Our Self-Subjugation

We make it hard on ourselves.

I mean, individually, we women, we working moms, we stay-at-home moms, we something-in-betweenness:  we set impossible standards for ourselves.

We put pressure on ourselves where none needs to be:  breast feeding, home schooling, family dinner, organic foods, television, co-sleeping, cry-it-out, baby wearing, attachment parenting, time outs . . . our weight, our looks.

And we judge our friends as harshly as we judge ourselves.

I guess I was reminded of this recently, by this video, a Similac formula commercial, for Pete's sake.  It shows us all in all of our self-righteous glory -- even the baby-wearing dads.

And while we are judging -- ourselves, our friends -- we are doing only one thing.  With all of our self-imposed requirements of parenthood, we are subjugating ourselves as people.  We are crushing ourselves under the weight of expectations that we have no right to demand.  Enslaved by the breast pump.  Defeated by words like organic, natural, free range and whole grain.  Conquered by a thousand "better" methods to discipline and control (indeed, subjugate?) our children.  A tyranny of a crowd of "better ways" and obligations and judgments and joyless self-sacrifice . . . all in the name of "good parenting."  We hold ourselves back and down with our lofty ambitions, instead of pushing ourselves up and forward.

We are parents.  We are love.  Our children are joy.  We should rise and praise and smile and encourage.  Just as we do with our kids, we should do with ourselves, and each other.

"Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so let us all be thankful." --  Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha 

I am thankful for my health, and my family, and my job . . . and I am thankful for you diverse crowd of parent peers who do things differently than me, or the same as me, or somewhere in the middle.

I am glad we are all trying.

 

Tolerance

I wanted to write a blog post today because, well, I wanted to.

A friend recently gave me the idea to write about all the wonderful benefits of age – specifically, the fact that age gives you the extremely blissful ability and desire to say of most thing, “aw, blow it off and get you a beer, who cares?”  Trivial stuff actually DOES seem trivial at this age.  And that’s a great topic, but then . . . .

The Federal District Court in San Antonio published its opinion/order in Deleon v. Perry, in which it finds Texas’s gay marriage ban unconstitutional on the basis that (broad over simplification of the opinion to follow) it violates the 14^th Amendment’s protections of due process and equal protection under the law.  So I thought I’d write about that.

But then I read this article about over-achieving mom/parent culture at school (and how we parents – and the schools too -- should all just simmer down a little bit), which, paired with all of the crazy things I’ve seen on Pinterest, lead me to concur that we’ve all gone just a little bit overboard on, e.g., our kids’ Valentines cards and gifts.

AND THEN, I read a story about a new study – a single study – that found that, basically, if you didn’t breastfeed your baby, no harm/no foul.  Your kid is not permanently damaged because you didn’t give him/her sufficient boob juice with all kinds of magical and beneficial hoosiewhatsits in it.  And for those of us who had a hard time producing enough milk to fill even one bottle, this was welcome news.  (It was also welcome news to those of us who have been milk-shamed for not breastfeeding or not “trying hard enough” to breastfeed.)

Then I realized something:  all of these things have something in common.

Tolerance.

I think that tolerance has gotten a bad rap in recent years.  Some people hear the word, “tolerance,” and they think that you mean “approval.”  And that’s not what tolerance is at all.  Tolerance is the ability to accept that something you dislike exists.  Think of tolerance, in fact, as endurance.  Something may be painful to you, or distasteful to you, but you nevertheless endure it with grace and aplomb.  I have tolerated many a continuing legal education lecture through the years....

You don’t have to like it.  You don’t even have to endorse it.  But humility, patience, and generosity of spirit can allow you to live in peace knowing that something you think is wrong exists in the world.

That’s tolerance.

There are a lot of people who don’t want to tolerate gay marriage.  They find it morally offensive.  I get that.  I tolerate that.  I can even sympathize with those feelings and thoughts.  Because there are a lot of legal things that I find immoral and/or distasteful, but I tolerate them because I live in this civil society that permits them.  (Example:  the death penalty.)  And it seems clearer and clearer that the law of equal protection and due process will extend to the marriages of same sex couples throughout this land, and sooner rather than later.  Not everyone has to like it.  But trying to find a way to tolerate it while remaining true to oneself is a virtue for which we can all strive.

As for the breastfeeding and the over-achieving parent behavior, well, let’s try to give each other a break, shall we?  Not everyone is going to make the same choices as you do, and that’s okay.  In fact, we make the choices that are best for us.  For some of us, that’s breastfeeding and making elaborate Valentine cards for our kids (sometimes simultaneously!).  For others of us, it’s Enfamil and dollar store Valentine cards with Dum Dums suckers taped to the front of them.  Whatever it is we choose, that’s okay.  No child will be damaged by a non-homemade Valentine card, nor will any child be damaged by elaborate homemade ones.  The worst thing that could happen is that the other grown-ups will talk behind their hands in judgment of your slackerdom or over-achiever syndrome.  (Something I’m guilty of myself, I confess.)  Rather than do either, we should gracefully nod, and tolerate the different choices of our neighbors.  “Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.”  Proverbs 16:24.  (I love Proverbs.)  It’s good to remember that, when thinking of our neighbors.

All this being said, we should not tolerate everything.  Some things are worth the fight.  (For me, women’s rights, human dignity.)  And, I suppose, that we must choose what battles we will fight and what things we can tolerate notwithstanding our disapproval.  What is worth it to us?  And are there things for which we can turn the other cheek, or drop our untossed stones, understanding that we are also not perfect?

