f-word

Why the Mommy Wars?

My mom is someone who always knew she wanted to have children. She got pregnant with me  as soon as she and my father could afford it and followed up with two additional kids in the  next few years. And she stayed home with all of us, quitting her job as a church music director to become a full-time mom. When I was eight, I entered an essay about my mom into the  “Mother of the Year” contest that the local newspaper held, and I won. Or, rather, she won. In  the essay I talked about how available she was to us—this was evidence of why she deserved  to be Mother of the Year. “If I forget something at school,” I wrote, “she will always bring it  to me.”

Nearing the end of my pregnancy, I already know I won’t be this kind of mother. If my kid  forgets something at school, unless it’s a lifesaving medication, chances are he or she will have  to do without, because I work full-time and am going to continue to do so.

When my mother and I talked about this, she was concerned that I didn’t approve of her  choices. “Do you think I’m not a good feminist because I stayed home with you kids?” she asked me.  I came back at her with a question of my own: “Do you think that I’m condemning your choices if I don’t make the same ones?” ­­­

­­­­Here’s something I know: There are certain decisions where the stakes seem so high, the available information so ­contradictory, and the societal  support so lacking, that everyone preemptively feels both guilty and defensive. Motherhood seems to be filled with decisions like that, and it’s pretty  evident that the decision about whether to work outside the home or be a stay at home mom is one of them. 

My friends who stay at home with their children tell me that they feel torn, that they miss working—and that they love all the time they get to  spend with their kids. Friends who work tell me that they feel torn, that they worry that they’re missing parts of their kids’ lives—and that they love  getting to have adult lives and careers that matter to them. These are complicated life choices for all my friends, choices that they don’t take lightly.

And both groups seem to be a little worried, as if maybe they haven’t made the best choice. Because of this, I think we have to be able to talk honestly—among women, and as a broader society—about how we’re making these choices and what they mean.  In the conversation with my mom, she said she felt certain that staying at home had been the right thing for her. “The only thing,” she said, “is  that I wonder if your father had to work too hard, since he was the only person bringing in an income. I think he might have liked to have had more  time with you kids.”

I wonder about that, too. All our choices have consequences, and I’m thinking carefully about the consequences of my own choices: if I were a stay  at home mom, it would force my partner to bring in all the income and would necessarily deny him as much time with our child as I would have. It  would jeopardize my career, since research shows that women don’t catch up financially after they take time off. It would enforce certain gender roles  in our child’s mind: moms are at home, dads are at work. I also think it would make me crazy. It just simply wouldn’t be the right choice for me.  And yet other women, women I respect deeply—including my mom—have made different choices and have thought equally as carefully about  what their choices would mean.

Our choices are complicated by the fact that we have very little societal support for parenting. In countries like Sweden, parenting decisions can  play out differently because new parents get paid time off to be with their child, and when and if they decide to return to the workforce they have  free childcare. The assumption there is that childrearing is a public commitment, something to which a society as a whole should devote time and  resources. What choices might my mom (and dad) have been able to make if they’d been living there rather than here when they had me?

Here, parents—and especially mothers, it seems—are given the message, “Do the best you can, but if something goes wrong, it all rests on you.  Good luck.”

This leads to guilt, defensiveness and anxiety that can get channeled into judgment, the so-called “mommy wars” that take place on playgrounds  and in the line to pick up kids from daycare. That anxiety led my mom and me to question how the other was seeing us. But the problem is not with  working moms vs. stay at home moms—it’s not a problem about moms at all. The problem is with a society that refuses to see children as worth  a real investment, that doesn’t recognize caregiving of any kind as particularly valuable, and that is happier to stage a catfight among women than  to identify solutions. 

Alison Piepmeier directs the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston. She writes books and articles about feminism, and she and her  partner will be welcoming a new feminist into the world at the end of this month. For more information, visit www.alisonpiepmeier.com.

~ Alison Piepmeier