Why Always Blame the Working Mom?

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By Dorothy Nixon

When I was 15, living in the suburbs, I sometimes babysat for a young couple who lived across the street in a towering garden-engulfed house made entirely of glistening British Columbia Redwood. The Mom was a very bright and very beautiful woman from England whom I admired greatly. Often, on weekday evenings, she would ask me over to mind her two girls while she walked over to the "depanneur" for some milk (her husband often worked or "recreated" nights) and, invariably, when she returned ten minutes later, she would ask me to come in. I would invariably decline. Then one evening as I turned to descend the snow-covered porch steps of her house, it hit me in a powerful, poignant shock wave of empathy: How could I have been so obtuse, so insensitive? Asking me over to "watch the kids" on these occasions was just a pretense. The sad fact was that she was lonely and needed someone to talk to. Anyone, even a 15 year old, could see that. I was shocked to realize that even beautiful grown-up women in supposedly "ideal" situations were lonely too. This was truly frightening. "I will never grow up and live in the suburbs!" I promised myself. "I will never marry a man who leaves me alone at night."

As fate would have it, today, I live in the suburbs and my husband has worked many, many nightshifts over the past ten years.

And although I have a vocation (and my own car ), I can certainly understand how stifled that young mother (now divorced and remarried) must have felt, back then in the 70s, when women's needs -- above and beyond their families -- weren't widely recognized. When my kids were young, I too spent many an evening house-bound, but at least I felt justified in feeling frustrated, pissed off. "Blame it on the privatization of the family," I might write in a letter to the editor. Or better, I might give it to my well-intentioned husband: "You can't fool me! I KNOW that working is easier than staying at home. I KNOW because I have done what you do and this -- taking care of kids -- IS HARDER."

But the question remains: how did I end up in a situation I vowed never to be in? Well, I know the reason: economics. I had the "luxury" of staying at home because my husband had a reasonably stable and well-paying job. I always thought I would go back to work the moment I felt like it, but by the time I was ready, the economy wasn't. (I was offered three nice jobs the year my first was born. Four years later the people who offered me those jobs were out of work themselves!)

Although I worry about my family's financial future, as do most middle-class moms, I feel vindicated somewhat -- in my quasi-choice -- whenever I read a statistic or poll revealing that kids do better when mom stays home. I feel vindicated even though common sense and my understanding of history tell me it's simply not true; or rather, it doesn't have to be.

As a modern, emancipated, mostly stay-at-home mom, I am truly dismayed when I learn, through polls, that the majority of people -- not just right-wing senators -- feel that working moms are having a "harmful" effect on the children of North America. (The common tune is to blame families with "two parents working outside the home" for all of our present social ills (real or imagined) -- but, really, who's getting the blame here??)

But, it just can't be as simple as that. It's because of misinformation, misperceptions, and all those myths and untruths floating around concerning Motherhood that most people feel this way. And polls and statistics and such, they are just the purveyors of modern mythology, propaganda posing as science, all with a purpose to keep us from demanding the changes in social policy which would benefit both mothers and children, like a national daycare policy, or mandatory equal pay for work of equal value, or creating a corporate culture that cares about families and proves it through tangible steps taken within their walls and not merely with PR-driven drivel.

Nonetheless, most people out there -- men and women -- seem to believe that it's the mother's job to raise smart, responsible kids. So, it follows that if kids aren't thriving, if communities aren't thriving; heck, if the whole world isn't thriving: IT'S MOM'S FAULT! (Never mind that this has never been true: Never in the course of human history have mothers been asked to raise children alone. In fact, it's been only since the Industrial Revolution that European mothers have been allowed to raise their children, despite what we saw on Little House on the Prairie. Before that parenting was the father's domain. Women were considered too weak, childlike, and sinful to raise kids properly!)

So, why do the majority (in the 55 percent range, depending on the wording of the question) of people think this way? Why do they believe that the only good middle-class Mom is a stay-at-home Mom? (Poor moms, are different somehow. They are "bad" if they stay at home. "Get a job!" everyone tells them.) And why has the measure of "being a good mother" risen so since the emancipation movement? How come moms today (especially the well-educated moms of the middle class) are expected to be far more attentive and doting than any mothers who ever existed before? I suspect because we have the potential to change society to suit us and our children.

I grew up in the so-called ideal sixties, in a middle-class neighborhood where Dads worked and Moms stayed at home. And even from a young age, I could see that the "traditional" family was a crock: no healthy mother lived just for her children. (Just as no happy father lived just for his work.) I had friends whose stay-at-home 70's mothers spent most of their time at church functions, and friends whose traditional mothers spent most of their time watching soap operas, and a few whose sad moms spent most of their time in bed. Many Moms were heavily into charity work. My traditional Mom found her intellectual outlet at the bridge table, and there were times where it became the overriding obsession of her life. My mom was also a wonderfully creative cook, and I was surprised to find that some of my friends, with traditional Moms, lived on canned food and TV dinners at home. But, our house was a mess while most of my friends had pristine palaces. And, if I recall correctly, my mother seldom got up to send me off to school, figuring I could do that well enough myself. And even though she was extremely well-educated, she did not spend time in the evenings helping me with my homework. (She was not expected to. Unlike today, this was not universally believed to be one of Mom's duties.)

True, I knew a few kids whose mothers seemed fanatically devoted to the care and comfort of their families: whiz housekeepers, cooks, and seamstresses. They were right out of the women's magazines, but didn't many of these Moms suffer painful crises, later, when their kids flew the coop? Didn't some suddenly find themselves divorced at fifty with no skills to support themselves? And lest we forget that the world doesn't begin and end in white middle-class suburbia, I have a Moroccan friend with eleven siblings, who remembers her Mom only as a fixture in front of the stove. Don't mention quality time to this mother. For moms with large families, survival is the order of the day. (Another friend from a family of nine children tells me how her mom made sure to take 20 minutes out of every week to spend just with her, an act of maternal kindness for which my friend still feels a warm flutter in her heart. That's...20...minutes...a....week.)

Did anyone ever criticize my well-off British grandmother for sending my father to boarding school at the achingly tender age of six? No, this was considered the best kind of mothering. And my father-in-law, who lived in a wealthy family in the 20's, was raised by a nanny. His mom stayed at home but did what most wealthy women have done since the beginning of time: she contracted out most of her mothering duties. And guiltlessly, too, for all of society supported her in this.

Knowing all this, why do I, emancipated and educated Mom that I am, feel so guilty when I miss just one of my sons' soccer games? Myths, even modern, media-generated myths designed to keep women and children poor, are mighty powerful, I guess.

1999 © Dorothy Nixon, all rights reserved

• Katherine Letawsky | March 5, 2009 at 2:37 pm - §

  Wow I stumbled onto this site and this article by accident today while looking for something to do with my 2 children (ages 6 and 8) tomorrow since they will be off school and I will be off work. I feel guilty everyday that I can't be home with them. Society really has put alot on the shoulders of mothers (working or not) and has surely been the source of depression fuelled by guilt. I loved your article! I'm glad to have stumbled on it. It will help me in the times when I'm feeling like the worst mother because I desire a home life and a professional life. Thanks.

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