Which of course brings me to the first topic I considered writing about today:  the relaxation of care that comes with age.  In my forties, it’s true that I just do not have the fire in my belly to become indignant or fight back about every slight.  In my forties, I’m becoming more “live and let live” and less “you’re doing it wrong.”  It doesn't mean I don't have passion or that I'm world weary.  But my two-score-plus years have given me a lot of patience, gratitude and perspective.  So here in my forties, I tolerate a lot . . . mostly gladly.

We’d all be a lot happier, I think, if, rather than seethe and gnash our teeth, we would just blow it off and get us a beer when something irks us.  (Or a red wine.  Boxed, even.  I’m not picky, I’ll tolerate whatever you’ve got.  Cheers, friends.)

The Mommy Wars Are Over . . . .

Huzzah!

Judith Warner has a piece in the August 7, 2013 edition of The New York Times Magazine entitled The Opt Out Generation Wants Back In.  In it, she checks back in with about two dozen ladies who were profiled ten years ago as being high-power, high-stress, high-status, high-earner women who chucked it all in favor of staying home with the kids.  (I have to believe that one of the Opt Outers was behind the invidious acronym SAHM.  It'd just be like a corporate type to come up with an acronym to describe her new status.)

The article was inevitable ten years ago.  I mean, when a bunch of rich and powerful ladies make a bold move to leave the power suits behind, and announce it to the world in The New York Times and on 60 Minutes, you know that someone's going to want to eventually write a "so what happened next" piece.  And, sure, it's because we, the public, want to know what happened to the lady who left her $500,000 a year job in order to stay home with her kids.

Anyway.

Turns out not all of them, ten years down the road, are very happy with their choices.  It seems the grass wasn’t so green on the other side of the fence after all.  But the reason isn’t merely that housework is, in fact, kind of a drag, just like Betty Friedan said it was.

The reality is that these ladies didn’t really leave their high profile selves behind them when they entered their domestic spheres full time.  Instead, they threw elaborate birthday parties, they gave themselves projects like the ultimate photo albums, and they volunteered for organizations that stood in for paid employment.  They’re the ones that make you hate yourself for being an inferior homemaker every time you glance at Pinterest.  In essence, many of the Opt Outers, Martha-Stewart-like, transferred their corporate culture mindsets to the home.

Others of them found that their husband, having gotten used to not sharing the chores of dusting, washing, and cooking, were less willing to pick those chores back up again when the Opt Outers decided to re-enter the work force.  Still others found that their lack of economic independence led to jealousy and a loss of self-esteem, which, rather than improve their marriages, damaged them and made the Opt Outers feel like second-class citizens in their own homes.  And at least one, who went home in order to save her marriage, found out that,, in the end, there was nothing much to save.  Being at home only amplified the problems, and exacerbated hers by taking her out of the workforce and away from financial independence. 

It’s easy to feel a twinge of schadenfreude over these ladies' plights.  Go ahead.  After all, for my generation, as far as I’m concerned, they started it.  For me and mine, they’re the ones who started The Mommy Wars.

Because . . .  they’re the ones who went onto television and to the newspapers, and trumpeted to everyone that would listen that they were leaving corporate culture behind in favor of domesticity.  And because they had always been the best and made the best choices and gotten the best educations and had the best jobs and made the best salaries and had received the best professional accolades and won the best awards, they also believed -- and told everyone else so -- that what they were doing as the “best” choice.  And in so publicly announcing their best choice, they implied, of course, that we ladies who kept on working were making the wrong choice or an inferior choice.

So, yeah, to see that "the best" wasn't the best after all, gives me a tiny, self-satisfied, I-told-you-so sort of lift.  Guilty. 

As one of the Opt Outers – now working again making 1/5 what she used to make and divorced – sadly put it, “I was this woman who made this great ‘choice’ . . . . It wasn’t the perfect fairy-tale ending.”

But.

I can't be too smug . . . because it is sad.  These are real people.  They had the best of intentions, really.

But as I read and reread this article I kept asking myself (and my husband), “How could they not have anticipated this?”

How could they not have foreseen, for instance, that the economy might take a turn for the worse and their husbands would be laid off (as in some of Opt Outers’ cases) leaving them with a no income household?

Or that they would find cleaning the toilets less invigorating than closing a deal?  (I mean, I work, and I find cleaning toilets more chore than joy.  So surely, when they were still working, they too had an inkling that cleaning toilets could, in fact, be drudgery.)

Or that they would find themselves bored and devoting a substantial amount of their time in a quasi- professional capacity leading an organization whose entire focus is support of stay-at-home moms?  (Think about that one for a minute.)

Or that changing the fundamental dynamic of the household structure might also change the fundamental dynamic of their marriage, and not necessarily for the better?

Or that their chosen professions would move on without them making it, ten years out, more difficult to re-enter and making their re-entry positions far more humble jobs than they’d held a decade earlier?

Or that their retirement accounts would not be as fat at age 45 as they might otherwise have been both by virtue of having been raided to meet bills and/or by virtue of simply not receiving yearly contributions?

How could they, these lady-captains of industry, not have thought it through?

How could such smart and decorated professionals not have foreseen the worst possible outcomes?

Am I the only one who thinks about these things?

