[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] I’ve got to stop reading the “mommy blogs.” The internet thrives on manufactured controversy. There have always been the standbys of politics, religion and the latest celebrity brouhaha – courtesy of Lindsay Lohan. But now the internet punditocracy (and Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper) has thrown “http://www.andersoncooper.com/2012/01/10/mom-who-works-outside-the-home-calls-sahm-lazy/” mothers under the bus.
There are the standby controversies: stay-at-home vs. working moms, breastfeeding vs. formula feeding moms, moms who cook vs. moms who drive-through, moms who vaccinate vs. moms who don’t, moms who do cry-it-out vs. moms who don’t, peaceful homebirth vs. medicalized hospital birth. You get the idea. The Comment sections give everybody a chance to be judgey. I’m as guilty of judgment as the next person. I mean, who are these moms who give formula, vaccinate blindly, and have elective c-sections? How do they expect that to turn out?
Although I feel no compunction venting it all anonymously on the internet (yes, I have a couple of fake identities – no, I’m not going to tell you what they are), it turns out being judged in person is no fun.
For Example
Last September, I was driving my mother from Los Angeles – where she’d flown in from the East Coast to visit me – to San Diego where she had a conference, when she asked me the big question: “Do you have any aspirations in life?” I was so shocked that several Californians’ are lucky I didn’t veer out of my lane on the 5 Freeway and kill someone . That was quickly followed by, “other than raising your child, of course.”
In the course of a few seconds I went from educated woman to the ambition-less mother of a toddler. When asked what I do or don’t do, I never have had a good answer.
Yes, I went to college. Yes, I went to law school. When I was attending all that school, I imagined that I’d have a job someday in the same way I imagined that I’d win the lottery. I didn’t go to my liberal arts college with any sort of plan. I didn’t arrange a single job interview while I was in law school. You have to understand I come from one of those families who believes in education for the “sake of education” – which doesn’t prepare one well for the future. Don’t worry about it, my mother, the philosophy major, said. Folks will be knocking down the door to hire someone like you. Exactly who would be bashing down my door? Where would that job materialize? I didn’t bother with those pesky little details back then.
Then Came Marriage
So, you see where this story is going, right? I got married and followed my husband (and not in the “http://www.answers.com/topic/ruth-j-simmons” Ruth Simmons – become a college president-board member- millionaire kind of way). It was more in the get-marginal-job, quit-to-stay-at- home-and-pursue-dreams, move-again, get-marginal- job, etc. At the point where my husband’s not-so-marginal job paid seven times what my marginal legal job paid – that was the point I decided to get off the crap job bandwagon. I’ll spare you the details. In two hundred fifty-six pages, Barbara Ehrenreich “http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/nickelanddimed.htm” adequately explained why horrible jobs are horrible.
Out of the sixteen years I’ve been out of school, I’ve worked, perhaps, six or seven. In the other nine or ten years, I figured out how to fill up my time. I remodeled and sold a couple of houses, I wrote four books, read hundreds of others, and I managed a life with countless pets. In all those years, I never came up with the perfect, pithy, party phrase. An adroit answer to the “What do you do (all day)?” question eluded me. I’d flirted with “yoga,” “Pilates,” “writing,” and “really, nothing much.” But none seemed to satisfy half-drunk partygoers. Alarmingly, after having a child, saying his name is answer enough for most.
All Right, So When?
Then there are the rest. Even at my grandmother’s funeral, I got quizzed by people as to when I was going to go back to work. They were not impressed when I told them I wasn’t working before Judah was born, so there was nowhere to go back to. They were even less impressed when I told them I felt no compunction to “use” my law degree. To get that same question, not soft-pedaled, from my mother was something else entirely.
So I’m dipping my toe into the mommy wars waters. I take issue with the idea that stay-at-home moms are worthless non-feminists. (FYI, I’m not a feminist myself, but that’s another essay.) Look, being a stay-at-home mom is boring at time. It is boring a lot of times. Another damn puzzle. Mmm, fun. More fake cooking. Blocks, then Legos, then more blocks – count me in. I’m not even sure if it’s as super rewarding as some mothers make it out to be. Mud pies are fun the first day, but not so much the thirty-first day. Talking to a toddler all day doesn’t strike you dumb. Quitting your job after so much education doesn’t render you stupid, either. Yes, that comment from a “friend” who was amazed I still could have an adult conversation after giving birth, smarted.
People make choices. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why other people care. As long as I’m not asking you for money, I figure you don’t have any say on how I live my life. If you are jealous, I think you should shut up and keep it to yourself. If you only feel better after putting others down, that’s just sad. If you’ve got nothing better to do than nose around in other’s lives, I say, “Get a subscription to People magazine. Focus on the aforementioned Lindsay.”
And for my answer to my mother? I’m still working on that. I have one of those mothers for whom I can never do anything right. So I will just live with the judgment from that realm. Like staying at home, that’s a personal choice.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
