The Mommy Wars
Jun 19th, 2006 at 10:08 am by Susie
I must have fallen asleep and missed this the first time around, but I truly don’t understand the big fuss over what Linda Hirshman is saying. Or maybe I’m just too old and tired to get it.
Everybody started hating Linda, apparently, when I published an article in the progressive magazine the American Prospect last December, saying that women who quit their jobs to stay home with their children were making a mistake. Worse, I said that the tasks of housekeeping and child rearing were not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings. They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings. Oh, and by the way, where were the dads when all this household labor was being distributed? Maybe the thickest glass ceiling, I wrote, is at home.
Well, yeah. Duh. What’s so frigging controversial about that?
Oops. I forgot that out in the minefields of the Mommy Wars, the battle is still raging. Even if you remove the home-schooling fringe fundies, it’s still commonly believed that Moms Who Stay at Home are the Real Mothers, and the Ones Who Go to Work are the Selfish Bitches. Or vice versa.
As if anyone really has a choice, anyway. Are we supposed to pretend those decisions take place in an economic and psychological vacuum, absent cultural pressure?
I know some lovely, smart women who decided to stay home with their kids. (Their husbands had good enough jobs and/or they had small enough mortgages that it was viable.) They didn’t become any less smart or funny, but they did seem to acquire a, shall we say, bitter edge that didn’t used to be there. And one of them (a fundamentalist Christian) called me from a train station in the middle of the night after she ran away from home, all the way to Tennessee.
I also know women who would rather slit their wrists than stay at home full-time, and a few of them have a rather noticeable disconnect from their kids. They try to fill it with cash.
The big sandtrap for mothers is the pressure to Do What’s Best for the Children (as judged by everyone else), to pretend everything is just great, your kids are angels and you’re completely and utterly fulfilled, carrying the weight of keeping everyone else happy at your expense. Neither group of moms has a monopoly on that; in fact, the ones who come out with the worst of both worlds are the ones who work “part-time.” (What a joke. You work harder at your job to prove you’re not a waste of space, and the people you live with expect things to stay the same, since you’re “only” working part-time.)
Pretending is always a bad idea. Yet mothers face an enormous amount of pressure to do so, to help prop up the elaborate facade that is Sainted Mommyhood.
I’m fortunate that my friends were more of the subversive Roseanne Barr variety: “I figure if he comes home from work at five and those kids are still alive, I’ve done my job.” When we’d see one of those stories in the news - the ones where the happy young mother drowned her children like rats - we knew it was more than a joke. Some women just crack under all that simulated joy.
I didn’t want to go to work; I wanted to stay home, paint and and bake organic cookies. I was pushed kicking and screaming into the workplace by my then-husband, because our finances were in such bad shape.
And you know what? Turns out, I loved it.
See, here’s the thing. If cooking, dusting and taking care of the kids was as fulfilling as they try to make it sound, men would be knocking us out of the way just so they got to be the ones squirting Tide on the skidmarks of their tighty whities. They’d sit around the bar, talking about how nothing beats the sense of real satisfaction (you know?) that you get from scrubbing the top of a really dirty stove.
I think women who stay home should take every opportunity to remind men of that. “Hey, if you want to be the one who scrubs the shit out of the bowl, be my guest.”
Yeah, I know being the primary breadwinner has its downside, too. (Try being a single mom.) But unless you’re a janitor or plumber (and God bless you if you are), it doesn’t involve the same literal exposure to excrement as the Mommy Track.
I guess my point is, these decisions should be made on an individual basis, and they shouldn’t be inflexible. When couples are trying to figure out what’s best for the family, everyone should note that mothers are members of the family, too.
Talk about working for a tough boss! When you’re a mother, you’re judged by everyone - other mothers, but especially yourself, for falling down on the job. Have you read the latest books, put them in the right school, thought of every possible way harm might come to your child and managed accordingly?
How come guys don’t put themselves through this? Where are the Daddy books, telling them all the things they’d better do before they ruin their kids for life?
The mothers on my street thought I was an alien. They’d knock themselves out for weeks to make the perfect Halloween costumes; I’d tell my kids, “Don’t you want one of those nice superhero outfits that come in a box?” I don’t think my sons ever took homemade cupcakes to school, because Mr. Entenmann made such nice facsimiles.
I’ve done some radical stuff in my time, but to this day, the most shocked response I get is when I mention I discouraged my kids from playing organized sports. (You’d think I sold them to a ring of pedophiles.) I was a single mom working 50-60 hours a week, and did I mention I have narcolepsy? Of the list of maternal sins my sons recite, this one has never come up - unless the trauma was so great, they still can’t bring themselves to talk about it. I guess I should ask them.
My point, I guess, is that you do get a say in what works for you. Fuck what your neighbors or sisters-in-law think: What do you think? You’re entitled to balance your needs with those of your kids.
Would it help if I remind you that no matter what you do, they’ll blame you anyway? Just ask our mothers.
Oh My God!
