"That makes sense!" She sounds kind of surprised, because America rarely makes sense. "But that means boys need to learn fight, and girls do not. So do girls learn to fight, or do boys no learn to fight even though they will need to if there is a war?"

"Most boys don't need to learn to fight because they're not going to join the army! If they do join, there's a whole training program for it, it's not something we think makes sense to cover in school when it won't even apply for most people." 

"So the school does not teach caring for babies, and the school does not teach fighting, and the school does not teach running a house, and the school does not teach the word of God....it teaches lunar modules?"

"Stuff related to that, yeah! Designing lunar models specifically is really, really complicated, only very smart people can do it. But basically all jobs need you to be good at reading and writing and basic math. High school doesn't cover everything in depth, but everyone learns the basics, and some science, and some history and geography - where other countries are - and how the government works, and often a second language like Spanish. How to use computers, too, that wasn't a thing yet when I was in school but it's important in basically all jobs nowadays." 

"And then, since they know where other countries are and do not know how to care for childs, they childs end up like Lily and the government take them away?"

"That doesn't happen that often, and - I'm not sure teaching different things in school would really fix the reasons it happens? It might help sometimes, if the problem really is that someone doesn't know better - or that their own parents weren't great and that's where they learned their sense of what's normal - but I think a lot of abusive parents do actually know better and just don't - care. Or they're addicted to drugs or alcohol, or have another problem in their lives like that."

Shrug. "I definitely think we could be doing better to prevent kids from ending up in Lily's situation. I - mostly don't think that teaching home ec and parenting stuff in school again is a solution. And if it was, I think it'd be especially important that the boys take it as well." 

"Men cannot care for babies. They do not have bras."

"Men can absolutely care for babies, and should! It's good for kids to have involved fathers, and babies bond with the people who actually spend time carrying them and playing with them and stuff - if the dad isn't involved when they're a baby, they won't be as comfortable with him when they're a toddler. Men can't breastfeed but they can bottle-feed - with breast milk, even, my friend Esther is a surgeon and she would pump milk out and keep it in the fridge so her husband could bottle-feed their baby when she was on shift." Chuckle. "Not to mention, most moms nowadays think it's only fair for their partner to do their half of diaper changes." 

"Men do all they work in the house, in America?"

That sentence was very confusing but it does not seem like clarifying it is an urgent priority.

"If you mean staying at home and only doing housework, sometimes but rarely? But that's not all that common for women, either, a lot of women have careers they're invested in - I can't imagine Marian would be a stay-at-home mom after she spend all the time training to be a nurse - and a lot of families can't afford to have a stay-at-home parent once the children are old enough for school, so both parents work jobs and share the housework. The gender stereotype is that men do more of the handyman fixing-up stuff and women do more of the cooking and cleaning, but every family is different. Jeremy's a great cook, for example. ...Maybe part of what's confusing is that housework takes a lot less time in America, because we have washing machines and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and stuff? It's maybe an hour or two a day." 

"No what is confusing is who care for the children? People with no papers?"

"...I guess that's probably a way some people get nannies - that's someone who comes to watch your young children while you work - for less money? Sometimes one of the parents stays home until the children are all at least four or five and in preschool or kindergarten - those are like school but it's more just playing and getting to know other kids, they're not learning to read or write yet - and they only go back to work once the kids are out of the house during the day anyway. A lot of my friends do home daycares - basically, one of them will stay home and take care of three or four people's children while they work. There are also not-at-home daycares but they're pricey and it's hard to find a good one, at that point if you really can't stay at home until they're in school you might as well get a nanny. According to me, at least." 

" - so, most people do not raise they children, they have the people who work for them do that, and since even women are not being mothers, they may as well learn man things in school?"

"...How many people brought to America to do work without papers?"

Evelyn is still thinking about Iomedae's question. "I think there's still a lot of important parenting stuff that happens outside of school? For one, kids don't learn well in school if they don't have a good home life. And of course there's the first couple of years, it's really important for babies to bond with their parents. I think some women do wish it was still more normal to be a stay-at-home parent? It was a lot more common fifty years ago. But also, women not being in the workplace feels like a pretty big waste, too, when women are just as good as men at most jobs?" 

She turns back to Alfirin. "I'm not totally sure - and it's hard for the government to count them, right, the whole point is they're trying not to have the government know they're in the country - but it's a pretty small number compared to how many people live in America in total? The figure I vaguely remember reading was ten million - a million is a thousand thousands, right? - and that's less than one in twenty people in the US." 

" - women are not as good as men at most jobs. I guess maybe at America jobs. I do not really understand what America jobs are. Women are not as strong as men, and not as fast. For the body to be maked for the having of childs is to make it not as good at other works."