And the answer to the question is, obviously, no.  I’m not.  There are lots of stay-at-home-moms who have thought it through and made the choice anyway because, weighing the good and the bad, staying at home was the best choice for them.  And there are lots of ladies like me who have thought it through and decided that, on balance, the best choice is to continue to work.

But, honestly, I think that those decisions were made far earlier in our lives than after we got married and started having kids.  I never imagined myself staying home.  Ever.  And that is (probably) because my mom didn’t do that.  (Well, she did, when I was a toddler, but she was back at work pretty quickly after my younger brother was born.  And I don’t really have a clear memory of a time when my mom did not have a job.)  It was never in my make up or psychology to be a stay-at-home mom.  I always knew I would work.  And I wanted to.

By contrast, I have a dear, dear friend of 20+ years who is a stay-at-home mom with three kids.  And I recall conversations in college with her in which she expressed her desire for a large family and to stay home with her kids, even as she was sitting cross-legged on her dorm bed, studying marketing with voracious intensity.  She’s super-smart.  She’s super-capable.  Before her first child was born, she had an awesome job.

But I know that she had known (on some level or another) for decades before her son was born that she would stay home with him . . . just like I had known for decades that I would continue to work.  I think that if we had done the opposite thing, we would be far less happy people.  Our choices were best for both of us, though very different.

Now, sure, there are stresses with working – traffic, deadlines, the actual work itself.  But they are not insurmountable.  And I’m positive that there are stresses with hanging out with toddlers all day without adult interaction that can be maddening as well.  Neither choice is perfect.  But the choice has to be the right fit for the right person.

Which brings me back to the Opt-Outers profiled in The New York Times Magazine . . . .

After reading the article, I am left with one sense of these women.  None of them had stay-at-home-mom in their DNA like my college friend seemed to have.  All of them were more like me – but me on speed.  

It also seems to me – though it is admittedly difficult to judge other people’s relationships from the outside, even if you know them well – that there was a bit of the bait and switch going on with at least some of the Opt Outers.  Their husband married go-getter, up-and-coming professionals, who helped with the household income.  Husbands are entitled to have expectations and dreams too, and if their expectation is that they’re not going to carry 100% of the family economic burden and then their wives suddenly present them with an alternative plan in which the wife brings home no salary, that’s got to be a bit jarring even to the manliest of men.  I cannot help wondering about the level of communication between the husbands and the Opt Outers both before and after the marriages.

To be sure, these ladies were living large on the professional scale before they opted out, and when they came home they were going to do it big there too, and it didn’t turn out so well.  What they needed was not to leap off the bridge and go from all work to all caretaker, but to choose the middle way.  They needed to take the farm-to-market road rather than the freeway in their professional lives – less prestige, less money, more personal time.  I’m fine having a less-than-high-profile job that gives me personal satisfaction, intellectual stimulation, and a good income.  (I’d prefer 32 hours a week to 40, but, I’m fine.)  I could have stayed in the law firm and tried to make partner, but at the end of the day the satisfaction of making a lot of money is not equal to the satisfaction of being able to put my son to bed every single night of the work week.  I did not have to quit working to have that pleasure, but I did have to slow down.

Finally, here’s the problem unique to these really rich ladies (and we should not lose sight of the fact that the Opt Outers are tremendously economically advantaged) living in the NYC area: They all seem to have, on some level, made the decision that, with their husbands working high-demand six or seven figure jobs, it just didn’t make economic sense for them to take a job making $100K and have their comparatively meager salaries taxed at 40%.

In response, I have a few thoughts to share with the rich lady making this unique economic choice:

First, your work is not about the money.  If you are inclined to work, the work is about your personal well-being and your sanity and, possibly, about your husband’s satisfaction with and interest in you.  You do it for you.

Second, your husband should also slow down.  Your family does not need a million dollars a year.  You don’t even need half that.  Your kids need a mommy and a daddy who are happy in their lives (and, likewise, happy in their jobs) and are present.  They don’t need the latest do-dads.  They need you.  Both of you.  And, economically, that may mean you need to leave Westchester County.  Your husband’s tombstone should not read, “He lived.  He worked.  He died.”  You need to talk to him about that.  My guess is that he’d like to be at the house more too.

And, in fact, the end of the article gets to that very issue:  Men are facing the crunch too. Many men envy their wives' SAHM-ness.  And many of the Opt Outers would have preferred to slow their pace, rather than leave work entirely.

Men and women, moms and dads, need to work together to change the corporate culture so that parents who work get the sort of flexible jobs we need to be present in the office and at home. Work-life balance, as Judith Warner writes, is a gender neutral issue. We need to make the American workplace safe to be a good mommy and a good daddy and a good worker bee. And that takes the presence of moms and dads in the workplace willing to fight for their rights as working moms and dads.

Warner observes that the uniform lament of the Opt Outers was not that they left their high-powered jobs behind.  They lamented the nonexistent "ideal world" in which these moms could have "more time with their children combined with some sort of intellectually stimulating, respectably paying, advancement permitting part-time work."

It is a description of an ideal work/life balance, for both moms and dads, but it won't be handed to anybody by an employer unless we start asking for it. If that is they type of workplace the Opt Outers wanted, the answer is not to opt out. The answer is to stay and fight for changes in the workplace, for you and for your coworkers . . . else you come back ten years later to find your ideal working conditions still aren't there. But why would they be?  No one stayed to demand the changes. 

