Why don’t we respect mothers more?
Quietly, they run the world. But we don’t see them as complex people.
When my oldest son was three weeks old, I handed him to my husband, Josh, as soon as he arrived home from work. “I’m getting a job,” I announced. “Now.”
I wore a C-section girdle, cavernous under-eye circles and my own breast milk — both freshly leaked and regurgitated. Our baby’s GERD and as-yet-undiagnosed dairy allergy made for long days; I hadn’t brushed my teeth or hair, much less showered. But what made me look worse than any of this was the urgent panic I radiated.
“OK,” Josh said.
He didn’t remind me that we had no childcare. Or that, after months of discussion and exacting financial calculations, we’d devised The Perfect Plan: I was to take a break from practicing law, act as our children’s primary caretaker and write my first novel “in my free time.” Josh was to continue practicing law to support our family. We were to reassess The Plan when our youngest started kindergarten.
Josh mentioned none of this. He put poor Jacob in his baby swing for 90 minutes while we reviewed online job listings.
“The repairman came today,” I eventually said. “He told me to ‘talk to my husband tonight’ so that you could decide what to do about the A/C. Can you [expletive] believe that?”
“Seriously?” Josh asked.
“Seriously,” I said.
That was years ago, and the shock of suddenly being treated like my time — and, really, I — was no longer valuable has worn off. At first, though, it gave me whiplash.
Was I “only” a mother?
I’ll never know why people were interested to hear that I was a commercial litigator, but not that I’d just had a baby, or that I was primarily responsible for two actual humans. Commercial litigation doesn’t change the world. Negotiating one’s way through parenthood is less scripted, less predictable, and the stakes are much higher. That people’s attention would invariably wander before I could even mention The Perfect Plan drove me nuts. But I’ve become more adept at managing these encounters.
Now, I tell people I’m a former lawyer working on a novel. That tells them that I am educated, can support myself, have goals and interests outside of my family and don’t spend all my time shopping or lunching.
What I only now realize — and find acutely depressing — is that I never mention the 60–70 hours a week I spend parenting two precocious boys and CEO-ing an active home. Despite that my fullest-time job(s) provide invaluable and, importantly, compensable services — if I bit the dust today, Josh would have to hire a full-time nanny, housekeeper, driver and personal assistant to replace me — people don’t want to hear about it. They don’t think it gives them the information they need to figure me out.
But why doesn’t it? Why don’t more people know or care that “stay-at-home” (blech) parents are often the best multitaskers, time-managers, schedule-coordinators, and task-executors? That their patience and tolerance are unsurpassed? That they sustain Wall Street hours for years longer than most of the people who actually work on Wall Street? Why isn’t raising children to be kind, productive and generous contributors to society worthy of our admiration?
We put mothers on a pedestal only in the abstract — in real life, they are overworked, overlooked, undercompensated and, in many cases, essentially excommunicated from the adult sphere. Our society depends on women to bear children; our law requires us to care for them. But mothers are supposed to do this alone and out of the way.
It’s become abundantly clear to me that, to many, mothers not in the professional realm are complex individuals no more.
But I’ve come a long way in adapting to my “new” life. Now, I blow off the repair people who interpret my gym clothes and the Radio Flyer wagon in my driveway to mean that I can’t understand what’s wrong with my dishwasher. I call more people out on the sexist assumptions they make.
And I’m more likely to say, hell yes, I work!
I’m also learning to squelch the Mom Guilt. I opted not to chaperone the last preschool field trip because I was at too critical a juncture in my novel to sacrifice the morning. (My kid survived.) When Josh comes home defeated by his impossible caseload, I’m more likely to think of concrete ways to support him than become immobilized by guilt about not earning an income. (No mother escapes Mom Guilt, by the way. Men and women have asked my brilliant friend — an investment banker and dedicated parent — if her children are in therapy because she “isn’t around.” Nobody has asked this of her banker-husband, which should surprise no one.)
I’ve made the least progress, however, on my most important struggle: how to raise feminist sons. Our home conforms to traditional gender roles in their young eyes. Daddy leaves the house in “itchy clothes” in the mornings and returns after they are bathed and jammied in the evenings.
Mommy, on the other hand, is home when they leave for school, home when they return, home when they are sick or have a day off. Mommy unpacks their backpacks, prepares their meals, kisses their boo-boos, drives the carpool. Our home is far from the only home my kids know that works this way: Of all their friends, only one has a Dad who does what I do. In every other household, it is a mother or paid caretaker who fulfills this role.
Because our boys watch Josh leave home to do things that don’t involve them and experience his absence, every day, it is easier for them to see him as an independent individual. But they’re too young to contemplate what I do when I’m not with them. Because my schedule revolves around theirs, and because I’m almost always home when they are, my kids understandably think that they are my whole life.
It is incumbent upon Josh and me to teach them otherwise. To highlight what mothers do and the ways in which our society disrespects and demeans them. To showcase the disconnect between what society values on the surface and what it values at its core. To instill in them a moral obligation to do differently and be better.
But we’re not sure how.
“I used to be important!” I heard myself yell at the boys when they barked snack orders and I was on my hands and knees mopping up geriatric dog barf. My heart broke when Josh felt compelled to tell the kids, during some similar moment I’ve since forgotten, that, “Mommy went to a very important law school!”
So we try to seize teachable moments: “No, Daddy isn’t folding laundry to ‘help Mommy.’ He’s folding laundry because he lives here.”
But these moments aren’t nearly enough. I’m eager to forge a career not only to boost our bottom line and achieve personal satisfaction, but also to show my boys that, actually, women do everything. We, quietly, run the world.
I’ve always been a feminist. But I don’t think I understood how out-of-reach gender equality remains until I became a member of a group that is systemically marginalized. I want “women’s work” to be adults’ work. I want “mother’s work” to be parents’ work. I want my circle, and my government, to value my work — and act like it. I want my daughters-in-law and granddaughters to be unable to identify with this essay.
I want my sons to fold laundry because they live here.
Emily Wolf is a recovering lawyer and emerging writer. In 2009, she moved from Chicago to Houston, where she lives with her husband and two young sons.
