To Work or Not To Work?

I did something decidedly un-wifely this week. I cancelled dinner plans at our house with my husband’s colleagues to attend ‘Baby, I’m Bored: When Did Motherhood Become a Career and Is It a Professional Disaster?’, a conversation with writers Leslie Bennetts and Meg Wolitzer moderated by Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times. I was hoping that listening to two women who had survived the New York scene with apparently successful careers in both writing and motherhood would somehow yield The Answer that I’ve been searching for since I became physically and mentally aware that I might one day bear children. The Answer to what? Well, the Question that is the distinct product of cultural modernity and feminist awareness: Should I stay at home or should I work? If I have to work, should I aim to maximize my time with my kids given the economics of my situation or should I seek intellectual/creative outlets and fulfill my own ambitions?

Having taken several Women’s Studies courses and attended similar lectures in the past without achieving much clarity in the matter, I was pleasantly surprised to come out of this experience with what may not have been The Holy Grail of Womanhood, but certainly set me on a path of self-reflection. Maybe this discussion just managed to hit the nail on the head, or maybe I was just ready to listen to it. In any case, what I learned was certainly food for thought:

- Our society tends to romanticize the Stay-At-Home mom, even though this sets the woman up for economic dependency, which is fine until your husband dies, loses his job, or divorces you and you discover the hardly surmountable challenges of re-entering the work force in middle or old age with skills that are several decades out of date. While studies have shown that there is no risk factor for children associated with a mother who goes to work (not to be confused with the term ‘absent’), there is a tremendous risk factor for children who live in poverty. A working mom can also be beneficial from a husband’s point of view: he doesn’t bear the stress of being the sole breadwinner and he can better relate to what his wife did with her day.
- Many women who spent N years in graduate school, got top-ranked positions, and then became professional mothers, drive people, especially their kids and other moms, crazy. Why? Because these women take all the passion and skills that they would have used at the boardroom table to the soccer fundraising table. With all due respect to women like myself with graduate degrees from fancy schools, child rearing does not require a J.D. or Ph.D. (an M.D. could certainly be helpful in emergency situations, but is mercifully not a pre-requisite for motherhood). And although I think kids require lots of intellectual stimulation, by the time they are ready for Calculus, mom will hopefully be at the sidelines of their lives.
- One thing we can do to improve the situation for working mothers is political action, but this requires that most women stay in the work force (or re-enter it relatively quickly) to achieve the critical mass required for social change.

Most importantly, Bennetts and Wolitzer suggested that while Having It All is somewhat of a mythical aspiration, you can have a lot of many things. Kids or not, this is always the case in life, and it’s important to keep things in perspective.