For my part, I am thankful that The Working Dad and I have jobs on the farm-to-market road that allow us both the flexibility to occasionally work from home and the predictability to be able to sit down at the dinner table with our son every evening and talk about the day.  We had to change jobs to get this life.  We had to pursue it.  It is not perfect.  Still, all things considered, it really is the best life . . . for us.

So, Mommy, it’s not that your choice is better than mine.  It’s that your choice is better for you and my choice is better for me, just like I said in my second post published on this blog.  You just – we just – need to be thoughtful and purposeful in our choices.  Just think it through, Mom, and be honest with yourself and your family.  And if you want to work, but at a slower pace, don't just quit.  Figure it out. You're smart! You might not find your ideal, but I'm betting that you can get pretty close.  (Because I have gotten pretty close . . . .)  If you do that, I’m betting that we can all get to what is best . . . for all of us. 

Gallup-ing to Conclusions

There's a new Gallup poll out that indicates that I'm more mentally healthy than a stay-at-home-mom.  Awesome.  I knew I was better.


Seriously, this poll is already being used around the blogosphere to fuel the Mommy Wars:

So what does this mean to you—members of the professional class? Well, I guess opting out of a demanding profession like law for full-time motherhood—especially if you're married to Mr. Money Bags—is likely to be a much more pleasant experience than that of your lower-income sisters. I can certainly understand the desire to escape the law, if you have other things going on your life.

But I also believe that this issue transcends mere economic differences. From what I've seen, women—really, all people—have better self-esteem, better long-term options, if they maintain an outside identity (yes, I mean, a paying job), even if it means juggling the demands of work and family. Frankly, I've seen one too many women who quit their careers to stay home, only to find themselves in the job market years later, after a divorce or some other sudden shift in their lives. If that seems unromantic, I'm sorry.

Obviously, if you are miserable with what you're doing, you don't have to do it forever. I'd find an alternative. But quit totally to run the school auction? Not a smart idea.

See?


Oh, you knew it would!  But let's look at what the poll really says.

The poll examined women aged 18 to 64 (e.g., before retirement age), and defined "stay at home mom" as "women who are not currently employed and have a child younger than 18 at home."  The margin of error is +/- 1%.

In nearly every metric, the employed moms rated moderately "better" than the stay at home moms.  This comes as very little surprise to me, personally, because, after all, taking care of a kid full time is hard.  And I have discussed before how I feel that working outside the home is good for me, personally and psychologically.  As you can also see, the survey also looked at employed women with no child at home.  Those ladies, on the whole, are doing better than any of us mommies!

So maybe we just shouldn't have kids.  Then we'll all be happier!   Ummmm.

In most cases, the difference between SAHMs and working moms in these ratings is about 5 or 6 percentage points.  The three areas in which the gap between SAHMs and working moms seems to be the greatest are sadness (26% of SHAMs versus 16% of working moms), depression (28% of SHAMs versus 17% of working moms), and thriving (55% of SAHMs versus 63% of working moms).

These three metrics, to me, go together.  If you do not feel like you are thriving, you are more likely to be sad or depressed.  And it also seems easy to me to see why one who spends her day chasing after other people to ensure that they thrive, may find herself feeling less personally actualized.  It's the Problem That Has No Name, that Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique:

"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?"

This is a very real problem that persists today, and we shouldn't ignore that taking care of small children full time is difficult, and that doing such to the exclusion of any other vocation is not necessarily the life's dream of every woman and mother.

But you'll notice too that if you flip those poll numbers around, 74% of SAHMs do not report sadness, 72% of SAHMs do not report depression, and 37% of working moms do not feel like they're thriving.  Wow, those are some pretty big, potentially meaningful numbers.

Still, there are a significant number of women working in the home who do not find it completely fulfilling.  And what should we do about that?  We should find ways to let them out.  We should support them and encourage them to work or find productive avocations, or, indeed, vocations.  Why do you think there are so many Mommy Blogs out there?  These moms are trying to find a productive intellectual outlet.

The numbers for worry (41% for SAHMs and 34% for working moms) and anger (19% for SAHMs and 14% for working moms) are interesting too.  These two emotions, when I feel them in my life, tend to emanate from the same locus:  lack of control.  If a woman feels she lacks control over her own existence and future, which I can imagine being the situation of some segment of SAHMs, it is easy to see how she may feel more worried and angry than a woman who works and, therefore, sees a stream of income (and, for instance, a retirement account) that has her name on it.  This problem of a lack of control may be particularly acute if the SAHM is married to a man who views his income as "his" money that he parcels out to her as a kind of allowance that requires an accounting.  That sort of existence could be extremely stressful (50% of SAHMs and 48% of working moms reported feeling stress).

And, of course, many SAHMs are not SAHMs by choice, like my cohort -- the professional, relatively high-income women who choose to stay home, but could easily afford the childcare so that they could go to work if they wanted to.  (Of course, there are also those in my cohort who opt to stay at home because professional advancement is stunted in pernicious and subtle ways by the mere fact of motherhood.)  But many SHAMs are at home because daycare is not as economical as her giving up her job.  And that's really the bottom line of the survey.  Gallup pulled out the numbers relating to women with annual household incomes of less than $36,000.  Here they are:

These women are really struggling.  What should we do for them?  Gallup suggests increasing employer-sponsored childcare of some other subsidized childcare for these women.  That sounds great!  How many employers do you think will voluntarily pay for childcare for their employees?  Big companies, maybe, but what about small businesses?  And subsidized childcare?  More taxes?  Can't you just hear the politicians likening it to welfare, even suggesting that the women should just stay home if they can't afford daycare?  It's the free market, baby.


