Redhead
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Member since 5/05 31871 total posts
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Jennifer
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MOMMY WARS (interesting newsday article)
What's a mother to do?
The debate to work or stay at home rages on within and among moms
BY AILEEN JACOBSON
Newsday Staff Writer
April 12, 2006
Last year, it was "The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars." This year, it's "Mommy Wars." Coming next year: A novel called "The Mommy Wars."
Is there a pitched battle being waged - again - between mothers who stay at home and those who return to outside jobs? With each cohort of mothers, the question gets a fresh airing - most often among women commiserating with friends.
But every so often a convergence of studies and books brings the conflict into sharp focus. The weapon of choice in these "wars"? Guilt, guilt, guilt, deployed by both sides.
With titles such as the new "The Wall Between Mothers: The Conflict Between Stay-at-Home and Employed Mothers" and "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety," authors squeeze perennially raw nerves. Women who work are reminded of the baby steps they miss and relive the wincing moments when their children cry as Mommy walks out the door. And women who stay home read about the negative vibes they spread and bad role models they provide their children by feeling unhappy about days filled with diapers and loneliness.
Nobody wants to be a bad mother.
But if there is an actual battle going on, many women say, it is not with other women over their choices, but over the decisions they have made for their own lives. Call it the war within.
"Everyone's choices depend on their situation," says Janice Grackin, 51, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University who stayed at home for 10 years to care for her children when they were young. Talk of "mommy wars," she says, sets "women against each other again, and we don't need to do that. We need to honor and respect each other's choices, and make sure options are available."
Perennial debate
Women have long debated in their hearts whether they should stay home or go out to work. The question is nuanced, the answer never clear-cut. Far from stepping up to the battle lines, women we interviewed, of differing ages and circumstances, didn't want to judge others or acknowledge a state of war. But they admitted ambivalence about their choices.
"I never really felt the tensions among mothers," says Lilly Icikson, 40, who holds a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School. She worked as a consultant in Washington, D.C., for five years before taking maternity leave in 1998. "I always had in the back of my mind that I would return, but I guess I enjoyed being home, raising a son and being with him." Now she lives in Manhattan and also has a 6-year-old son.
(Though some studies identify a slight "opt-out" trend of well-educated mothers leaving work, others dispute it. A recent University of Virginia study found that though at-home wives are somewhat happier, low expectations about equally divided housework influence marital happiness more than whether a woman works.)
"I often wish I could do more outside" the home, Icikson says. She's a PTA vice president and chair of the Alma Maters, a mothers group organized through her alma mater, Barnard College. "But honestly, it [volunteering] hasn't been that fulfilling. It's not the same [as a job]. It's not as exciting." She feels guilty about not using her expertise in affordable housing and is thinking of seeking part-time "socially redeeming" work, she says, but doesn't believe public policy or companies encourage part-time employees: "They make it really hard to go back to work."
Middle ground
Though it's sometimes hard, mothers who feel they must work find ways to adjust. Aroza Sanjana, 44, a Muttontown mother of two sons, 10 and 11, works six days a week at her Brooklyn-based real estate firm, taking only Mondays off. "I need to make a lot of money for the benefit of my children," she says - though she also loves working, she says, and has her husband's full support. Both their mothers worked. She feels even more need for a big income, however, because her younger son is autistic, and she and her husband want to provide for him for the rest of his life.
She left her job as an MCI executive two years ago because of the travel schedule. With her own firm, she says, "I'm home every night," and the family has "quality time with each other" during dinner.
Sanjana couldn't have done any of it, she says, without her parents, who left their Manhattan apartment to live in her home and care for her children. "A lot of people make sacrifices for a working mother. It's not always apparent in the workforce. My parents gave up eight years of their retirement."
You'd think that a mother who works at home has the perfect solution. It's good, but not always perfect. Natalie Johnson, 41, of Valley Stream, who has a 7-year-old daughter, finds a lot to like about working from home as a freelance production editor for scientific journals. When her child was sick, she could continue to work. "In an office, I would have had to call in sick," she says.
But she has no health insurance for herself and hardly any social life. She feels guilt, she says, when she takes time for her own leisure. Before her daughter was born, she says, she thought she'd return to her Manhattan job. "But once I had her, I really couldn't imagine being away from her so long." To concentrate on work, though, she brought her daughter to day care for two, three and then, after her divorce, four days a week.
"Mothering is very fulfilling, but I also like to use my brain," John- son says. She's a working mom, but is often perceived as a stay-at-home "nobody," she says. "The work of motherhood is not valued."
