Thinking about care

We are a group of people who think about care. We are PhDs, researchers, writers, professors, parents, partners, children, people who give and receive care every day. We are also cultural and institutional analysts who focus on the factors that affect people’s capacity and willingness to care for each other. We pay particularly close attention to social inequality, to work, consumption and insecurity, to dependency and need, and to the linkages between “private troubles and public issues.”

All In the Family: Rise in Multigenerational Living

Last week’s issue of Newsweek magazine reported that multigenerational living in the U.S. is on the rise. According to the U.S. Census, households with three or more generations increased by 38 percent between 1990 and 2000, to about 4 million multigenerational households in 2000. Since then, the trend appears to have continued with the number of parents living in the homes of their adult children having increased by 67 percent between 2000-2007, as well as more adult children moving back home with their parents.  Part of this trend may reflect an increase in immigration to the U.S., with many immigrants preferring extended-family living.  Also, these changes likely stem, at least in part, from tough economic times. As sociologist Frances Goldscheider points out in the article   “It is so much less expensive to have one kitchen, one living room, one dwelling to heat.”  Furthermore, changes in young adulthood with the extended time it takes for young people to complete their education and attain financial independence may partly explain young people’s “failure to launch” and prolonged coresidence with mom and dad.  On the other hand, increased longevity may mean that more elderly parents are moving in with their adult children as they are healthy enough to live without intensive medical care, but may need or prefer family help or care.  But in addition to these economic and demographic changes, there is likely a cultural shift around intergenerational relations toward closer, friendlier connections between generations that may make multigenerational living more appealing. As family scholar Stephanie Coontz remarked  ”Over the past 30 years, more democratic methods of child-rearing and delay of marriage have resulted in deeper friendships between parents and children.”

Certainly multigenerational living  may present some challenges to family members, particularly those who do the bulk of the household work and caregiving.  But this also may offer new possibilities for lifelong family relationships, shared care and pooled resources that may benefit all family members, particularly those in the younger and older generations.

Who stands between you and your doctor

Turn on Fox “News” on any given evening during this health care debate summer, and you will hear threats concerning the future of your relationship with your physician:  “Whatever it is, it’s a lot of government between you and your doctor.”

Regardless of whether the healthcare reform passes, whether it creates any new bureaucratic structures, whether it regulates healthcare delivery in new ways or not, it is a myth to assume that Americans – insured Americans – have an unmediated doctor-patient relationship.

Take for example the Cancer Center where I conduct my research.  I am  a participant observer in a large hematology and stem cell transplant clinic.  Patients and doctors have dozens of meetings a day in the exam rooms that surround the “back of the house” area.  Each meeting involves critical discussions about chemotherapy, radiation, medications to control side effects, prolonging life, avoiding death.  I’ve sat in on over one hundred of these conversations – they are quiet, serious, detailed, overwhelming.

The back of the house is overwhelming in a different way.  A “W” shaped room is lined with computers – at each computer sits a doctor, a nurse, or a nurses’ aide.  Beside them are the files, often five or six inches thick, for each patient.  They read MRI results, blood tests, and doctor’s notes on their computer screens, as each nurse updates a doctor on his or her next patient, or a doctor or nurse practitioner grabs a moment to dictate medical notes in high-speed med-speak.  I stand in the corner to try to stay out of the way.  On a busy day it has the feel of the barely controlled chaos of air-traffic control at a major airport.

One computer stands out from the others.  A white haired woman named Alice sits on a raised stool at a computer in one corner of the W.  She is constantly talking, on the phone, to herself, to one of the physicians, and piles of patient files surround her.  Alice deals with insurance.  All day long doctors shout questions to Alice: “Was the donor matching on Mrs. X approved?”  “Does patient Y have a hospice benefit?”  And the biggest question of all: “Can we get patient Z approved to use Chemotherapy X?”

This last question struck me as odd the first time I heard it.  Especially when I realized that Alice had to call a nurse case manager at the insurance company to get case-by-case approval.  Not for Medicare or Medicaid – those plans have annually approved medication guidelines.   Doctors tell me they have an easier time making a treatment plan with those insurance guidelines because they know up front what drugs are in their arsenal.  Private insurance companies are the problem – those gold plated plans with the high premiums have case managers who haggle over every deviation in the treatment plan.