We require a fundamental shift in attitude that employment for women is just as important as employment for men.  It should not be the case that if a family's income is low, the default answer is that mommy stays at home with the kids.  If it would be better for mommy and for the family for mommy to work, then our country needs to see women not as the last resort childcare option, but as valuable employees who needs just as much support in their work as their valuable employee husbands.  Until we truly see male workers and female worker identically, these polls will continue to show this sort of dissatisfaction among SAHMs, especially low income SAHMs.  Because if being a SAHM is not truly voluntary -- if some economic, professional or social pressure forced the issue to make her a SHAM -- then she will not be happy in it.  Just look at the polls.

Exceptional Motherhood

Every mom, I think, must go through these periods of thinking, "Am I good enough?"  At least, I hope it's not just me who thinks that.  But you want to be great.  You want to be supermom and be the best employee at the office, the best pal, the best wife, and the best mom.  And when you evaluate yourself (when you're me, anyway), you can always find places where you fall short.

And even when you aren't nitpicking yourself, the thought creeps in that you are not giving your all.  For instance, I am sitting cross-legged on my living room sofa right now, The Cat to my left, my iPhone to my right, and my son still at daycare.  Because I got home from work a little early and I decided to have some "me" time before I went to pick The Boy up.  Nothing wrong with that.  Except that the hissy voice of Exceptional Motherhood has been whispering to me from behind my neck, "You should have picked him up.  You are being selfish sitting there on the sofa writing your navel-gazing blog post.  You should be playing with your boy, not thinking about yourself."

There is a drumbeat in the modern mothering culture that, at its root, demands constant self-sacrifice by the mommy.  You must breast feed.  If you don't breastfeed, you are depriving your child of valuable hoosiwhatsits that will protect him from disease.  You must use cloth diapers.  If you don't use cloth diapers, your child will get diaper rash up to his eyeballs and there will be an avalanche of dirty diapers at your local landfill.  You must feed your child organic baby food, preferable lovingly made by your own hands.  If you do not feed your child organic handmade baby food, you are endangering his health.  You must spend your every spare moment playing with, educating, or at least ogling your child.  If you do not do these things, you clearly do not love your child as much as you should.

It may not be stated so starkly, but the sentiments are there in the culture.  As it happens, I did breast feed to the extent I could.  (I never produced enough milk to exclusively breast feed The Boy, unless you count the first six days of his life in which I exclusively "breast fed" him insufficiently so that he was constantly starving and lost too much weight.)  I also use cloth diapers on The Boy when he is at home (but I do not impose them on his daycare).  And he gets a lot of organic food (especially the dairy foods), but it's not all organic.  It's not that I did not/do not do these "good mom" things to one degree or another, or even that I disagree that these are more-or-less good things to do (lest I wouldn't do them at all).  But there is a subtle hiss from the mother-culture that failure to live up to its standards is inadequate mothering is just false.

The time portion of this criteria is particularly wrenching for a working mom.  We really do want to spend as much time as we can with our kids.  We want to work too.  And, mentally, we need a little downtime every now and again.  But the impulse in the culture is to spend all of your spare time on the child and none of it on yourself, which, to me seems good for nobody.

Moreover, I think that working moms can't meet these standard.  Nobody can.  Indeed, I'll go out on a limb, and speak about that which I do not know, and say that it is only the most haggard drudge of a stay at home mom who can be the perfect breastfeeding, cloth diapering, baby chef and educator of a mommy.

And yet, we all love our kids.

So why does the culture guilt us about these ideals of motherhood?  And why are they ideals, anyway?  Because they're the way it was done a hundred or a thousand years ago?  Why is that per se the gold standard?

And why should I feel badly about taking an hour for myself to write this post and, literally, remove the chipped nail polish from my toes?

Is it competition?  Because we want to be "the best."  And if someone else shows inadequacies -- "Gasp!  Is that a Huggies disposable diaper on your child's bottom?" -- then the cloth diapering purists can feel secure in their anti-diaper rash and environmental perfection?

But that's not it because, frankly, I don't really know any moms who are really all that judgy about these sorts of things.  And yet, the judges are apparently out there, somewhere.  Whole books are being written about the subject, after all.

For instance, Elisabeth Badinter's new book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women poses that modern women have submitted themselves to something she calls "ecological parenting," which involves things like doulas, breastfeeding, organic food, the non-use of epidurals, the use of cloth diapers, baby wearing, co-sleeping, constant presentation of intellectually enriching experiences etc., etc. Admittedly, I have this information from the reviews of the book.  I've not read it.  I have not had time to read it, nor am I sure that I have the inclination to read it, having fully committed all of my life to either work or family - save for this one hour.  (Plus, I'm not sure I could sustain interest in this subject for more than the approximately 500 to 750 words that I am currently committing to the blogosphere.) But, generally, she is describing a very, very naturalistic and child-centric lifestyle (again, per the reviews).

