Health, broadly.

As end of summer approaches, I've been thinking about health, most broadly interpreted: psychic health, body health, economic health, family health, all of what makes life work. I foresee a bunch of posts about this. Today, here's two pieces of a pie. One's the reference to the NYTimes article this Sunday about women who work on Wall Street. Yes, most of us don't work in the financial sector, and few of us live close enough to the NY Metro area to work on the real, actual Wall Street. Still, women in the big finance companies (as women lawyers) are one of the ways we talk about mothers, work, recruitment to high-paying jobs, and to workplace reentry. Plus, these companies are extremely powerful in trendsetting. That's why this article, which suggests that change is happening, that companies are trying to stem the mommy brain-drain caused by offering no flexibility to mothers might be changing. As always, I'd like to hear from women who are on the ground, to see what it really looks like. One of my favorite self-help books of all time bears a title something like, How can you make a difference if you can't find your keys. It promotes the idea of finding enough organization in life to "get you to ready," and enable you to do what you want. When I started reading Tracy Thompson's book Ghost in the House I had a similar feeling: how's a mother to take care of herself, her kids, work, and find her ways to contribute to society if she can't get out of bed in the morning. Ghost in the House is all about health in the broadest sense, of evading depression, of dealing with depression. I've mentioned it before; I read the book several weeks back, but its kernels of wisdom keep coming back to me in odd moments. In part, there's a refreshing quality to it. Thompson is willing to say that some of us moms are not being good moms. She means that when we don't deal with our own health, we can't be good mothers to our kids, and very often, depression and anxiety disorder can turn us into very bad mothers, in quite specific ways. Because notions of who's a good or bad mother are bandied about so often, and so abstractly, I appreciate the way Thompson makes it real.