Guest post by Jennifer Magnuson of Get In The Car!
Like a lot of you reading this, I’m a mom at home with my kids. I happen to have four, so things at my house are usually hopping like Senor Frog’s in Cancun during Spring Break. Minus the tequila and table dancing. Okay, just minus the table dancing.
It wasn’t always this way for me. Not too long ago, I worked “outside of the home” in a career that focused on helping others. I was a social worker, and I really enjoyed it. Now, I do the same thing, only my family is my biggest client, and the pay isn’t so good, but the perks are obviously better.
But I’m still me. I’m still the girl who roller skated to Pat Benatar’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot. I’m still the young woman who finished college, married her boyfriend, and in the blink of an eye owned a home in the ‘burbs and was amazed that milk actually came out of her breasts to feed the little stranger that had grown inside of her. Because I was pretty sure mine wouldn’t do that. I was only play-acting at being a grownup.
Recently I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a stay at home mom. Aside from the annoying moniker, it amuses, angers, and befuddles me when I consider the relatively stagnant status of women who choose to care for their children in lieu of a career.
I recently reread a passage from Gloria Steinam’s Revolution from Within where she writes of her childhood in the fifties and sixties, noting
In my memory of those times and that place, men were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought) from the outside in.
Imagine my surprise to read this, fifteen years after it was published, and forty years after her childhood and thinking, “But it is still like this in much of our country.”
This, in America, home of the enlightened woman with the same rights, privileges and status accorded to men, right? Riiight.
Not too long ago I was with my family at a function sponsored by my husband’s company. He’s the “Big Boss” and has a few hundred people working for him, the majority of whom are women. I was standing around with my kids when some woman came up to me and introduced herself as having worked for my husband for some time. She added that he was the best boss she’d ever had and she really enjoyed working for him. I nodded, smiled, and thanked her. I get this a lot, and I am always resisting the urge to laugh inappropriately. As she was about to leave, she turned to me and said, “What’s it like?”
“Um. What’s what like?”
“You know, living with your husband.”
And the way she said it, well, it was nauseating. I don’t remember what I said, but it was forced, chirpy and probably something like, “Oh, he keeps us on our toes.”
Yeah.
When I’m volunteering in the community, whether by sitting on a board or grading spelling tests at one of my kids’ schools, I am always asked the same thing. Are you sure you’ve got time to do this? You have four kids! They mean it as a compliment, I’m sure, but I am always asked this. Always. Especially if the project I’m pursuing has nothing to do with my family and is just something I enjoy (like writing). I asked my husband if he was ever asked how he “does it” with four kids and a wife. In a word, no. He’s not asked because of the foregone conclusion that he has a woman at home tending to the little details that make up the rest of his life.
And the looks thing? It doesn’t bear writing about, we are all so aware of how our appearance is our calling card. It’s the most succinct way to announce our socioeconomic status, our age, and our self-discipline. It also erroneously labels our intelligence, education, personality and trustworthiness. And while everyone is victim to this unfair mode of categorization, we all know that women are more harshly graded. As for stay at home moms, well, we all know what the stereotypes are.
What I’m getting at is this. How is it that it’s 2007 and the words of Gloria Steinam’s childhood still ring true for many of us? How can we change this? How can we create another revolution? Because I believe that we can. I believe that if we harnessed the collective creative energies of all the wonderful moms who blog (both working and “non-working”) we could change the world. And that includes equal respect for moms, regardless of their career choices, and while we’re at it, childcare and healthcare for all! By the way, when I volunteered to write this guest blog, I wasn’t asked if I could manage it with four kids. I think Erika knew exactly how I’d get it done. And that, friends, is the first step toward our revolution.
Guest post by Jennifer Magnuson of Get In The Car!
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