Pity the poor stay-at-home mom. In one ear there is Mainstream
Society pressuring her to work outside the home so her family can
enjoy all the middle-class luxuries (the McMansion, the speed boat,
the Harley Davidson, the latest electronic gadgets). In the other,
she hears the shrieks of the Feminists warning her not to waste a
valuable liberal arts education on household drudgery and
child-rearing. Her encouragement to stay at home comes from that
nagging voice in the back of her mind accusing her of being a bad
parent.
What’s a girl to do?
My four siblings and I were blessed to have been raised by a
stay-at-home mom — a mother who may have skimped and struggled to
raise five children on a shoestring budget, but never had to
concern herself with the twin evils of status and radical
feminism.
How incredibly fortunate we were to have our mother at home to
make sure we were wearing our yellow rain slickers and rubber boots
when storms threatened, to nurse us when we were feeling feverish,
and to rustle us up a hot breakfast every morning before school. We
may have gone without brand new bicycles, a color television set
and a season pass to the city swimming pool (as did everyone else
we knew), and we may have had to sit in the cheap seats when we
attended a baseball game at Busch Stadium, but that was a small
price to pay to enjoy our liberty every afternoon after school,
instead of being locked up in some latchkey program in the school
basement. In the summer time we were blessedly free to romp the
parks and back alleys, not bused off to some daycare facility or
bible study camp. No color TV or luxury sedan could compensate for
the freedom we enjoyed by having mom around. And because she was
always near, mom didn’t feel the need to coordinate our every
minute nor smother us with planned “activities.” She allowed us to
be kids and to do our own thing, whether that involved building
tree houses in some distant wood or shooting spatzies with the BB
gun we “borrowed” from the school janitor’s garage.
Of course, we grew up long before the first salvo was fired in
the Mommy Wars, before being a stay-at-home mom was necessarily a
political statement. It was easier then for mothers to remain at
home. Like most Americans of their generation, neither of my
parents received a college education, so it was not like there were
hordes of self-righteous women telling my mother that she was
wasting her earning power on a bunch of brats.
Nor was status something we were overly concerned with. Ours was
a town where — in native son Jeff Tweedy’s words — “Everybody is
equally poor.” My parents grew up during the Depression and World
War II. Coming of age, their concern was survival, not status. It
was left to the far shallower Baby Boomer Generation to make a
fetish out of status and its symbols.
TODAY, WE OFTEN hear that being a stay-at-home mom is no longer
an option. That it takes two parents working full-time to pay the
bills. And certainly if you must live in a 3,000-square-foot house
in a tony suburb, send your kids to private school, drive a Lexus
and a Mercedes Benz and buy each kid an iPhone, one salary is
insufficient. That’s where a modest, frugal, 1960s lifestyle comes
in. “Living modestly, frugally, who needs that?” I hear you say.
“Why struggle and skimp when you can have it all?” As if working
mothers weren’t struggling and skimping to balance their work and
home lives.
The idea of the Mommy Wars still strikes my former stay-at-home
mom as absurd. Arguments over whether motherhood is a job because
it doesn’t pay a salary? Only a woman with no children of her own
has time for such nonsense. Motherhood might not meet the
Department of Labor’s definition of employment, but raising five
children and keeping a home is certainly harder work than being an
attorney or a magazine writer.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, the childless, manic-depressive
attorney-writer who recently revived the Mommy Wars with an
hysterical
piece in the Atlantic charging that stay-at-home moms
are contemptible and cultish, and helping to kill feminism, is on
the fringe of the fringe. As such, she and her piece do not deserve
to be taken seriously. Certainly Wurtzel does not speak for 99
percent of the women I know. But then I don’t live in
Manhattan.