The problem here is that cancer treatment varies significantly from patient to patient.  One patient may not be able to tolerate the most commonly prescribed chemotherapy and may need a second-line drug.  Or their cancer may not be responding as well as expected, so the Oncologist may wish to switch to a different mix of therapies.  Each of these decisions must be agreed to by the case manager.  In many cases, this is a pro forma agreement.  The physician makes the medical case for the deviation in treatment plan, Alice explains it, the case manager signs off. 

In many other cases, however, the insurance company won’t go along.  I’ve listened as Alice, then one physician and then another argue with one case manager, then the medical director, only to hit a wall.  This is the invisible bureaucracy at work.  The denial is not written anywhere that the patient can see.  Most of the time, the entire battle takes place behind the scenes and in the end, the patient is simply not offered that particular treatment option.   The doctor simply constructs plan C.

How many plan Cs are created every day whithout our knowledge?  How much of our medical care comes under the purview of these shadow regulators?  Perhaps we will never know.  I don’t know about the guys at Fox News, but I’d prefer to have my regulations out in the open where I can see them.

Support from the Sidelines

I spend a lot of time at youth sporting events.  Standing in cold ice arenas watching my daughter and her teammates skate down the ice in their bright yellow jerseys determined to put the puck in the net. Or sitting in the bleachers as my son and his buddies dribble and pass the ball around the court, trying to find the open player to take a shot.  Now that it is summer, you can find me most weeknights at one of the local parks, sitting in a lawn chair with the other parents, cheering on the neighborhood kids.

My children do other activities as well.  As Annette Lareau has pointed out in her book Unequal Childhoods, middle-class children participate in a great number and wide variety of organized, adult-directed activities.  My kids do music, art, chess club, and so forth, but it is sports that dominate our schedule and time on a regular basis. Game schedules often determine our meal times, our social lives, and even when my husband and I leave from work or whether we toil into the wee hours of the night because we had to take off early that day to get to a game.

No doubt there are times when we recognize the absurdity of it all.  In fact, all of us parents do. The other night another one of the parents told a joke to the group of 11 year old girls after a softball game: “How many kids who play sports does it take to screw in a light bulb?” The girls looked up waiting for the punch line, but really did not get it when it came: “One, and the rest of the world revolves around her.” The parents, of course, got the joke and let out exasperated, but knowing groans.  Indeed, in Unequal Childhoods, Lareau argues that middle-class families are harried and stressed out by their children’s schedules.  Bill Doherty, Family Social Science professor and director of the Families and Democracy Project at the University of Minnesota points out the problematic nature of today’s “excessive parenting” that he sees as parental over-involvement, the intensification of youth sports, and a displacement of other important family practices such as shared family meals due to demanding athletic schedules. Psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld also offers his critique of what he calls “hyper-parenting” of “the overscheduled child.”  (Although for evidence to the contrary see Cohen’s “The Myth of the Overscheduled Child” in the current issue of Contexts).  So, when we head to the ball field tonight will we be contributing to our family’s stress level and reproducing a kind of warped, pressure-filled childhood over-directed by adults?  Probably, at least to a certain extent.

But we will also be doing something else. We do this because we see it as a way to show our support and interest in our kids and their efforts. Showing up at our children’s games has become a part of the carework that we do as parents. I am not suggesting that it should be, and there are certainly problems associated with it as Doherty and others have pointed out. But in our contemporary culture, especially among middle-class families, becoming a parent-fan is an expected way for parents to express their care and love for their kids.  Just yesterday, my daughter confirmed that she viewed our attendance at her games as an expression of care. “I love to see the parents at the games,” she said. “It makes me feel support.”

And although it may make us rush around to get the kids to the games on time, it also, ironically, becomes a way that we take care of ourselves and each other. In truth, once we manage to get there, going to the games gives us all a chance to unwind and socialize with some pretty fun folks. We can escape our jobs, housework, and the general worries of life and just relax. We build community and connection. We exchange good books, phone numbers of trustworthy mechanics, as well as an odd variety and frightening quantity of flavored sunflower seeds. We also share our troubles or offer a listening ear to those who need some support.  Last night one mom vented her frustrations with her ailing mother’s medical team. Of late, many have told stories of job loss and financial worries.  And we jointly cheer on all the children, creating for them a “village” of perhaps “excessive parents.”

