As I've mentioned in other blog posts, I grew up with a working mother. She was a journalist, with a very demanding series of progressively more responsible, high pressure jobs, and she also had a lengthy commute. Her mother was also a working journalist, so she knew the drill. While there were a lot more employed mothers when I was growing up than there were when my mother was growing up (when she was a kid, her mother was pretty much the only mom-with-a-job she knew), I was still unique among my friends in the demands of my mother's job. I know that there were lots of American moms in the 70s and 80s who were grappling with the mother-employee balance in the way my mother did, but none of them seemed to have children who attended my school, church or 4-H Club meetings.
In my juvenile milieu, my mother's work made her an anomaly. None of the kids I knew personally had mothers with the kind of high-octane, super competitive, no-summers-off, always-on-call career like my own mom's, where breaking news sometimes meant a 15 hour day, or where "election night" was actually "election week," and where we might not see her for 48 hours straight. If an interview she had been trying to land for months suddenly became available at 9pm on Sunday night, she went out to do the interview at 9pm on a Sunday night. (My father was also a working journalist, and between my 7th and 10th grade years of high school, he attended law school at night, after work, eventually graduating with honors. So both of my parents worked at a supercharged pace throughout much of my childhood.)
And as far as flexibility on the job for my mom, the working mother of three? Forget about it. In the 70s and 80s, there was no way a woman who wanted to keep her job in journalism, much less be taken seriously and move up the ranks could suggest to her male boss that she might, say, work from home two afternoons a week, or negotiate a special schedule in the summer months when her kids were out of school. If one of us became sick (something our family discouraged to a degree I never truly understood until I became a working mom, and experienced for myself the moment of panic that comes when you realize your 6 year old has a fever of 102 degrees at 7:30 am on a Tuesday morning, and that you have a cannot-be-missed meeting scheduled with a client at 9:00am), there was no way at that time that she could have asked to use her own sick leave to take one of us to the doctor. It simply Wasn't Done.
As a child and teenager, it wasn't hard for me to see that many of the other 4-H, Brownie, Little League, and PTA moms simply didn't grasp the concept of a mother with a job like the one my mother had. Some of these other moms worked, but they worked part time, or in jobs that allowed them to be free in the summer, and after their kids came home from school each afternoon. Their jobs were not highly competitive or male-dominated like my mom's was, and their husband's jobs were obviously primary in the family priority structure. While my mother never, ever judged these women for choosing (or being able to choose) a different path, I know she could see what I saw, which was that a lot of the other moms at my school and around town actually felt sorry for my siblings and me, what with our absentee, women's libber, "career woman" mother. While I might have been a-okay with the fact that my mom wasn't at school for the 4th grade Christmas presentation - which fell at 11 am on a weekday - I very clearly remember how other moms would pointedly ask me where she was, even though they knew perfectly well that she was at work. They wanted to make a point by asking, and then they would "tsk tsk" in a way that made their disapproval obvious to me. (For the record, they never asked why my father wasn't there.)
Basically, these women - who were nice folks in general (and also good mothers, just like my mom) - literally could not imagine the demands of a job like my mother's. A mother of young children with a job like that was as foreign to most of them as if she had an extra eyeball in the middle of her forehead. Because of this, I always got the sense that they believed she was either exaggerating the demands in an effort to avoid being named "first grade room mom," or that she was simply a failure at time management, money management, husband management (because they all had husbands whose jobs mostly paid the bills)...or all of the above. I could see how guilty this made her feel, even though her income was absolutely crucial to our family, and even though she was damn good at what she did, and loved it. And of course, the value to her children of seeing their muckraking mother bust a slumlord for ripping off poor families, or snag an interview with Ken Kesey, or be named bureau chief for a major wire service had a value just as meaningful and long-lasting as baking cookies for the school's Fall Festival. But if I sometimes felt the sting of other mothers judging her harshly because she never chaired the school fundraising committee or taught Sunday School, I know she must have suffered far more painfully from their disapproval.
I guess I figured that by the time I had kids of my own, things would be different. I was lucky enough to have a rather enviable work-at-home career for the first 7-8 years I was a parent, and it allowed me to have the best of both worlds. But the only reason this was do-able was because I was in a marriage at that time where my husband's "primary" job provided a dependable paycheck, health insurance and other benefits. We both worked, but my "job" was the one where no boss - because, as a freelance writer and editor, I was mostly my own boss - was going to raise a fuss if I needed to spend an entire week doing nothing but caring for three young children with the flu. My ability to do this also meant that their father didn't have to endanger his own job by missing work. It was an arrangement that worked well for all concerned.
But after my marriage ended, and necessity moved me into the full-time, "real world" workforce, I discovered something rather disappointing. While employers' understanding of working motherhood has improved tremendously since my own childhood - meaning that my bosses have been very understanding of my need to sometimes take my own sick days for sick children, or of my very occasional requests to work temporarily modified schedules - I still sense a certain kind of disapproval from an awful lot of other moms.
