My alma mater’s alumnae magazine recently did a cover piece on stay-at-home mothering. This was a big deal in a magazine that usually pays scant attention to parenting at all, preferring instead to celebrate women in high-powered careers and community service in exotic places, as well as its own expanding science programs. Over the years, I have drifted away from many of the warm feelings I once held for the college, feeling alienated from their mostly liberal views, anti-Israel attitudes, and apparent lack of interest in women like the one I turned out to be. Yet I was pleased to see a bone of validation thrown at the thousands of women like me who choose to be home to care for their families, postponing or foregoing ambitious careers.
What did not cheer me was to see some of the responses by alumnae to the article printed in the most recent issue. While some women appreciated the college’s acknowledgement of their choice to stay home, some working women bristled at the suggestion that staying home is beneficial to their families. In one woman’s case, she had a child with an illness that limited the child’s life expectancy to five years, and returning to work was a way of ensuring that she had some occupation to keep from drowning in her grief should she indeed lose her child. (Baruch hashem, her child lived.) But other women who responded took exception to a single passage in the original piece where an alumna claimed that she was doing a better job as a mother than a working friend because she was spending more time with her children. One angry working woman complained that it was the 1970s all over again, when women who returned to work after having children were “dumped on” by greater society. Another woman wrote, “How about the stay-at-home mother who spends 24 hours a day at home with her children because she’s drunk and passed out on the couch? Or the mother who stays home and abuses drugs as her children look on?”
I’ve blogged about being a stay-at-home mom. And some of my decision to do so was made after talking to other working women who rued that their children’s best hours of the day were spent with other people and that by the time they got home, the children were hungry, tired, and cranky. Perhaps it’s gratifying to be the one to see to their children’s needs at the end of the day, and if so, that’s a form of good mothering. I’ve never been a working mom, so I don’t really know what it’s like. I know some women return to work to keep their jobs and maintain the professional stature they’ve worked years to establish. I know some women who return to work because while they want and love their children, they don’t think they could handle the amount of together-time that comes with staying home and meeting their children’s every need.
My mom stayed home with my siblings and me. She and my dad did the math and figured out they could make a better income if she left nursing and stayed home with us, while my dad worked weekends in addition to his work week. (That also says something about the relative incomes of doctors and nurses.) I saw very little of my dad in those years, but everything comes at a price. My mom loved what she did, and we loved having her at home. It worked for us. The Cap’n’s mother returned to work after each of her children were born. She didn’t relish staying at home and letting her professional skills become outdated, and with the Crunch Srs.’s dual income, quality childcare was within reach. Both the Cap’n and I concur in retrospect with our parents’ choices.
Feminists are often accused of being humorless. I usually stick up for them (a humorless job in itself), but I was at a loss when I read these letters to come up with any excuse for the rancorous tone. Is it so hard to live with the knowledge that some people make different choices? And do other people’s choices automatically represent a reproach to your choice? Is everything really all about you? (It reminded me of the responses the Cap’n and I got from liberal and secular Jews when we embraced Orthodoxy: “I don’t keep kosher or Shabbat, and I’m just as good a Jew as you!”) I was disgusted to see what was a simple acknowledgement of full-time motherhood turn into a cat fight. Every decision on the part of parents to balance work, income, and children is a complicated one and depends on factors that differ from one family to another. The at-home mom who thinks she is doing a better job than her working-mom friend is entitled to her opinion. (Who knows? It’s possible in her case that she was right.) There was no need for working moms to come out in force and either make excuses for their decision to work or bash at-home moms in retaliation for whatever slight they decided had been made to them. The defensive tone and obvious rage in some of the letters suggested that some serious baggage was attached to the working mothers’ responses: residual anger at society’s former attitudes toward them, a belief that staying at home is an unattractively conservative position to take and an affront to feminism, or just plain guilt. I don’t know what these women were feeling, other than pissed off. But it was reflected in some pretty vitriolic prose most unbecoming to civil discourse.
I seem always to be having to define feminism for people who should already know what it is. Ladies, it’s about having the opportunity to make your own choices. That’s what we didn’t have for thousands of years, and it’s what the women’s movement got us. That means you can choose to become Secretary of State (as two of our fellow alumnae have in the last few years) or you can choose to wear make-up, high heels, and a frilly apron and bake cookies for your freckle-faced suburban schoolchildren. You can be a kindergarten teacher or a pile driver. You can get married or not. You can have children or not. You can get Botoxed or not.
So retract your claws, please, pour yourself a stiff drink (but don’t let your children see you, or you’ll be labeled a bad mother!) and relax.
Or not.
It’s up to you.
Shimshonit 
I wish my alma mater would even acknowledge this as a choice. The mag. had one article on “sequencing”, i.e. career, grad school, kids at different times, and one on early retirement. Stopping to work at 50 to travel, volunteer or spend time with family is fine, apparently, but making a similar choice earlier in life is not.
Allowing full feeds in RSS readers would help me enjoy your blog more. :)
Choosing to stay home is a sacrifice, or it is if you have either a career, a need for the money, a strong desire to be out of the house, or need to be viewed as modern/strong/competitive/ambitious. I think most people fall into one or more of these categories.
Going back to work is also a sacrifice, one that many people refuse to acknowledge. We’ve been raised, as Americans and as modern women, to believe we can have it all — just take some Prozac, dear, when it gets to be too much.
We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. It’s too bad that we can’t just realize, as you point out, that other people’s choices are not a value judgment of our own.
Heather wrote:
“other people’s choices are not a value judgment of our own.”
They might be judging you, but it’s best to learn to ignore that.