Such a dichotomy is nothing new. Grace D'Alessio, 56 and mother of a 26-year-old son who's a graduate student at C.W. Post, lives in Larchmont and has always worked in Manhattan. At first, she worked part-time, four days a week as an executive assistant in an ad agency. She left at 5 p.m., earlier than most of her co-workers. After two years, she went back to full-time, then got divorced. Her mother cared for her son.
"I loved my work, and I loved being among adults," she says. "On the other hand, I didn't want to leave my child. ... I was always conflicted, always guilty about whether I was giving him enough time, whether I was being a good mother." Her son would often say he wished she'd win the lottery so she could stay home. Now he's more understanding, she says.
She wouldn't have done things differently, she says, even if she hadn't needed the income. "It helped me to be a more well-rounded individual, to strive for higher goals."
Stony Brook social psychologist Janice Grackin's grown daughter just had a baby, she says, so she's been thinking about working versus stay-at-home moms. "She enjoys working, but I don't think she knows how hard it will be the first day. ... It's never easy to leave your child, even if you feel you'll be a better mother if you're out in the workforce, which many people feel, myself included."
The next generation
And now some words from the next generation. Mitsu Chevalier, 19, a Hofstra University sophomore who lives in Hempstead, says she is "one of those people who likes to work, not stay at home. I'm not bashing those who stay home, but I want to work and be productive. I plan to go to law school. My mother is a single parent and she worked. She's my greatest inspiration." Her mother does clerical work. Chevalier has scholarships and a student aide job.
Chevalier, who just finished a child psychology course, says, "I want to have children. I really believe in day care. I believe that the social environment is beneficial to children. ... I was in day care." Some of her friends say they want to stay home but those going to law and medical schools don't want to: "Women are trying to be more self-sufficient, to go out into the workforce and really make a difference in this male-dominated society."
Going at it mama a mama
In the home corner, Caitlin Flanagan, essayist for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, writes in her new book about the rewards of staying home with her twin 8-year-old boys and warns other women of the immeasurable losses a mother incurs when she spends time at an outside job.
In the opposing corner, Bonnie Fuller, editorial director of American Media, writes in her new book about the pleasures of participating in an exuberant family life with her four children, ages 5, 9, 15 and 19, while overseeing an empire that includes Star, National Enquirer and Shape magazines. She advises women to go for it all.
Of Fuller, Flanagan says in an interview, "Would I make her choices? Never. She's certainly at the head of a callow enterprise." If Fuller were working for an admirable cause, Flanagan says, her feeling might change. "But becoming the head of a gossip rag and leaving her children every day? I don't know."
Fuller, 49, says she doesn't "want to get into a catfight" with Flanagan, 44, whom she says she'd never heard of. "I don't advocate being judgmental of other women. Everyone needs to make the choices that make her happy. We only have one life, as far as we know. If you have goals for your life, you only have one chance to make it to those goals. I enjoy making magazines that a lot of regular women read across the country."
Hard on the heels of "Mommy Wars" and similarly themed books, two media stars are arriving with their own provocative takes.
Flanagan's "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife" is a collection of carefully crafted essays. She acknowledges that many women must work: "What could be more heartless than highlighting the emotional losses posed to mother and child by their separation because of maternal employment?"
But she highlights them anyway, though she also mentions losses stay-at-home moms feel. She disapproves of nannies, but writes of employing one for three years and adds: "My husband had taken a big corporate job to pay for the type of motherhood I had chosen to pursue."
"Look at my title, 'Loving and Loathing,'" Flanagan says in the interview. "I wrote about the conflict." She also thinks, she says, that most articles on the subject lean "subtly" toward working mothers, because the writer "is a working mother or sits next to one."
Fuller says she wrote her book partly because she saw an opposing media trend. Her book is titled "The Joys of Much Too Much: Go For the Big Life - the Great Career, the Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You've Ever Wanted (Even If You're Afraid You Don't Have What It Takes)."
Magazines and other media, Fuller says, have lately advised women to simplify their lives. Many articles, she says in the interview, "took the viewpoint that women couldn't have it all, that it's impossible, that they should give up the desires and dreams that they had and drop out."
Her book is a series of confessions about her own shortcomings and attributes ("I made my own luck") mixed with snappy tips. She counts herself among women who must work, since her architect-husband is not the main breadwinner. She doesn't mention that she's recently been making a reported $1.5 million a year.
Both authors pay lip service, at least, to conciliation. "I'm not against women staying home if that's what they want to do," Fuller says. Flanagan's bottom-line advice: "My answer is to do whatever you want because you're being criticized either way."
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) manage to make it all work, especially when it's not really a choice. If I didn't have to work, I don't know if I would.
) and my MIL doesn't know what to do with herself now that her son moved away. 