If the bane of a working mother's summertime existence is cobbling together childcare, the flip side of that guilt and stress coin comes when school starts back up in August, beginning with the very first day of classes, which are usually a half-day. I can't easily just take half the day off of work, so year after year, I've had to get someone else - like my sister or my paid babysitter - to pick the children up at 11:45 am on the first day of school. And what kind of rotten mother doesn't even have the time to pick her own kids up on the very first day of school? Well...me. I am that kind of rotten mother, because like my own mom, I also have a very demanding job. And 30 years after I remember being made to feel bad as a child because my rotten mother didn't show up for the elementary school cookie bake-off - because she was at work - I find that I am judged in much the same way as my own mother was by those moms who CAN do the 11:45 am, first-day-of-school minivan run.
One would think that by now, the idea of mothers with competitive, time-intensive careers would be old-hat. To watch TV, or movies, or read modern fiction, one would certainly come to the conclusion that even the most career-driven and ambitious mother is an everyday thing in our culture. But that's not been my personal experience. I find that a not insignificant percentage of the other moms I meet still don't seem to grasp the concept of one of their own having the kind
of job that actually requires 40-plus, demanding hours a week. There
seems to still be a widespread
assumption that "mom jobs" are always kinda, sorta part-time - even if they are "full time" on paper - and that they are generally structured
around school hours and calendars (Surely you can make the 10am weekday school
fundraiser planning meeting! You're a mom!).
But that's not the way it is for a lot of us working mamas. Our jobs are not full-time in concept only; they really are full time, for real, just like men's jobs. Only we're moms! Just imagine!
No matter how accomodating and family-friendly
my employer is (and she is), the fact remains that I work a lot of
hours in an industry that simply isn't conducive to regularly popping
out of the office for an extra few hours here and there to chaperone a
school field trip, or to consistently make it to soccer practices that
start at 3:45 pm on weekdays. I remarried a wonderful fella in 2006 (lucky me!), and for several good reasons - and by agreement - my job is actually the primary one in our family, rather than his. Additionally, I am working in an economy
where jobs are hard to come by, and where all of us who are
lucky enough to have them are hustling doubletime to develop new
business.This is not a "part time, soccer mom" kind of economy for those
of us who are our family's primary wage earners. I haven't always worked at this level of intensity, and I certainly won't always need to work at this level of intensity, but for now, I am at a
place where I have to kick it up a notch. That's what I have to do, and frankly - when I'm not feeling guilty, or worried that a neverending meeting is making me late picking one of my kids up from a playdate - I am loving the challenges and pace of my work these days. But apparently, my situation rubs some other mothers the wrong way. What I see as a strong work ethic, and a desire to build a better, more secure and independent financial future for my family and myself, they see as selfishness and a yuppified form of child neglect.
Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that every mom I know or meet who works part time, or who doesn't work for pay cops a judgmental attitude about my status as an employed parent. I feel blessed to have many stay-at-home mom friends who are tremendously dear to me, and with whom I share the ability to connect as mothers beyond our different lifestyles. We support each other and laugh with each other and commiserate together over the hard parts of our lives, whether those are work or family-related. I am forever indebted to a few of my stay-at-home mother-friends (particularly my sister) who always have my back when I do need help with afterschool pick-up. They never judge, they just step in to help. And I love them for it, and know how lucky I am to have them in my life, and my kids' lives.
Additionally, I am sure that some of my perception of
judgment stems entirely from my own internal guilt and conflict about whether I am failing my children, my husband, my employer or myself by attempting to do too much. And no one can make you feel guilty like you make yourself feel guilty, especially when honesty compels you to admit that there are certainly times when my kids really do wish I were more available for things like field trips and bake sales. I know they do, and thus arises my self-inflicted flagellation. But I am equally
sure that a fair portion of my sense of being judged is indeed coming from the Good Moms, the ones who, unlike me, managed to marry (and stay married the first time!) to someone with a good-paying job, with health insurance, thus allowing these Good Moms to work part time, or not at all. These Good Moms manage to communicate their distaste
for my situation with a certain look, a certain tone...and sometimes,
by pointedly excluding me from the non-work-hours, mom-centric activities and social events that I likely COULD
attend, if I were asked. And I know for a fact that a few of them sometimes ask my poor, neglected children why their mother is not in attendance at a particular event or activity, even though they know very well that I am at work.
Sometimes, when I get "that look" from another mother, after I've sheepishly explained why I can't come to the coaches' appreciation luncheon, much less help organize the flower arrangements, I want to blurt out an explanation of my financial reality to her. I want to tell her about how I got divorced when I was 34 years old, and then had to start all over, from scratch, just like a 21 year old college graduate at the very start of her career, except with shared custody of three kids, no savings, no health benefits, and with bills to pay. I want to tell her how intense the world of billable agency hours can be, and how competitive. I want to ask her if she ever lays in bed at night, silently going over her office to-do list for the next day, and hoping she can somehow get to work an hour early, just to get caught up. Sometimes, I feel like defiantly declaring that I actually LIKE my job, and that I am, by nature, a competitive person who is a better mother at home when I am challenged at work.
But I don't ever say anything. I just silently feel guilty, wondering whether she's so obviously disdainful of me because she feels like she's having to pull more than her fair share of the classroom cookie-baking weight for all of us slacker, non-cookie-baking, working moms, or because she truly believes I don't care enough about my own children to have made the "right" choices, like she did. Maybe it's some of both. But while I may not be sure exactly why she's judging me, I know that she is. Just like my own working mom was judged, 30 years ago.
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