"Yeah. I think that's - a way the world has changed a lot in the last hundred years? There are still a lot more men in the army and that's probably why, but even there it doesn't matter as much to be strong when we have guns. Even for farming it matters less when we do most of the really hard parts with machines. Most jobs are - man, I'm not sure how it actually breaks down, we should maybe Google it. But a lot of jobs are working in big stores or serving food or driving trucks of food to cities - I think more men drive trucks but women aren't worse at it, just less likely to be interested. And it definitely feels like there are more women than men working at the bank we just visited, for example, and if anything they're better at it. We can go look up the numbers on how many people have what kind of job, if you want?" 

"Maybe that would make me not so confused. 

Why do people with papers in America marry? ....do people with papers in America marry?"

They can go to the computer, then, and Evelyn will Google "US occupational statistics" which she's pretty sure is the right phrase. 

"People fall in love! And being married is - it's a commitment, it means you're saying, this isn't just casual, we're partners for the long run. It's a good idea not to have children with someone unless you're committed enough to each other to get married. ...Also it's a bit better for your taxes, and there are some legal things it affects, like if your husband or wife is very sick and can't make their own decisions about medical treatment, you can decide on their behalf. And if people separate later then there's a legal process to divide up their money and property fairly. Jeremy's father - decided he hadn't wanted to be married to me after all - but he still sent money for Jeremy until he was eighteen, which helped out a lot for paying the loan to the bank for the house, and if he'd stopped sending it then he would have gotten in trouble with the courts." 

"Oh! So marriage is agreeing to pay for the childs. That makes sense." Marriage is recognizably not the joining of two people who have complementary competences both of them needed to run a household as they have complementary bodies both of them needed for union and child, but 'to oblige the father to pay for the children' is a perfectly cromulent thing for marriage to be understood to be in the absence of that. 

Evelyn briefly considers whether she should point out that (because English is ridiculous) the correct plural is "children", and decides that it doesn't actually seem that helpful to focus on teaching Iomedae to sound more native rather than just increasing her vocabulary. She already tends to come across as knowing English better than she really does. 

Occupational statistics! Wow there are a lot of job categories, apparently. The top ten most common jobs, by number of people working in them, are apparently only 20% of the total. Most of them are low-paying; registered nursing (what Marian does!) is the only one that's particularly well paid, but wow apparently there are a lot of nurses.

Evelyn will do her best to describe what each kind of job on the chart involves, though, uh, "general office clerks" is very...nonspecific...and she's mostly left with 'people who work in desks at business buildings, they probably do a lot of filling out paperwork and making phone calls and sending emails.' 

The enormous table of job areas underneath is pretty hard to read but Evelyn can at least skim the headings!

There are people who run businesses or manage smaller groups inside of big businesses; there are people who plan how to build things, which would include lunar modules but is mostly, like, buildings and trains and stuff like making houses have electricity; there are scientists who study things like how animals breed or how the weather works; there are people who work in the community helping other people, that would include social workers like Diel; there are people who do art and entertainment, and make things like movies; there are people who work in healthcare and take care of sick people; there are people who work in prisons; there are people who prepare food... 

"So most people with papers work in stores they do not own, or are cooks, or are nurses? That - make sense I think. And women have to do this and not look after they childs because they do not know how to look after childs and do know how to work in stores?"

"Some women do stay at home - hmm, I can google that too." She does so. "Looks like...a bit less than one in three mothers in the US is staying at home with the kids - though probably most of those women worked jobs before they had children - and that's actually higher than it was a decade ago."

(She is kind of tired of arguing with Iomedae about whether women are invariably incompetent at parenting just because it's not on the school curriculum, or whether being there day in and out for the non-school parts of a child's life means you flat-out aren't raising them, and in general, Iomedae's insistently...'black-and-white' isn't quite right, but definitely lacking nuance and with bizarre emphasis...view on American society. Also the fact that she JUST SAID that the top ten jobs - which involved as many as several things other than retail or cooking or nursing - were still only 20% of all jobs, the space of jobs is huge. But Evelyn is already noticing herself feeling slightly frustrated, and it would be stupid to keep hammering on that point and end up actually mad about it to the point Iomedae would notice. She'll drop it.) 

"I think it's - well, sometimes it's just finances, if they can earn more at their job than it costs to pay for childcare - and once the children are in school they're not paying for it anyway, school is free. But also, I think a lot of women like their job and like having a life outside the home, and valuable skills other than parenting and housework? People say it can get stifling when everything in your life is about kids and being a mom." She gestures around herself. "I mean, obviously I don't feel that way, but I think it's not rare." 

Iomedae does not intend to be a mother and does not want to and has never really contemplated bearing children but she cannot really imagine giving birth to ten different human beings and then going off to do something unrelated every day and see them only in the dark. It is not hard to imagine that some women prefer this. It's a little hard to imagine it's most of them, but Americans are strange and caring for babies is a lot of work, perhaps of the kind they typically refuse to do. 

"I see."