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To work or not to work? That is the question.
When you’re pregnant, it seems like your biggest decision is whether you should get an epidural. But once you have the baby, the decisions are e ndless. Breast or bottle, disposables vs. cloth, cry it out or cuddle? It seems like every choice is fraught with life-altering consequences, and if you make the wrong one, you’ve doomed yourself and your child forever.
Still, few decisions induce more angst than whether or not a mom should work.
Perhaps you’re the rare breed who has been waiting her whole life to play June Cleaver and now that you and your babe are snuggled into your three-bedroom ranch home with wall-to-wall carpet and a formal dining room, you’re happily creating domestic bliss every day, secure in the knowledge that Ward will never leave and that cooking, cleaning and taking care of your loved ones are all the most emotionally and intellectually validating experiences a woman could ever desire.
Or maybe you popped the baby out, hired a sitter and continued your climb up the corporate food chain without a shred of guilt because the quality time you spend with your child every night and weekend is turning him or her into a fine human being who knows the value of work and understands that mothers have ambition too.
But if you’re like most of us, you were probably caught off guard by your conflicting emotions surrounding the issue of work.
I’ve known many a woman who had every intention of staying home only to find out that the job was harder than she thought it was, and that her identity and self-worth were more connected to her previous profession than she realized. Take my friend Shannon, for example “The cashier at the grocery store asked for my work number the other day,” she says. “I went into this big, long explanation of how I used to work, and will probably go back, and now I’m home, and I’m OK with it, and I really do a lot and I don’t watch soaps and blah, blah, blah. All this for a 17-yearold who didn’t know what a kumquat was.”
I’d laugh, except I’m the working mom who, when her first child was little, went to great pains to tell anyone who would listen that, “I’ve got her on a schedule so that we can spend three and a half hours of quality time together every single night, so it’s not really even like I have a full-time job.”
Inner Battles
The Mommy Wars was a juicy chunk of artichoke dip for the media in 2006, but frankly I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. I think the real problem is not our anger at other women—it’s the civil war going on in our own heads: Self-directed missile #1: If I work, I’ll doom my kids forever.
Left-brain launched counter-attack: But if I stay home I’ll wind up a no-identity bag lady.
Make no mistake: These competing fears are rooted in reality. Children don’t raise themselves.
And as much as we may try to embrace (or in my case enforce) egalitarian parenting, at a certain point, Nobody does it like Mom. Let’s be honest here: there are only 24 hours in a day. If you have a job outside the home, you’re not going to be able to do as much hands-on parenting as you would if you stayed home. (There, I said it, you will miss some
mommying if you go out to work.)
Yet, while staying home with the kids may be personally gratifying and make us feel like we have more control over how they’re being raised, giving up a paycheck is not without consequences. As author Leslie Bennetts quite soberingly points out in her book, The Feminine Mistake: Are we giving up too much?, “Long-term loss of income has a cascading impact in areas such as medical benefits and retirement funds.” Being out of the work force greatly diminishes our capacity to support ourselves and our family without a husband should the need arise.
Her research unequivocally demonstrates that “when women sacrifice their financial autonomy by quitting their jobs, they become vulnerable to divorce as well as to potential illness, death, or unemployment of their breadwinner husbands.”
If you want to scare the pearls off the ladies at the Junior League, tell them about your newly divorced friend who is now working at Waffle House and had to move herself and the kids into her parents’ basement. And nothing drives a knife into a working mom’s heart any deeper than having to ask your sitter to peel your screaming child off your body so you can leave for work, where you then spend the better part of your day wondering whether your child will recount this episode for countless shrinks in years to come.
The worst-case scenario on both sides is real. Yet while at first pass it might seem like a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” debate, our lie-awakeat- night fears are often unduly magnified by a few widespread – and completely false—assumptions.
Never Say Never
First off, everybody—and I do mean everybody— makes you feel as though the decision to work or not work is forever binding. As if once you make the decision you can never undo it.
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