It is likely that this phenomenon is largely associated with class and culture. But there are some signs that it has become embedded more generally in our expectations of childrearing. Earlier this week I was analyzing transcripts for a research project of Hmong adolescent girls talking about their parents.  These girls were talking about how they felt their immigrant parents did not show them as much affection or love as they thought American parents did. This is a familiar theme among Asian American second-generation youth as has been pointed out by sociologist Karen Pyke. These girls used the example of their parents’ absence at their sporting events as a sign of their lack of affection.  As one girl recalled “I played badminton and I always asked my mom, are you going to come? ‘But do I need to go?’  Of course you don’t need to go. But I will always ask her to come see. Come with me.  ‘Do I need to go?’ you know.  Of course you don’t need to go.  But I want you to come.  Every other American kid’s mom is there, you know.”   Another girl concurs “I used to be really sad. Look up and not see any one Hmong person. All their parents show up. And parents getting involved shows the kids that they care. Encourages them.”  While their poor and immigrant parents had not yet taken on this cultural expectation that they needed to demonstrate their devotion through coming to their children’s sporting events, it was clear that their daughters had.  If this becomes expected of parents in a general, parents whose work schedules or other caregiving obligations prevent them from having the flexibility, time and resources to go to games or enroll their kids in sports may limit their access to being viewed as, or viewing themselves as, good parents.

The other night one of the other parents rolled her eyes as she approached a group of parents at the playground.  “Why are we here?” She asked. “Why do we keep showing up?”  Our critical view and self-questioning about showing up is healthy, I think.  It keeps us in check and from becoming one of those crazy parents who flips out over a referee’s call or who yells at the kids.  But despite all the real problems associated with youth sports and “excessive parenting,” we show up because we care, and we want to make sure our kids and communities know it.

on loneliness

I saw Last Chance Harvey on the plane to California last week.  Two icons of contemporary loneliness — the man unmoored by divorce, now just an ex bearing sorrowful witness to his former family, the woman still single after years of  skating on the very thin ice of dating noncommittal men.   Is loneliness the cost of our present-day zeitgeist?

One of my graduate students took issue with the sociology of family this past semester, arguing that the books we read seemed to assume that people need to be connected, need intimacy, need partnering.  And a battery of recent research argues that singles are just as happy, more likely to help take care of their parents, and create fulfilling lives by knitting together communities of friends.  Do we even need romantic relationships?  Do we need intimacy?  Or is that just an ideology, one that makes Cherlin’s marriage-go-round turn?

Perhaps because of my focus on dependency and need, I tend to think we need relationships that last even when they are not immediately gratifying.  As our cultural idea of intimate partnerships moves away from that model, perhaps they are better thought of as an intermittent luxury.   Meanwhile, other relationships — parent-child, sibling-sibling, even sometimes neighbor-to-neighbor, as I discovered on my trip back to my old street in Oakland — can accrue enough ballast to last the tougher moments.  What do all these have in common?  You don’t choose them, they are just what you get.  As my kids like to chant when someone is clamoring for a particular piece of birthday cake:  “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.”

So is Last Chance Harvey yet another propaganda film — albeit one with a sort of gentle elegance — about our need to couple up?  Maybe.  But still the palpable loneliness of the film rings true.  Maybe we just need to get Dustin and Emma some neighbors.

How to end a relationship (for good), raise thousands of dollars, and help people living with serious illness—all at the same time!

Imagine you have an ex-boyfriend with whom you’ve tried to maintain a friendship for far longer than is healthy.  In an “on” moment of your on-again off-again relationship, you agree to attend a concert, one of the few activities that you both fully enjoyed while with each other. You make a plan to each try to score tickets to see one of your favorite artists.  You figure if both of you are trying, you have a better chance. You’re in luck!  Both of you land seats.  Yours are pretty decent.  His, he tells you, “are pretty incredible.” Except they cost $700 each. “Absolutely not,” you tell him, “I can’t afford that” (that $1400 is your rent and then some).

Trouble is, your ex charged the tickets to your credit card (yah), assuring you it would be his treat, even as you protested that this “gift” was too extravagant.