I happen to like being The-Boy-centric.  He's pretty much the greatest thing I've ever done, so I really like hanging out with him and I find it tremendously fun (except when he's screamy).  And I like cloth diapering.  I like the idea that not as many disposable diapers are going into the landfill.  And the breastfeeding that I was able to do, I enjoyed that too.  But the problem in trying to be a culturally perfect "ecological parent" is that it saps the joy out of being his Mom.  Strive to be perfect and I think you will find yourself perfectly unhappy.

So I am ignoring that little hiss at the back of my neck.  Shoo, be gone!

Rather than worry about whether I'm perfect according to the Exceptional Motherhood Code, I think I'll just be perfectly content to use the rest of this hour to read a New Yorker article about Kraftwerk and then go pick The Boy up at about 6:30 so that we can have a rocking good time until it's bedtime.  That seems perfectly wonderful.

Quantifying Mommy's Worth

Mint.com is not the first outlet to attempt to quantify the worth, in terms of dollars and cents, the value of a stay-at-home-mom.  They're just the latest, and the one that, therefore, has stuck in my craw this week.

So before I address the fatuous, pandering article/blog post, I want to, once again, reiterate my enormous respect for my stay-at-home-mom friends and family.  In addressing this article, I do not intend to denigrate my loved ones.

But what I do intend to do is say, "Hey, wait a minute!  I do that too!"  Or at least some of it . . . .  I think that even my SAHM friends and family can easily see that this Mint.com article serves only to fan the flame of the Mommy Wars.  In quantifying the work of SAHMs in this way, Mint.com implies that Working Moms (and Working Dads) don't do these things, that we hire all of this stuff out.

Mint.com says a stay-at-home-mom's worth is $96,261 a year.  That's a pretty nice salary.  They come up with that figure by adding up the salaries of professionals who do the work that SAHMs, by the estimation of Mint.com, do.

Private Chef:  $52,261/year
Really?  First off, it may come as a surprise to Mint.com, but my husband and I actually are able to get a meal onto the table without the aid of a personal, private chef.  This cooking-dinner thing is something that SAHMs would be doing even if they were at the office all day.  Rarely, rarely do we order out or eat out. So, add $52,261 to the annual net worth of my family because we're saving the expense of a weekly private chef.  Awesome!  (And, P.S., are we really to believe that every meal prepared by a SAHM is chef quality?  I mean, I am willing to wager that even SAHMs will open the occasional blue box with the noodles and orange powder in it.  Tom Colicchio would not be amused.)

House Cleaner:  $6,136/year
Okay, yes, we have a maid service that comes in once a week.  But that doesn't alleviate our nightly need to clean the kitchen (not to mention the minefield around the high chair of an 11-month-old table-food-eater-and-occasional-thrower).  And, too, we have been known to re-clean something after the maids have "cleaned" because it has not been "cleaned" to our satisfaction.  I am, therefore, taking $2,000 of this and adding it to The Working Mom & Dad's yearly take.

Childcare:  $31,000/year
OK, total give.  Because we both work 40 hours a week, we don't do this (except for early mornings, evenings, mid-nights, weekends, holidays, when The Boy is sick, and the occasional SAHM Friday).  The Boy goes to the most awesome daycare ever.  It costs approximately $18,000/year, though.  Still, assuming two or more kids, daycare could easily top $30,000.

Driver:  $4,168/year
Yes, in fact, most working parents also have to chauffeur their kids to doctor visits, Scout meetings, school functions, and extra curricular activities.  Maybe Siri Cruise has her own car, but I can assure you that The Boy will have to settle for rides in his mom's Civic.  Yippee, another $4,168 per year added to our family income!

Laundry Service:  $936/year
I. Do. Laundry. All. Freaking. Weekend. Long.  And during the week too.  First of all, it's worth way more than $936 when you consider time value of money.  I mean, say that my husband and I billed a fairly modest lawyer's hourly rate of $350 an hour.  My husband and I probably spend, conservatively, 15 hours a week doing laundry, folding it, and putting it away.  That's over $5200 a week!  But then, I guess you can't charge lawyers' rates to do the work of a laundress.  More's the pity.  So I guess that's another $936 to The Working Family's yearly net worth.

Lawn Maintenance:  $1,560/year
Okay, let's be honest, most middle class families have lawn services, whether or not both parents work outside the home.  And if they don't have a lawn service, honesty must again prevail upon us to admit that it's usually Dad who is pushing the mower, not Mom.  (Although, this Mom, before she was a Mom, really enjoyed mowing the lawn, and probably will again in the fullness of time.)  We have a lawn service, now, post-birth-of-The-Boy.  So we get dinged here.

In all, based upon Mint.com's valuations, my husband and I can consider ourselves enriched to the tune of $59,365 per year for all of the work that we do ourselves that we could otherwise hire out to other folks.  Lucky us!  Now, how to spend this new-found wealth . . . .

So what is my point here?  My point is not to devalue the work of the SAHM, but simply to point out that many of these quantifiable tasks that Mint.com has ascribed to SAHMs are not just done by those parents whose workplace is the home.  Many of these tasks are tasks that all parents do, whether they work outside or inside the home.  The point of, and the value in, being a stay-at-home parent is that there are unquantifiable intangibles in that occupation.  In attempting to quantify the "worth" of SAHMs, Mint.com has simultaneously devalued the worth of the working parent's contributions to the home and of the stay-at-home parent's intangibles.  And, well, that irritates me.

