Mom: A little word of infinite capacity
My wife’s job can be brutal. Monica easily works 80 hours a week and is on call 24/7. 3 a.m. intrusions are the norm. The big jobs always fall in her lap, and her two direct reports often refuse her requests while throwing fits. One of the two slobbers.
If you were to see her job description on Career-Builder, you’d recoil.
But Monica would tell you that raising our 3-year-old and 10-month-old boys is her dream job — combining her diverse skill sets into the work of shaping, teaching and loving Sebastian and Luke, so they grow into authentic, strong and caring men. She can witness their every milestone and wonder-filled moment of play.
Though we live in a society obsessed with categories, Monica cannot be reduced to “stay-athome mom,” a label conceived decades ago to paper over the infinitely worse “housewife.” She’s that rare person in Type A-saturated Washington who decided that the best way to use her talents, even mid-career, was in raising our boys.
This vocation has seen a spike nationally in the past decade, as the share of mothers not working outside the home has climbed to 29%, according to Pew Research Center. Yet as I celebrate Monica this Mother’s Day and marvel at what she does, I will relish all that she is: a thinker, writer and editor extraordinaire; musician and teacher; wine aficionado and foodie; Italophile and traveler. She was all of these things before motherhood.
Monica left the workforce through a circuitous route. When our first child was born, we both shifted our schedules as journalists to alternate child care. This was our routine until an unexpected job offer provided us financial flexibility — a privilege we realize many families don’t enjoy. Suddenly, what had been a dream became our reality.
What she does, every day, is extraordinary. And it’s something that could never be calculated simply in dollars and cents. Much as teachers are categorically undervalued — or at least underpaid — so are stay-athome moms.
As writer Anne-Marie Slaughter laid out masterfully in The
Atlantic a few years back, American society doesn’t properly value caregivers. “An America that puts an equal emphasis on care and competition would be a very different place,” she wrote.
How do you quantify the patience of a mother who is ill and sleep-deprived, yet reading Ad
ventures of Frog and Toad enthusiastically to a child?
How do you put a price on her willingness to answer hundreds of questions — “Do butterflies have faces?” — thoughtfully rather than with dust-offs? And how can you properly weigh the value of having someone dedicated to your family 24/7?
A champion. A model of our faith. A mama bear.
Celebrating Monica and the millions of mothers like her is not a judgment of “working moms,” a title as loaded as “stayat-home moms.”
For to judge the former would be suggesting that my mother (who abruptly entered the workforce after my father died), my sisters, my sisters-in-law and countless colleagues and friends aren’t doing what’s best for their families by working outside the home. They most certainly are.
This Mother’s Day, we should reflect on the integral and unique role women play in raising children and enriching our society in immeasurable ways. But in doing so, let this reflection show each mother in full color rather than reducing them to black and white.
John Siniff is the former op-ed editor at USA TODAY, where he met Monica, who was an editor in the Travel section. He works at Subject Matter, a strategic communication firm in Washington.