Things get funky from there.  That old familiar feeling of being railroaded and manipulated gnaws at you. “Why did I agree to do this?” you ask yourself.  Why am I trying to make nice with this person who in the course of five years abused me emotionally, financially, and physically?  You vow that once the concert’s over, you’ll never get involved with him again. But the shame of knowing you’re back in it is creeping in. For brief moments, the thought of second row seats and the hope of free drinks that come with your one-night-only VIP status make dealing with your bullying ex for three, four hours tops, seem bearable. Until he calls you up, irritated, asking “how did I get on the hook for $1400?” (or something insane like that).  It all comes back now. As you figure out how you’re going to sell them, the anger rises in you as you remember all the other times you were let down. The self recriminations set in as you wonder how on earth you could have let him close enough to do it to you all over again. But then you stop yourself.

The anger is keeping you tied to him. Time to let it go. And with it, the tickets.

This is a true story, that of my dearest friend of 30 years, Andrea. I share it with you (with her permission) because she has come up with a brilliant solution for dealing with this dilemma that is a great lesson in how to transmute pain into something healing.

Instead of trying to sell the tickets and make back the $1400, Andrea has decided to hold a raffle.  By donating $25 to an organization called “God’s Love We Deliver,” and checking the box for “Leonard Cohen at Radio City Music Hall,” you will be entered into a raffle to win 2 center, 2nd row VIP Tickets to Leonard Cohen at Radio City Music Hall for Sat, May 16th, 2009.

God’s Love We Deliver grew out of one woman’s practice of taking food to a neighbor with AIDS who was unable to cook for himself.  It has grown into a coordinated effort to provide meals and nutritional counseling to people living with serious illnesses.

What I love about Andrea’s solution is that in caring for others, she is caring for herself.  By letting go of the tickets and the hope of getting her money back, she is cutting the ties of anger that have kept her in this abusive relationship for far too long.  By raffling the tickets, someone who loves music as much as she does will get to experience an event that they could likely not afford otherwise. By asking people to donate to God’s Love We Deliver, she is the conduit through which many others will be fed, both physically and spiritually.  In the process, she is honoring the memory of her brother, Mark, who died of AIDS in 1993.

That’s how to end a relationship—for good.

The Intersection of Care and Need

I remember a disagreement between two of my graduate faculty advisors. Should people who provide care be called caregivers or care workers? This argument reflects a longstanding debate regarding care. There are those who emphasize the work in the caring and those who emphasize the caring in the work. I’ve always interpreted this, to some extent, as debates over whose needs should be emphasized, the care providers or the care recipients?

But it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve begun to understand how closely these needs can intersect. I have yet to bear significant financial and health costs associated with raising my daughter, but the emotional price is becoming clear. Generally, I’ve defined the emotional costs of care work as higher rates of depression among long term care providers, which are triggered by the heavy demands of care. But as a parent of a child with a cognitive disability, the emotional costs are related to things I never really imagined. I’m not depressed. And while I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to hurl myself through varying bureaucracies, from hospitals to the welfare system, what causes the most pain and stress, the thing that keeps me awake most at night, is triggered by the realization that people will be cruel to my daughter as she grows up. Yes, most children have to deal with cruelty, but my daughter will have to deal with more of it.

Negative reactions to those with cognitive disabilities are often strong and seemingly unconscious. President Obama’s slip regarding the Special Olympics is a striking example. He clearly felt badly and I would guess that if he had thought about it–for even a minute–the comment never would have slipped through his lips. Indeed, he apologized profusely, without caveats. But the sentiment is lurking beneath the surface—even among the best of us. And even more concerning was the number of times I heard others excuse the comment by arguing that he was being self-deprecating. The fact that it was self deprecating is not going to make that kind of comments any less painful for my daughter.

So it is here where I’m finding that my needs and my daughter’s needs are one in the same. When she feels pain, I feel that pain. I think this blurring is part of what underlies the stress that many care providers face.

“What Would You Do?”