(P.S.  Thank you, Friend With Whom I Had Lunch Today, for encouraging me to write this post and for getting me back into the blog.  I will try not to let a whole month pass before the next entry.)

"Do you work?"

My sweet little son has RSV, respiratory syncytial virus.  Merry First Christmas, right?  He caught it at school.  Actually, I'm pretty sure who he caught it from.  I think he caught it from The Dude.  Poor little guys.  RSV is highly contagious, so I fully expect that nearly every kid in his class will catch it.  It's one of the well-known downsides of daycare:  your kiddo is going to catch everything.

Yesterday, we took The Boy to the doctor because we had learned about the RSV outbreak, and The Boy had a cough.  We wanted to get on top of it if it was, indeed, RSV.  My fellow working mommy friend, whose daughter just had RSV last week, also encouraged us to get in there early to get on top of the disease.  So we did.

The pediatrician, not our normal one because of the holidays, watched him breathe and determined that his breathing wasn't too bad, especially given that his blood oxygen level was 100%.  She noted that his nose was quite congested, and had two nurses come in to suction his nose.  It took three of us to do it:  Mr. The Working Mom and I to hold The Boy down, and one of the nurses to do the actual suctioning.   The Boy is an incredibly strong little creature.  That same nurse also swabbed The Boy's sinuses to get a sample to test for RSV.

While all this was going on, the other nurse, who was in there for God knows what reason other than to annoy me, prattled on about the benefits of nose suctioning, even going so far as to imply that The Boy's RSV infection may have been prevented had we but regularly suctioned The Boy's nose.

Give me a break.  The Boy has RSV because he, The Dude, and all the other kids in his class suck on the same toys five days a week.  For Heaven's sake, they steal each other pacifiers.  When one of those kids caught the virus, it was inevitable that The Boy would get it too.

So I was a frowny-faced mommy.

They offered me the bulb syringe, when it was all over.  I responded, snippily, "I use a NoseFrida to suction his nose," and did not take the stupid torture device.  Mr. The Working Mom, however, politely took the bulb syringe because he doesn't like that I tend to catch whatever The Boy catches by way of the NoseFrida.  (Mister is, generally speaking, more polite than I am, I would say.)

And I really do feel that this nose suctioning is torture for The Boy, even with the NoseFrida, and I don't really like to do it.  Here they were telling me to do it every couple of hours!  (Anyway, I always understood that you shouldn't do it too often or you could give the kiddo a nosebleed.  But nevermind that, 'tis not the point of my tale.)

Around 3 p.m. yesterday afternoon, I got a call that the RSV test on The Boy had come back positive and the doctor wanted us to come back today for a recheck.  So I made an appointment for 1:15 p.m. today.

I took The Boy to the doctor on my own today, which may have been a mistake.  (See superior politeness powers of my darling spouse.)  The Boy and I arrived in the exam room and among the questions asked of me by one of the very nurses who attended to us yesterday was, "And what is the purpose of your visit today?"  Really?  That's not in your notes on your little computer screen there from yesterday?  But I just said, "Recheck because of the RSV," flatly.

Not-Our-Regular-Pediatrician came in to check The Boy.  Among the things she said was that she had heard that I had gotten mad yesterday about the nose suctioning and so she wanted to apologize that the incident was so upsetting.  I wasn't planning to say anything about it, but since she brought it up, I explained to her that it was not the nose suctioning itself, but the unhelpful commentary by the, to my observation, superfluous nurse.  She didn't seem to understand the distinction.  For all I know Not-Our-Regular-Pediatrician also believes in the miracle cure that is nose suctioning.  I sort of let it drop, though.  No sense beating a dead horse.  We were there to get The Boy medical attention, not belabor a trivial personality dust up.  And besides, we are suctioning his nose, not every two hours, but several times a day.  And it comes right back.

The Boy's oxygen level was down and he was showing signs of labored breathing, so the doctor recommended that we do breathing treatments.  We did the first one in the doctor's office, me and a nurse (not the offending nurse).  The nurse commented several times about how strong The Boy is and how difficult it is to control him.  Yes, try to suction that nose all by yourself without two other adults to hold him down.


The doctor came back to check him again after the treatment and he was, sort of, instantly better.  His oxygen level went up a little and his breathing was not as labored.  She told me that she was sending us home with a nebulizer and that the nurse would give me the breathing treatment schedule.

So the same nurse who did the breathing treatment with me came back to give me the schedule.  Twelve days:  four treatments on the first three days, then three treatments for three days, then two treatments for three days, then one treatment for three days.

I somehow feel that it is necessary at this juncture to make crystal clear that I will do anything and everything to make The Boy well again.  Anything.  Everything.  Name it.  I'll do it.

After being given that treatment schedule I muttered (which I am want to do when stressed, I am given to understand) that the schedule might pose a bit of a logistical challenge, especially in the early days with so many treatments a day.  She said, sort of surprised, "Do you work?"

!

She never would have asked a dad that question.  Never.

I snapped back, "Yes, I work."  I went on to say (mutter) that I barely have any leave because I was on bedrest before The Boy was born, and that this will be hard, but we will figure something out.  It is not a question of whether or not to do it, but managing it.

Still, I was so angered by that remark that I really couldn't think of anything else.  Do I work?  Do I work?  Shit, lady, do you?  Look, some girls actually have fulltime jobs that are just as important as boys' jobs and stuff, golly!

