In motherhood versus work, must there be a winner?
In the saga of modern motherhood there is nothing more phony or toxic than the motherhood versus work debate.
It’s phony because there is no choice in most women’s lives. The reality is that like men, most women have to work outside the home in order to provide for their families — or even just to survive in a crushingly expensive city like Toronto.
So mothers — and many fathers — run themselves ragged doing the best paid work they can muster while loving and nurturing their kids.
Women especially also try to meet societal standards for being a “good” mother that are punitive, absurd and unreachable. I know I did.
Which brings me to the toxicity of the debate, as maternal guilt, both externally and internally imposed, continues to be as inevitable in motherhood as sleepless nights.
This summer, the New York Times published an opinion piece with the none too subtle headline: “I’ve Picked My Job Over My Kids” written by a woman — white, middle-class, highly accomplished law professor and author — to drearily prove this debate is as phony and toxic as ever.
The writer, Lara Bazelon, who is divorced, confessed that because of her high-powered and socially meaningful work she has missed “my daughter’s seventh birthday, my son’s 10th birthday party, two family vacations” and a host of other kid-centred events — Halloween, recitals, school field trips, etc. All in order to fight the battle for justice on behalf of her clients, some of whom have been falsely imprisoned for years.
Bazelon also admirably states: “I prioritize my work because I’m ambitious and because I believe it’s important. If I didn’t write and teach and litigate, a part of my life would feel empty.”
Cue the predictable judgments, stupid headlines — “Mom prioritizes work over kids” and earnest segments on morning television about how mothers shouldn’t judge each other because it’s SO hurtful. My kids are now grown — and wonderfully so — but decades ago this was a hot button issue and we need to call b.s. on it, whether you are an ambitious lawyer or at the other end of the
economic scale, working two minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet.
Men are never asked this question unless they ask themselves, “Why the hell am I pouring so time into my job when I could be with my kids,” at which point they are lauded for stepping away “to spend more time with the family.”
Rehashing the question, even from an informed feminist perspective, is a way to keep women from reaching their full potential. The media should give up printing such binary notions especially at the privileged end of the scale and move on to how all mothers who work outside the home could be helped more. As I’ve often stated, all mothers are working mothers whether they work outside the home or not.
We should also emphasize that some of us just really, really love our work. I thought of this recently because it is high summer, and summer is when I fell deeply in love for the first time in my life — as an intern at the Star — with the news business.
That love has sustained and improved me through every other facet of my life for more than four decades — through singlehood, marriage, motherhood, child raising, empty nesting and right up to this very moment through crises and celebrations and all the days in between.
Journalism and for many years being lucky — or doomed — enough to be paid for having an opinion has shaped and guided my days.
Recently, I came across a long essay I am still working on about how I fell in love with journalism. In it I had written:
“Can you fall in love with your work? I mean, in love with what you do for a living in the same way lovers describe making love with their soul mates, in which you don’t know where “you” end and “he” “she” or in this case “it” begins?”
Short answer, yes. And, for women, it’s the love that does not speak its name enough. We are so used to thinking about our jobs as searing workplace issues — harassment, prejudice, underpay, work/life balance, workaholism. But, if we are lucky, our work can be one of the great love relationships of our lives. My life’s work as a journalist came and got me when I stepped into the Toronto Star newsroom.
The Star, you will recall, was not only the newspaper that briefly employed Ernest Hemingway; it was the newspaper on which Superman co-writer Joe Shuster (and former Star copy boy) said he based the Daily Planet. Maybe that is why a key component of my romance with journalism was that I dreamed of being both Lois Lane and Clark Kent.
Newsrooms in the 1970s were starting to be filled with what would become my cohort: university-educated smarty pants writers, many of us ambitious young women, riding a wave of feminism, who easily found jobs but still had to learn that in the newspaper business our talent and hard work was not enough, that we had to worship at the altar of instinct and news judgment.
We also had to deal with so much sexual harassment that that’s a topic for another day.
In those early days, being in the newsroom made me dizzy with longing, the din of the wire service bells, the copy boys hustling, editors often pacing, waiting for reporters to file their stories. I wanted to write immortal prose, I wanted to get a big scoop, I wanted to be anywhere the action was.
That may strike you as grandiose or embarrassing, but I don’t care. Love is love is love. It still is. Every time I sit down at a keyboard. Forget the menstrual cycle. The news cycle is my cycle of life.
We women — especially as mothers — need to emphasize how much we love our work. That’s so much more uplifting and hopeful than framing it as an either/or dilemma at various domestically challenging stages of our lives.
Work life balance isn’t about getting it right. It’s about getting it wrong one day and doing just a bit better the next.
As a freelancer, I have been lucky enough to not have to be in a courtroom or an office at a certain time. Once my teenage daughter asked me to drive members of her softball team to the game when it wasn’t my turn. What about so and so’s mom I asked? “She can’t. She’s a lawyer.”
Maybe it’s that pecking order that is the problem. Maybe we should take on all professions and bend them to our reality, although some work just cannot wait for the softball game to be over.
And if I was asked today to “choose” which to prioritize, my kids or my work?
I would blow the questioner a raspberry and say in 2019, we get to do both to the best of our abilities, because that’s what makes a woman — and the children she raises — healthy and whole.