The work-parenting dilemma… not for the new-born mother
As I was driving my daughter to school for an afternoon exam, I received a work call about a knotty issue that left me with a lot of explaining to do about power, money and some complexities of office politics. This is my life, I thought. Though I’ve long since abandoned any hope of being free to do only one thing at a time, and I’m not sure I would have chosen to expose my child to all that she heard on the speakerphone, nevertheless, after 17 years at this parenting stuff, I am happy to report that I am no longer self-flagellating about doing it all at once.
There was a time, long ago I think, when I would pore over those new-mom essays, the type agonizing over pseudo-crises like, “Should I work?” or “Am I a good mother?” and soak up every word. Today, I find that genre irritating at best. I am not interested in hearing guilt-inducing rants, and frankly, I think that some of these questions are all wrong, driven by a conservative, anti-feminist backlash designed to keep us in our place.
People work. This is just fact of life. We work to earn money, to grow our minds, to be part of society. We work in different ways, using different parts of our bodies and minds, at different paces and in different poses, and in formats and for compensations that change as we do — and we’ve been doing it as long as we have been begetting offspring.
Yet it’s only women — middle- to upper-class Western women of the late 20th and early 21st century, to be precise — who ask themselves whether or not parenting and work can co-exist.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:41 pm
I have actually never bothered wondering whether I will work. What I wonder is whether between work and parenting, I will have time to pursue my dreams. Or rather, what conservatives would dismissively refer to as my “career.” (Which for a woman is always a superficial, bitchy enterprise that makes her too much like a man.)