The ABC news program 20/20 has an ongoing series called “What Would You Do?” which explores the following question – “When people see a situation that calls for action, do they step in or back away?” Using hidden cameras, the show orchestrates troubling moral dilemmas such as a couple physically fighting in a park or a clearly drunk mother loading her children into a car and then records what passersby do.  The responses are fascinating to watch since we are able to see in real time people getting involved in the lives of those they don’t know and/or debating if and how to get involved.  Depending on the situation, like the drunk mother, passersby immediately step in to protect the children.  Other scenarios like a group of young girls bullying another little girl in a park aren’t as clear cut and many people walk on by though it is obvious that they are troubled by what they see.  For anyone watching the program the topic raises many questions to ponder – When would I get involved?  Under what circumstances?  If I got involved, what would I do?  If we invoke a care framework, a bigger question that emerges is how much should we care about people we don’t know? 

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot lately since in my own little world I occasionally, yet repeatedly, see a kind of moral dilemma that I’m not sure if or how to deal with.  There is a woman I often see speed walking down a busy street near where I live who clearly has some kind of eating disorder and/or over exercising disorder.  Over the last ten years or so, on and off, I’ve probably seen her several times a month, rain or shine, walking.  In one glance, it is obvious that something is wrong with her.  She looks emaciated and her legs are as thin as sticks.  Also, she always wears a fleece jacket tucked into biking shorts even when it’s extremely hot out, like she’s trying to hide the rest of her body from view. 

About a year after I began noticing this woman speed walking, she came into a yoga class I was taking one morning.  She placed her mat down in front of me.  It was difficult to look at her at such a close range since there was nothing to her.  Her hair was very thin and looked as if a lot of it had fallen out.  But I remember feeling relived that she was in the class since I thought for sure that the yoga teacher would talk with her after class and ask her if everything was okay.  I’m not really sure why I made that assumption, but I think I just figured that as “the teacher” the yoga instructor had more authority or more of a social right to get involved than a stranger, like me, did.  At the end of class, the yoga instructor didn’t take her aside as I had expected.  Instead, she made small talk with the woman, welcoming her to the class and ending their banter with, “I hope you come back to the class.”  I could not believe my ears.  This woman clearly did not need any more exercise.  As I rolled up my mat I thought about talking to the yoga teacher about this woman’s problem but I decided that it just wasn’t really any of my business.  I continued taking the yoga class for another month but then school started and my schedule changed.  I remember feeling relieved that I no longer had to be confronted with this moral dilemma on a weekly basis.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Furthermore, I figured this woman must have family that was dealing with her situation.  I mean she clearly didn’t have a job because she was exercising all day so someone was supporting her.  They were probably doing something about this…right?  And what if I got involved?  Could it end up being a messy situation that was bigger than I was prepared for or qualified to deal with?  Did I really want to take this on?

Lately when I’ve seen the speed walker, she is looking a little better.  Her legs seem slightly bigger and her hair is fuller which I think means she must be getting more nutrition.  But she’s still walking fast, still wearing that fleece jacket tucked into her shorts, even when it’s 90 degrees out.  I feel guilty about not doing anything and I remain concerned about her.  I bet other people driving by her feel guilty and concerned as well.  And then I think of all of us who have driven by her over the last decade, collectively feeling guilty, collectively worrying, and all of that care remaining invisible and going no where. 

So how much should we care about people we don’t know?  How much should we care about people we don’t know, but who we see need help?  And if we knew a camera was watching, would we act differently?

(As an aside, this 20/20 program might be a useful tool to use in sociology courses since many moral dilemmas unearth assumptions about gender and race)

Transracial adoption when the baby is white

Last week Newseek.com ran a piece called “Raising Katie: What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama Era,” an unusual story about transracial adoption in that it focused on a set of black parents who adopted a white child—an almost non-existent form of transracial adoption.

The article is interesting for the ways that it details, by way of this very uncommon example, the common experiences that interracial families often have in public: the stares, the comments, the bizarre behavior that indicates the trouble people have reconciling familiar displays of affection, caring and relations of authority in an unfamiliar racial context.  We learn of the various ways that white strangers surveil the Riding-Smith family, for example, following them around the mall to make sure Katie is not being kidnapped, asking Katie directly (in the presence of her mother), “Are you okay?”.

The story traverses the terrain we have come to expect in coverage of issues of transracial adoption, though the racial signifiers are reversed: accusations that these parents must be self-hating black people if they chose a white child over all the many black children lingering in foster care; the fear strangers express that Katie will be confused about her identity when she gets older; and a discussion of the rights of children to be raised by their racial and (it is assumed) cultural similars balanced against their right to be raised in a family at all.

