Today I'm going to talk about a different kind of working and parenting, because it's affecting a lot of people right now, including my wife and I. It's one thing to work for a living while you're also trying to be a good parent. But what if you haven't had a full-time job with benefits in years- or maybe not ever?

The current economic and political climate is slowly squeezing people out of the full-time workforce, creating situations where you have to work two or three jobs just to stay alive, or where you have to try to support an entire family on what a college student might think of as “beer money.”

So, what do you do in that situation? Do you go on working those multiple jobs, grateful to be allowed to live at all? Or do you start putting your energies into another kind of work, the battle for economic justice?

My family has made the latter choice. We march together at Occupy rallies, my three-year-old in her stroller and my newborn wrapped up in blankets in my wife's arms. When it's too cold outside for that or when there's some risk of police action, either my wife stays with the children while I attend the rally, or vice versa. This isn't an easy way to live when you have two young children. Sometimes my older daughter wonders where I am and what I'm doing. Sometimes I don't know if I'm going to make it home that night or not. It puts a lot of stress on all of us, but we're facing it together- Solidarity within the family, and with our brothers and sisters outside of it.