hefty price to live in the country’s largest and richest city.

So why ???��??? 13 years after settling in Canada ???��??? does a hard-working mother still live in poverty? How many more years will she be expected to live and work like this?

Last week I posted about how the mother’s movement rhetoric too often surrounds the lifestyle choices of affluent women who can afford to decide whether or not to work. Sometimes it helps to have a good stiff kick in the pants to remind us what “tough choices” really look like. I have volunteered with children who live in similar circumstances; anyone who says that a middle- or upper-class child in daycare is suffering for the lack of a full-time mother has never seen what real suffering looks like.

There are hundreds of thousands of children in Canada whose parents were two or three jobs each and who still can barely afford to eat, never mind amass large quantities of battery-hogging toys. I hate to move the conversation beyond their suffering, since that alone should be enough to motivate people to work for change; but human nature being what it is, I’ll point out that the children who grow up in these homes, chronically undernourished, understimulated, with no enrichment opportunities, will not grow up to meet their full potential and will not be able to contribute to our society as productive and engaged citizens (and honestly, why should they?). This will damage the world our children will grow up to live and work and make families in, making it less secure, less peaceful, less just.

Besides supporting the local food bank (which is necessary, but also conveniently lets government off the hook for changing the systems that keep people in such deprived circumstances), I also support a variety of organizations committed to ending poverty in Canada, among them the National Anti-Poverty Organization–itself always struggling to make ends meet, ironically.

If you know of and support a similar organization where you live, please leave the name in the comments below. Maybe someone who reads it will be motivated to take some of their own affluence and put it to a constructive use.

If you or your family are currently benefiting from the work of a particular organization, please also feel free to plug them in the comments section. Oftentimes the most helpful and forward-thinking groups don’t receive the attention they deserve in mainstream circles.

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At least once every two weeks, I revisit the family budget and try to figure out a way to scale my hours back to part time. I’ve done this since returning to work after maternity leave twenty months ago. That makes forty budget sessions, minimum, and every one is the same: if I reduce my hours, we go in the red. The difference in cost between part-time and full-time child care is so slight that a reduction in hourly earnings would not be met with a reduction in costs, and the result would be a monthly budget deficit that could only be eliminated if we cancelled the cable, the phone, the cell phones, the internet, all disposable income and reduced our monthly grocery bill by about $100. And that would be, mind you, with me working part-time. If I were to stay home, we would have to sell the house and rent an apartment instead.

So I’ll admit to feeling a tad fed up with the constant media flood of stories about women who actually have the choice of whether or not to work. The women I know who work, work because they have to–they are the sole or main breadwinner in their families, or without their income their families wouldn’t eat. Most of the women I know who don’t work for pay, don’t because the money they could earn wouldn’t cover the cost of childcare. Yet newspapers and magazines seem entirely preoccupied with stories about the five percent of women whose husbands earn enough money that they can realistically decide for themselves whether or not they want to work.

Or, as this wonderful article from today’s Toronto Star put it, “The average woman gets up and goes to work. She doesn’t have time to wring her hands about it.”

The result? Policy proposals that come out of these discussions tend to be in the interests of those who can afford to trade less income for more family time.

While flex-time, shorter work weeks and more part-time options are often cited as family-friendly solutions for working parents, the just-released 2006 Ask A Working Woman Survey by the giant U.S. labour federation, AFL-CIO, shows different priorities. Top concerns among the 25,000 respondents included inadequate pay rates that don’t keep up with cost of living, lack of retirement security and inadequate benefits.

The biannual survey has consistently shown women would rather have the opportunity to work overtime than reduce work hours. In 2006, 38 per cent said their earnings comprise all or almost all their family income; 75 per cent said their earnings comprise half or more than half.

You might think that after thirty years of the same criticisms–that the problems of upper-middle class women are not actually representative of the problems of women as a whole, and that real feminism explores solutions that work for women who are among the working poor or just-plain-poor and not only the rich–that we might see some change. Instead, the media remains consistently fixated on the so-called “plight” of women with options and ignores the struggles of women without. Or, as Sandra Tsing Loh put it, afflufemza: “wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism.”

And you know that if this is true for me–a university-educated woman with a comfortable middle-class income and an employer who technically offers options such as part-time work and flex-time, but who can’t afford to use them not because my income pays for fancy vacations or nice cars but because it pays for the groceries–then how true must this be for the majority of women, who are not university-educated and who don’t have comfortable middle-class incomes?

Today, the wealthiest 20% of North Americans own approximately 80% of the resources. They also seem to get about 80% of the air-time. It’s a crying shame.

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