Hobson's Choice
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stay and work
During lunch, I read an article in the latest Bitch magazine about stay-at-home mothers. The author, the mother of a ten month old, argues that mothers opt to stay home, not because they think it important work, but because they are dissatisfied in their jobs. Overly ambitious women, who had hoped to be Katie Couric or Barbara Boxer by their early thirties, discover that they are not fabulous celebrity successes and hence to decide to drop out with their children. Additionally, because they have nannies, they're not really doing the work of motherhood anyway.
It seems an exceptionally odd generalization to make on the basis of the author's nannied acquaintance.
As you know, I'm already annoyed by the concept of the "choice" of staying at home. Contrary to the irate letters to parenting mags from SAHMs, working mothers do not simply need to learn to economize better to be able to stay home. Most women have no choice about working.
Those letters suggest that women work because they want the perks of a ritzy lifestyle. Not in the majority of cases, but I say "so what if they do?" I'm not in favor of gross consumption for all sorts of reasons, but not because it puts women into the workforce. And despite any attempts at simplicity, I have my own luxuries; I'm just lucky that mine are relatively cheap in our culture (books, good food, stationery, hot water in the tub). What if my luxuries were travel to far off lands? Or jet-skiing?
But back to the author at hand, she who is concerned with the ambitious and their nannies. More interestingly, she makes the point that while taking care of her ten month old is all-time-consuming, it doesn't feel like "work," either in the sense of drudgery or in the sense of exceptional life fulfillment. And that's far more pertinent that scapegoat nannies and more personal.
It depends, I suppose, on your definition of work. Certainly, when I had a ten month old, the round-the-clock physical labor of nursing fit the bill for work to me. My muscles ached like they did when I worked at a garden center. Nowadays, the work more resembles the time I spent with one hundred sixth graders, trying to keep one step ahead of their energy. Today, I spent a long time in an exceptionally repetitive yet creative discussion about how "we touch our crotches in our bedrooms by ourselves because it's private."
Motherhood, it seems, fits my personal definition of work, because it feels like work to me. It doesn't feel that way to the article's author, and I'm not sure why a tolerant attitude can't prevail on our differing assumptions about what work is.
For the lucky few mothers for whom working is a choice, the decision is highly personal, if culture-bound. Undoubtedly, my decision to stay with Eleanor as much as possible comes out of my experiences at home with my own mother in the 1970s. It's part of my cultural milieu. But it also comes out of the personal experience and trauma of being separated from her for the first three weeks of her life, when she was born too early. Our whole family is still healing from that time.
It means that I may make a different decision the next time around. If my next baby is born at term, is healthy, and so on, going back to work sooner may feel right. It will still be personal and particular to the situation of the moment.
I'm fascinated by how we cobble together our lives as mothers. My generation is not enforced to be home-bound, and we live under relatively good economic conditions that allow a few of us to choose our life situations.
For myself, staying at home while working on the computer with other social workers fulfills my need for many types of work. I'm interested to see how it's going work now that I don't have oodles of free child care, and I still wish that someone would put together an anthology of how mothers today put together our lives. Maybe it should be me.
2:01 p.m. - 2004-09-02
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