In another comment thread I just mentioned how I love your “family stories” and how they perk me up after all the Republican detritus floating in the toilet bowl of life and you go and write something like this and rock my socks off!! I’m in heaven!
P.S. Would you like to have two gay husbands? My partner and I would LOVE to move in with you, long as you talk like you write all day long!
P.S.S. Love you Susie! (Sorry about all these exclamation points, but this story made my day!)
Yes. Just yes.
Indeed. I resolved not to live my mother’s life — stuck in a small town and forbidden by my father to accept pay for her volunteer work (which she did anyway, albeit on the sly). So my husband stayed home as a full-time father while I worked. Duffy is still famous in Prospect Park as “the father of twins.” There were times I felt gypped, but the kids did fine. (Perhaps I compensated by making Halloween costumes (but never cookies) from scratch.) There are lots of ways to be a good mother.
haven’t we just about OD’d our kids on sports? Don’t kids ever get time alone anymore? Micromanaging kids is not an adult’s function. let them have time alone for a little imagination.
Hate to be a contrarian, but having done more than my fair share of corporate America, housework is no more brainless than most of the paperwork and followup crap those jobs required, regardless of how fulfilling the job itself might have been. Like anything else, the jobs were fulfilling despite the degree of mindless upkeep and mundane management required. Much like being a stay-at-home parent..
Stepping back, I often wonder why any discussion of feminism always centers around valuing work that was seen as traditionally male, rather than also valuing work that was seen as traditionally female.
Over the past year I’ve been the housespouse, a stay-at-home dad who has learned two very valuable things:
1) Man, being the one at home with the kid is FUN!
2) And yes, it is a lot of work. some fun and some boooooring.
But then, that was true when I was an junior flunky at Paramount and the creative director of Starbucks.
The cliches are also true — the work does not end when my wife gets home, since I keep going until our daughter is in bed. I’m also the one who gets up with her at night, etc. Still, it’s as rewarding as anything else I’ve ever done. I didn’t expect that to be true, but there you have it.
I also think that valuing this kind of work also seems like winning politics whichever side proposes doing something about it. I don’t see why Dems can’t propose a plan whereby a couple with kids and one stay-at-home spouse or partner would pay no taxes at middle class income levels, with the tax break progressively phased out at higher income levels. Instead, corporate taxes would be adjusted to cover the amount needed.
I sometimes think it’s because it would seem too “socially conservative” to value work that was once seen as traditionally female. As if it’s not a valid choice anymore, even when proposals about it are expanded to include both genders.
What is most striking about this latest round in the “mommy wars” is that it is not about the range of options an individual woman should have in determining what’s best for her and her family, something that early feminists espoused.
Now it’s all about disparaging the other side.
Listen up, ladies, if you need to bring down someone who made a different choice in order to justify your own choices in life, I suggest you take a good long look at your own life for the sources of your discontent.
I’m quite certain my wife likes homeschooling our kids very much. I’d like to be there too, but I go out because we have bills to pay. I sit in 8×8 cubicle almost all day and try to stay sane while I get enough work done to justify my being here, and I consider it a good job.
At the end of the day I go home and start the real work, helping with the kids, working on the house and in the garden, etc. On weekends I sleep a little later but work at home until past dark, because I love it. I look forward to my day job as a chance to rest, but the hardest part is staying awake because it’s so boring most of the time.
I sit at a computer but I’m not supposed to use the internet for any amusement. Of course, that’s impossible; so I have to take care not to upset anyone, so they don’t check my internet usage. I manage to bring in over $1000 per day for my employer, which helps to counter the fear that I could get fired for reading your blog and a few others.
I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say that would get the point across that my wife likes her role as the wife/mother in our family, but it’s true. She does mostly womanly things, and I do mostly manly things. It’s just the way we are, and it works well. My body is built for hard phyisical labor and hers is built for giving birth and feeding the baby. The difference is really obvious. Right now we have four daughters (the youngest is 7 weeks old), and just yesterday my wife was saying (unprompted) that she’s open to the possibility of more. She did very well in school, but felt that raising a family would be the best use of her intelligence. There are people like that. We try not to impose our beliefs on others, but we’re quite happy with our choices in life.
Pandu, I thought that’s what I was saying: that families should decide what’s best for themselves, without guilt and pressure from other people’s expectations - including that of gender, or of their religious community. It’s a lot harder to figure out what you want to do (or admit it, even to yourself) when everyone you associate with believes so strongly it’s wrong for you to want anything else.
OK, sorry if I misunderstood. Now that you mention it, I did get a sense of what you’re saying. It sounds like we’re in agreement.
Sometimes I feel like I know what’s best for people, but I’m also rebellious enough to know that I definitely don’t like people telling _me_ what I should do. Actually, I just paused a discussion of Bhagavad-gita where the subject was that at the end of Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna, He said, “You have heard My opinion, and now you must decide for yourself what you will do.”
Of course, life can get pretty complicated, and society has to balance potentially opposing values such as like free will and justice. I suppose “live and let live” is a good philosophy. The trouble is that some people’s living is more aggressive than others.