Long and Winding Road
Sue Shellanbarger’s Work and Family column in Today’s Wall Street Journal looks at the maternal drop out rate from the work force. She explores, via anecdote, families who have made the decision to live lean (my phrasing not hers) for their children and the name of childhood development. And she sets before us a growing body of evidence from various studies in early childhood development which support the need for a parent (really read as mother) to stay home during the first year or longer. She also sites the lack of extended maternity leave and undesirable and costly childcare options as reasons women are opting to stay home. According to the WSJ:
The analysis, prepared for release within the next few weeks, suggests new mothers’ hiatus from the work force tends to be one to three years, compared with longer breaks in the past.
What is most fascinating here is not the obvious political (YES, we need more – how about ANY - progress in the way National maternity leave policies that would serve to provide solutions and options for all women) or cultural (NO we are not settling back into mid (last) century, 1950s, martini fortified model of family life) but rather the subtle message to women about their care and feeding of each other.
Motherhood, career, life – it is a long game (as one of my favorite people on the planet once told me). And this long game is filled with personal choices made by individuals, women and their partners, based on circumstances. These (hard) choices are neither permanent nor are they binding. These choices and where they land us, reflect a moment in time and are able to be altered at will (you can quit, you can go back).
These stats remind us that women are in and out of the work force – making their way down a long and winding road. How nearly impossible to be simply a working mother or simply a stay and home mother – not with this much uncertainly and motion in our society. And yet, even when the anecdotal and statistical evidence suggests that these are fluid titles, we still retreat to our camps with defensive posture and closed minds.
As Leslie Morgan Steiner puts it in the introduction to her look at American Motherhood, The Mommy Wars, “In order to end this catfight and emerge united, we need to explain ourselves to one another”. A fair observation and what I read in Sue Shellenbarger’s article today is that we are each other. Perhaps not at the same moment or with the same motives, but women will weave through various versions of herself – as a working woman and as mother. And this, my friends (or do you still hate me because I am working?!?!), makes a very convincing argument for a little less venom and a little more love.
Yeah, yeah – I know I am one of the few people who can take a statistical heavy WSJ piece and turn into Kumbaya moment – but if not me, who?