What I find especially compelling about this story is the way it demonstrates that when racialized abstractions are replaced with real live human beings, the hard line positions people often take on the subject of interracial intimacy, and adoption in particular, become less defensible. Katie’s adoptive mother, Phyllis, you see, is a former head of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers, and supports that group’s policy discouraging transracial adoption. Even so, when she received Katie, who had been bounced around to a dozen foster homes by age 3 because she was considered unmanageable, Phyllis “couldn’t say no.”

The article hints at, but never really moves its analysis of transracial adoption “upstream,” as Barbara Katz Rothman puts it, to understand the historical, political and social conditions for why so many more black babies are available for adoption than white and, further upstream still, what makes adoption necessary in the first instance.

Allison’s post about Shanley’s concept of a “relational right” to support is relevant here. That is, if we operated from the principle that parents and children have “a positive, “social right” that leads to claims for support to sustain their relationship,” far fewer women would have need to surrender their children to the vagaries of the adoption and foster care system for we as a society would create the economic and social conditions in which such family relationships thrive.

relational rights

I saw this fantastic talk the other day at the UVA law school.  Mary Lyndon Shanley, a political scientist from Vassar, workshop’d a paper she called “the right to a parent-child relationship.”

She said most people regard childrearing as a private matter, and that this was a mistake, that parents deserve public support to raise kids.  But they don’t deserve public support just for the reasons we have heard before:   because individual children have a right to be educated or to health care and the like; or because children are “the future,” a “public good” from whom we all benefit, and whose unremunerated care perpetuates inequality.

Rather Shanley contends that both parents and children deserve public support simply because they are in a parent-child relationship, and that this creates what she calls a “relational right.”  “The meaning of their relationship to both the parent and the child and the good that comes to each of them gives rise to a right to have their relationship continue over time.”  This is not simply a negative right, which protects them from undue interference, but a positive, “social right” that leads to claims for support to sustain their relationship.

This is profound work, elegant in its simplicity, but radical in its implications.  I can’t wait to hear more.  Contact Shanley at Vassar to get a copy of her work.

Seeing Susan Boyle as a Caregiver

Susan Boyle, before and after?

Susan Boyle, the famous “unemployed Scottish Spinster” of “Britain’s Got Talent” fame has another story to tell.   She is also youngest daughter of eight children born to Irish immigrant parents who lived at home to care for her aging mother during the ten years following her father’s death.  Diagnosed with learning deficiencies due to a difficult birth, she may have had a hard time finding employment outside of her parents’ home, but thanks to the UK Carer’s Allowance, she probably had paid employment as her mother’s primary caregiver inside their home.  While I cannot speak to Ms. Boyle’s specific situation, it is the case that in Great Britain, as well as in Australia and several other EU countries, family members who care for a frail elderly or disabled relative on a live-in or live-out basis are eligible for income replacement from the state. 

These programs have been controversial in many ways:  conservatives worry that cash for care will erode the notion of self-sustaining families, that it might taint family relations and blur the line between “care” and “work”.   Some conservatives fear that this kind of caregiving remuneration will lead to an increase in elder abuse.  Liberals, and in particular feminists, worry that payment for family caregiving will create a pink collar ghetto of female caregivers living on subsistence wages while caring for their elderly parents.  Others worry that paying family members for care will deprive care receivers of the autonomy they might have in supervising an employee rather than a family member. 

These questions are worth considering.  However, we know that women provide the vast majority of care for the frail elderly, and in the United States, at least, the vast majority do so without any compensation.  They receive no more than the standard unpaid FMLA leave from employment, and many must choose between employment and caregiving or balancing childcare with eldercare, both of which are unpaid and socially undervalued.

This last point deserves special note: unpaid care work is accorded little or no social value.  In a recent article entitled, “Why Susan Boyle Makes Us Cry,” feminist activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin writes that Boyle’s sudden rise to stardum creates a collective lump in the throat because it makes us think of “the years of wasted talent, the career that wasn’t, the time lost…”  As if Ms. Boyle and others like her were locked in a closet. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I think it’s great that Ms. Boyle’s beautiful voice is being heard all over the world.  I listen to her sing before I start my writing workday.  But I think it’s a shame that so many of us think that the time she spent before she met Simon Cowell was wasted.