I know I over-reacted.  I wanted to cry.  I just left the office and did not make a follow up appointment. I just could not stay and burst into tears and make a fool of myself.  (And the follow up appointment that I will make when I call back tomorrow is going to be with Our-Regular-Pediatrician.)  I was already stressed about the work that I am missing, deadlines that I have to meet somehow while not actually being in the office, and even more stressed about my very sick little boy.  Do I work?  I have two fulltime jobs, lady!

I called my aforementioned working mommy friend as I was walking out of the doctor's office.  And while talking to her, I did cry.  (And, she also rightly suggested that I was overreacting a bit, and very patiently listened to me and calmed me down.  Yay, friend!)

But this question that nurse asked carried with it all sorts of assumptions that just would not be made of a man.  To assume that I don't work, that I do not have other obligations that need juggling, just floored me.  I haven't asked him, but I suspect that when my brother, just last year, was staying home with his daughter while his wife worked, no one ever asked such a question of him or made any such assumptions about him.  You just wouldn't do that to man.

Who knew that I would face gender inequality at the pediatrician's office?  Certainly not me.

Man.  Wo-man.

Woman's Work

I'm not cut out to be a stay at home mom.  And I have mad respect for the moms who do it and do it well.  I know that it may seem like an obvious thing to say, but taking care of a baby is hard!

Imagine for a second:  You are an intelligent person.  Maybe you hold one, two, or even three college degrees.  Maybe you once had a job that paid a handsome salary, maybe even a six figure salary.  People you worked with came to you for advice.  You were lauded among your peers.  You were good at your job.


But that was another life ago.


Today, you have spent your day with a small person who doesn't talk or walk . . . you're not sure, but that could be poo under your nails and somehow you got sweet potatoes in your hair.  And you have to do that every day.


And not only do you have to do that every day, but because your salary isn't there anymore to, perhaps, pay for outside help, you also have to clean the kitchen, vacuum the floor, do the laundry, cook dinner, and, in between, try to do something edifying with the little person at your feet.

You can understand why stay at home moms might need a mommy's day out every once in a while.  Sometimes, after a particularly difficult weekend with The Boy, I feel a sort of guilty relief to be going to work on Monday.  My husband said that some weekends feel like you've been working 48 hours straight for a tyrannical boss who never really communicates to you exactly what he expects of you and, nevertheless, is rarely satisfied with your work.  Yes, and for stay at home moms, there is no break on Monday morning.

Betty Friedan described a housewife's plight half a century ago:  "Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?'"  Friedan also said that men were not the enemy, but fellow victims of the roles thrust upon us by a society that defined a woman's domain as the home and a man's as the office.  She advocated that we strive for an equal partnership between the sexes.  One last epigram from Aunt Betty:  "A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in professions, or by refusing to compete with men at all."

Here's the heart of the modern woman's dilemma:  We have not moved past that point.  It's 2011. Friedan wrote those words in 1963, and professional women like me still know that the pinnacle of the profession is very rarely attained unless we foreswear our families.  Not wishing to do that, many of us opt out all together; we stay at home.  It's a choice, yes, to stay home, but I do wonder if it's a choice foisted upon some moms by the very stagnant shape of professional advancement.  True, more of us can get into law school, more of us are engineers, more of us are doctors, but when we start to have families, the same walls emerge as existed in 1963.  And the choices are difficult and career-threatening.  This is the choice some stay at home moms make:  the choice to chuck her career because the height of professional success is incompatible with motherhood, even 48 years after Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique.

Even I made a choice, long before I was ever a wife or mother, that limited my professional progress.  I saw early on that life in a law firm was not compatible with my hope to one day marry and have a family.  The female partners I worked with or around were, by and large, single or childless or divorce or some combination of the three.  The one female partner who was married with children had her mother-in-law there constantly to fill in.  That's fortunate for her, but it is not an advantage available to all of us.

Why does the choice have to be binary:  successful career or mommy.  In fifty years, we've come no further than this?

Friedan alleged that women handicapped society by copying the pattern of male professional advancement or by refusing to compete at all with men.  What choice is there?  Choosing the middle way, like I have, endows women with no power to change the paradigm for professional success.  That was established by men.  So electing, as I did, to eschew the big law firm life, I chose not to be as powerful or as rich as I might have been had I stayed.  If women want that success, and the power that comes with it, they must compete in the house built by men.  To allege that adopting the man's path to success handicaps society suggests that women can shift society all on their own.  To shift the paradigm, we must have the power.  To get the power, we must follow the established path to the top.  Or it must be given to us . . . or taken by us.

And that's it, really.  I suspect that Friedan would have liked to see women take to the streets, like the temperance movement, or the Suffragettes, or Occupy Wall Street.  Take the power that way.  Demand more flexible working conditions.  Demand companionate marriages.  Heck, demand a different way to think about professional success.  But by the time you are a 41 year old lawyer, wife, and mother, finding the time to hold a sign on a picket line really is not the first priority, even if it would benefit "the sisterhood."  And would I want to do that anyway?  No.  Because by the time you are 41, and a wife, and a mother, most people are also far, far from their passionate youths.  If I ever had radical, protest days (and I think those might have been the days in 1992 when I decided to vote for Bill Clinton), they are far behind me.  I hope, though, that incremental steps over the past 50 years -- more women lawyers, more women engineers, more women doctors -- will mean that by the time The Boy is grown, there will be better options for the little girls his age, and for him too.