A Fighting Chance

And it was no longer “just anyone” who was going bankrupt. It was families with kids. To be sure, older folks and childless people were going broke in record numbers, but our newest finding knocked me back: The single best predictor that a family would go bankrupt was if they had a child. And this didn’t apply just to poor, single mothers with limited education and no opportunities. Bankruptcies were exploding among solidly middle-class families, families with Mom and Dad both working full-time—or working full-time right up until something went horribly wrong.

So I set out to pick at the sore yet again, but this time the sore was a lot bigger. Instead of asking why people went bankrupt, now I had a different question: What on earth was wrong in our country? How could we have that much distress? And what made having children so dangerous to a family’s financial security?

By now Alex and Amelia were grown. Alex was twenty-five and a full-fledged computer expert, designing databases or taking on software troubleshooting jobs that I didn’t know existed. He was on his way to Los Angeles to live near his sister and enjoy the sunshine.

Amelia was thirty. She had married her boyfriend, Sushil Tyagi, a brilliant young man from a village in northern India, who had come to the United States for graduate school. Now they had a baby, a beautiful little girl they named Octavia. My relationship with Amelia had changed completely. Now my daughter was the Working Mother. And somehow I was no longer the meddlesome mom who was trying to keep her from having any fun. I had been promoted to “Wise Person Who Knows How Babies Work.”

In 2001, I went to California to help Amelia during my summer break at Harvard. Little Octavia was a fretful baby, and I rocked and rocked her. And then, at some point during all that rocking, bam! I fell in love. And this was the real deal: hit-on-the-head, knock-me-over, stars-in-the-eyes love. It was a lot like the way I had loved my own babies, but much better. This was all the love without any of the scary responsibility or the guilt over whether I was making the right choices. Amelia could be the anxious Working Mother. I just got to love-love-love the baby. Octavia gave me the chance to experience some of the purest joy I’d ever felt in my life.

When it came time to go back home, I could barely stand it. My arms ached for that little person. So I came back—and came back again. And somewhere along the way, I made a promise that I would find a way to be a part—a real, in-the-trenches, regular part—of this little girl’s life.

Amelia and I had lots of long, rambling conversations during my visits, and sometimes the talk spilled over to my research. During one of those early trips, I asked her to help me dig into some government data about bankruptcy. Amelia had worked for consulting giant McKinsey and then cofounded a start-up business. A self-avowed “quant jock” (which just meant she liked to work with numbers), she jumped right in and soon began to offer up some intriguing insights. One day, between fretting over a bad rash under the baby’s chin (it was really gross) and poring over the data, we hatched a plan: Let’s write a book together.

Bruce thought this idea was nuts. He remembered the days when Amelia and I could barely make it through dinner without one of us yelling at the other. What was I thinking? Besides, a mother-daughter collaboration just isn’t something professors do. Professors are supposed to coauthor books with other professors, and the books ought to be really dull and have a million footnotes that almost no one ever reads.

But Amelia brought something important to the new work. I was now the old generation, and she was the new. We framed the book around our lives. We compared the middle-class family of 1971—the year I had started out as a young mother with a new baby—with the middle-class family of 2001—the year Amelia was starting out as a young mother with a new baby. Thirty years, one generation—and in that snippet of time the middle class had turned upside down. This was the story we would tell.

Amelia brought a second value to the table: she was the only person who had the nerve to look me straight in the eye and say calmly, “Mom, you are boring.” She still does that. I learned the hard way that collaborating with my daughter is not for sissies.