Mommy Wars

I feel like the "mommy wars" are in my universe a lot these days. Perhaps it is because I have a swath of friends who are pregnant or who have young children. I watch them facing the decisions that fuel the mommy wars: stay at home or work? Because I see it in my network, I notice it in the media.

I have recently read two articles on salon.com regarding this issue.

First there are The Invisible Mommies. In this article, we see how the entire concept of the "mommy wars" focuses on the elite women of our country, the women who have the choice of staying home or working. For the elite, it is a moral issue and an issue of personal happiness. For many many others, there simply aren't that many options, and most of them are bad. If you can't afford to stay home, you probably can't afford daycare. What do these mothers do? The government doesn't help them. Society doesn't help them. They have only a lot of bad options imprisoning them.

Then there is A Truce in the Mommy Wars. This article explores the idea of the mommy wars being based on individual personal wars. It reviews a book that is a collection of essays from mothers on all ends of the spectrum. The prevailing idea is that the mommy wars are hyped by the media that essentially creates them by making mothers feel insecure, no matter what their choices are, and it proposes the idea that the media simulataneously creates and predates on this insecurity. "You aren't a good mom, but buy this product and your life will be happy."

And then there is Heather's take on The Price of Motherhood in her blog. Here we have again, the dilemmas that challenge mothers. She writes: "Motherhood is a big factor in poverty, as is divorce; alimony is increasingly less common, and all the stay-home care you provide (or want to provide) your kids doesn't count in its calculation. People tell you you're doing "the most important job" but they don't want to pay you for it, and if you're poor, to get public assistance, you can't stay home with your kids, but must put them in daycare and take a job that pays less than the daycare costs." Why can't our society realize that we truly need to integrate motherhood and children into how we value our culture? And while we're at it, lets add in teachers and education, among other things.

So, here I am contemplating issues that I see around me. I have been interested in the work of Moms Rising for a long time (well, ever since I heard of them, which was just shortly after they got started). The thing about it, for me, is that environmentalism is "my cause." At first I didn't really see how the issue of family and mother discrimination really fit into that. But I think now that they are truly integrated. I don't know very much about deep ecology, but I think I practice it. Taking the ideas of ecology, of interconnectedness, and applying it as a moral guide really works for most of my dilemmas. You can't jsut ask "How does this affect me?" Or even "How doe sthis affect my country?" But "Hoe does this affect the world?" We are truly interconnected, and facing the issue of motherhood comes as part of living in a world with mothers. And without mothers, where would we be? Exactly.

Books relevant to this article: