Strollerderby : WAHM

Women Not Having It All, Having It All, Had Enough

Kelly Mills — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:29:00 GMT

Meg Wolitzer has a new novel called "The Ten-Year Nap". It's about moms, mostly moms who left the workforce to stay at home with kids. It sounds good, and she says, "In fiction, stay-at-home moms have often been [subject to] mockery, and I think it's very sexist: the stay-at-home mother whose children are oversubscribed, who has reduced her entire brain to trivial things." We can totally use some better depictions of SAHMs. But I have to speak to the fact that once again, we are gonna get a small wave of "Can women have it all?" headlines and I'm over it.

'Kay, look, I'm going to answer the question of whether women can have it all: It depends. I mean, we aren't having a giant collective female experience here, are we? So some moms have to go back to the workforce whether they want to or not, while others can't wait to get back, and still more choose to be home with the kids full time. I know some SAHMs who partly made their decision based on the fact their jobs were low-paying and tiring (like teaching) and they preferred being at home, not just because they wanna be with the kids. I know moms who found being at home with the kids was so not for them. And I know moms who like their jobs and made choices based on the fact that their careers don't allow for much of a break.

I know moms who went back to their careers after the kids went to school, who work from home, who have part-time jobs, who work two jobs, who care for several kids, who are single, and who are the breadwinner with a partner staying at home. You know, not everyone has a really fulfilling career, mom or not. Not everyone finds parenting fulfilling. And things change over time for people. Whether or not you can "have it all" probably depends on what you want, and where you are, and I bet the answer to that question is different for everyone.

Look, I'm irritated because the "have it all" stick is used to beat women for selfishly wanting things or passively not wanting things. It implies that women want too much; and yet asserting that women can have it all ignores that many women are going to have to make a few trade-offs along the way. Rather than get into that, could we get equal pay and better childcare and a little respect for our individual choices? Thanks ever so much.

Mom Brain Is Not Such a Bad Thing

Amy Kuras — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:03:00 GMT

Maybe this is a second kid kind of a thing or a new baby situation, but man, I miss having my act together. Two short months ago, I totally felt I was rocking the work-at-home mom thing. Then baby #2 arrived, and while he is delightful and wonderful and a much, much easier baby than I deserve, there is no longer a single, solitary aspect of my life I am not ragingly behind on. Thank you notes unwritten, blogs not maintained, friends not called, books, hell, magazines unread. And we'll not talk about the tumbleweeds of pet fur all over my house or the disorganized cluster-you-know-what that is my work life.
So I found this essay, from Parenting (my least favorite parenting mag), of all places, very reassuring. Writer Margaret Renki posits that the kind of thinking we tend to do as mothers is just as meaningful and important as the stuff we once thought, and sometimes still do, about politics or art or The Meaning of Life.
I especially loved this:
"Motherhood forces us to understand, if only so we can teach it to our children, what really matters in the small space we each have between birth and death. And the easiest way for me to learn this lesson is by living in deep, penetrating kinship with other human beings -- by living, in other words, in a family."
I needed that, that reminder that this stuff matters even when it feels so small and trivial that the best thing I got done today was to keep everyone alive and loved.

What Does This Generation of Moms Want?

Kelly Mills — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:39:00 GMT

There's about a thousand headlines trying to define what moms of this generation want. Do we hope to return to the domestic spheres of the 1950's housewives (as has been reported), or are we career-minded? Do we care about our jobs or our kids? And one writer says we don't know what we want. When she works fulltime she can't wait to be home with family, but when she is on maternity leave she finds she hates staying at home. She gets a work-from-home freelance career but misses office action, and when she goes back to the office she chafes at the set hours that make her miss her kids. In short, women of this day and age have no idea what they want. What they really, really want.

I actually know what women want. Every woman really wants...A pony. Can I have a pony? A nice Shetland?

Sigh. If I had to hazard a crazy guess, I'd venture that women really want to feel fulfilled and satisfied at whatever they do whenever they are doing it, be it time with kids or the office grind or the freelance life. They'd also like financial security and crap like that. And that it's hard to balance many priorities, and the balance probably looks different for different people, making it impossible to (gasp) find one way to define an entire group of women, except with very broad strokes. I don't mean to Myspace the party here, but I'd also guess men want the same damn thing. It's a generation of people wanting to feel like they are engaged in meaningful things, which of course makes us sooooo very different from previous generations. It's just that our choices were more limited in the past, but I'd be surprised to find we have become suddenly impossible to please.

Working at Home and Making It Work

Jessica Ashley (Sassafrass) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:32:00 GMT

Last month, I decided I was done with the heavy lifting. I was done moving my laptop from the dining room table to the bedroom to wherever I could...ummm, borrow wireless. I decided it was time to chuck the fantasy of having a chicly designed apartment or house with a remote office in the attic and just claim a corner as my own. After that decision came the radical act of turning my desk around, sacrificing my view of the $1.5 mil home with the peek-friendly windows for an "office space" that's much more defined.

Don't get me wrong, it ain't pretty. My desk juts out nearly halfway into the entrance of the dining room and I have to wedge myself into my chair to sidle up to the computer. It's my own little insta-nook and I couldn't be happier.

First of all, the small space behind the desk means it's harder for the hubs to squeeze back here/dump bills on my highly organized piles of stuff/steal my favorite pen. Second, I think it is the first time in the nine years we've lived together I've had a space other than my bra drawer that's been all mine (no touching!). Third, for some reason, even though I face the mayhem, I can better focus back here. Hmmm...Maybe all that turning around see what Lil E's using his plastic saw to ~~anhialate~~ fix was yanking me out of the zone. Now I don't have to stop typing when I start yelling, which feels like genius to me. Finally, when Lil E needs to be close to me while watching Barney, he can stand behind me on my chair, hold on to my neck and still see creepy dinosaur all at the same time. Ta-da!

Cafemama's also found a way to making working from home with kids work, which includes a little bit of chaos, a well-stocked project drawer and the possibility of some part-time babysitting help. Now she wants to know how other WAHPs are doing it. How are you handling the in-home gig these days? What are your tricks of the trade?

[via: UrbanMamas]