Equality

A dear friend and I were talking the other night about equality and how it plays out in parenting, especially in the first six months to a year, when so many women choose to stay home--and often, then, either don't go back to work or feel unfulfilled when they do, perhaps because, in the intervening time, they missed a promotion or got otherwise left behind. (This talk started as yet another convo about that Anne-Marie Slaughter article, incidentally.) My friend, who is not a mom but is thinking about it, really doesn't get why so many women lose their careers when they have kids--and, on a related note, why more men don't stay home with their children instead. If society were truly equal, she said, wouldn't there be an alternative to the model of the mom staying home? Couldn't it be just as normal, just as incentivized, if you will, for dads to stay home and moms to go right back to work? Couldn't maternity leave and paternity leave be interchangeable, letting the parents decide who took what?

But moms have the goods, I said. The boobs.

But if, my friend asked, you formula-fed, couldn't you just go right back to work if you wanted to?

I've been thinking about this conversation since it happened. I think my friend's point was not that all women should formula-feed (or experience the pumping room) and get back in the saddle asap, but that women should have more choice about whether or not to work--that moms staying home should not be a given, the most obvious choice, the easiest choice. After all, she said, if society were equal, wouldn't there be another way to do things if you were a mom who just didn't want to stay home with your kid?

After thinking about this for a couple of days, I've come to these conclusions:

1. Yes.
2. But no.
3. But maybe yes.

Beyond the obvious issues with going right back to work (the bleeding, the healing, the resting after you've just run the marathon of your life, twice), I'm hung up on the tits, I must say. I'm a breastfeeding devotee. I stopped nursing my son at 15 months, but when we were in it, we were in it. Because I could breastfeed, and because L. loved it ("L," I'd ask, "Do you want to nurse?" "Hmm--hmm--hmm--hmm--hmmm!!" he'd reply), I sank right in. Breastfeeding was totally wonderful for me. I believe the many studies that show that kids who are breastfed are smarter, healthier, etc., and I think I can be this sanctimonious about this because...

I was not breastfed. And you all know I am a few sandwiches short of a picnic, plus overweight and unhealthy to boot.

(idiomcomics.com)

But seriously. Breastfeeding was my personal choice, and I was lucky, lucky, lucky to be able to do it for over a year while I stayed home with my son--sort of. At ten months I started working from home, part-time, and soon thereafter he started going to a nanny share three mornings a week, an arrangement that has morphed into our current scenario: he's in daycare three days, I'm home with him two. I think nursing L created an amazing bond between us. These days he is as partial to his dad as he is to me, but in the earlier days, nursing was this thing--this event, this experience, this verb--that stuck the two of us like glue. It was better than writing, even. It was lovely. Not the actual sucking, I mean, but the sweet symbiosis of being together in that way, that particular way that is so biologically humdrum and yet so completely unlike anything I had ever done before. I believe that, if it is at all possible, that every kid, and mother, should get to have that experience. I do.

But here's the bigger point.

I realized that when my friend and I were talking about equality, we were talking about paid work or work that has creative payoff--work that's public, intellectual, and monetarily valuable. Our whole basis for "equality" was about who "goes back to work." My issue with this notion is that in some sense it devalues Momming as work. I'm not blaming my friend for that--I'm saying that that's what we've been led to believe: that Momming is not work. Being in the office or the classroom or wherever else is the work.

When I say that it sounds like I'm making that classic and tired yet true statement that mothers aren't valued in society. Fine! We're undervalued. So are lots of other people. Let's move on. My point is more that--well, what if a woman should stay home with her kid, because no one else can really give the kid that foundation that's established by nursing? And what if that might be the most feminist, empowering choice in the world? What if nursing and nurturing were the work? What if that was just a given, and no one thought it made a woman "unequal?" I think that's what worries me: that when we talk too much about equality we end up sounding like it's the raw lot, the chump change, just more of your womanly troubles, to have to stay home and nurse your kid for a bit. Maybe it's just what you sign up for when you decide to become a mom, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Hmm.

Slippery slope.

Slippery slope because there are more and more different kinds of parents out there: adoptive parents, gay parents, parents who are parenting their partners' kids from previous marriages. Many, many babies come into this world in a very different scenario than mine did (you know, born on the Norwegian dole, for which I am forever thankful). And do I think those babies should be formula fed by their two dads? I do. Do I think those babies will be as loved, and as happy, and likely as healthy, if they're fed formula by their adoptive straight parents, both of whom have gone back to work? I do.

(sirlin.net)

I feel sort of refreshed when I meet a kid who is at the playground with his stay-at-home dad; at the same time, I feel wistful for the working mom heading to the pumping room at work (mostly because I wonder how exhausted she is). I feel sorry for some of the SAHMs I meet who seem so tired, so absolutely spent, so spiritually dead, so depressed. Amazed by the ones who are invigorated and joyful, who are clearly thriving with their three kids, one on the back, on one the playground, one off at school. Their skin is gorgeous, their family bed is über-comfy.

I know these moms and more.

And I know a few who, after their kids were born, found that their careers didn't make sense any more. They wanted to stay home, yes, but they also weren't sure what paid work would even look like anymore. Not because they missed the promotion, though maybe that was part of it; more because their mindsets had changed and what they were doing before seemed small and unfulfilling. I expect this is a tough spot to be in.

I'm lucky in a lot of ways--and I don't mean that to sound smug but rather, grateful, and since I can be quite negative, I want you to take note of this gratitude--but one of them is that I'm able, these days, to do my Momming alongside my writing and my teaching. I don't feel lost in parenting. Having a child has not changed the trajectory of what I want to do; it's slowed it down a little, diverted it, become a part of it, enriched it, complicated it, made it messier and more loveable and more meaningful, but not hijacked the whole thing of it. I still love my work. I still do my work. That hasn't changed.

I think maybe that's what my friend is afraid of: having her life hijacked. I can really understand that fear, because I had it too. I wish I could reassure her that if she does have a child, she'll figure it out.