A Suitable Mom : A Princess Costume, a Clean Closet and a Month of Epiphanies Later, a Working Mother Reflects on the Mixed Joys of Staying Home Full Time

I didn’t work today.

This might be no big deal for the 33% of American moms who stay home full time, but I went to work at 16, filing repair invoices at a Chevy dealership, and I haven’t stopped since. I am confirmed workaholic--by temperament, surely, but also by economic imperative, since I, like so many women, just didn’t think to marry a pre-Clinton private-practice physician.

Besides, I was one of those idealistic young women who, 20 years ago, bought everything the women’s movement was selling. A career meant independence and identity. I was not going to be like my stay-at-home mom, who looked at her suddenly empty house one day and wondered what to do with the rest of her life.

All my friends had careers and then kids. We interviewed child-care people (my favorite was the 17-year-old boy who thought that tending babies was a good career move after a summer at McDonald’s). We swapped nursing-mother horror stories, most of which centered on being trapped in a meeting at mealtime. We cut our hair short because we didn’t have time to blow-dry the longer styles. We discovered that even the most enlightened male shows up at the dinner table at the appointed time assuming that someone will feed him. Our free time evaporated--and we pretended it didn’t matter because there was nothing we could do about it.

Everything got done somehow. We were no longer second-class citizens; if anything, given how much we did, we were better than equal. That shoulder pain wasn’t from the Snugli straps--it was from reaching up and over to pat ourselves on the back.

Convinced I was a member of an elite, if beleaguered, sect, I confidently signed 18-month-old Sarah up for what the preschool called a Mommy and Me class. It was supposed to be an opportunity for children to get used to school in two-hour sessions with their folks; as it turned out, I was the one who had trouble getting acclimated. Suddenly I was surrounded by women I hadn’t known existed: my chronological peers, women in their 30s and 40s, who didn’t work and didn’t want to.

Excuse me. They didn’t work outside the home for compensation. They were full-time mothers. But most of them had child care anyhow. They went to the gym. They seemed to have read recent books from beginning to end, and they cooked meals that took more than 20 minutes. Some of them had manicures, and all of them were less harried than my indentured pals and I.

Worst of all, they seemed happy. They weren’t drooling for the chance to have a career. They were as smug as I was. In fact, some of them felt rather sorry for me, trapped as I was by fiscal circumstance. I wanted either to kill them or be adopted by them.

We circled each other warily. Moms with careers need to think that full-time moms are self-absorbed and limited (no, no, they reply, we’re focused and devoted). They, in turn, want to find us distracted and uncaring (no, no, we insist, we’re swimming in the economic mainstream and/or providing our children with a new, less lopsided gender model). We are too civilized to say so straight out, but everyone’s self-esteem rides on being right: Getting up happy in the morning depends on believing you’re living a good life.

Each side has its credentialed advocates, but nobody really knows how the other half lives. So I decided to find out, however briefly: I stopped working for a month to see what life was like on the other side (OK, OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I did two book reviews, got paid for this piece and did not hang up when my agent called). I took a dilettante’s tour of what I secretly imagined was heaven on Earth--and prayed would turn out to be a dull purgatory, since winning the lottery stands between me and a lifestyle choice.

I explained to Sarah, now 4, exactly what I was doing. I was working on not working; this was not a permanent change.

Going into this, I imagined such bliss. Let’s be honest here (and I speak as someone who would just as soon read “Babar” to my daughter as watch a C-SPAN hearing): There’s down time built into this child-rearing business. Our daughter’s first six months of life revolved around a lot of sleeping, with nursing breaks in between; she didn’t know that I raced back home four times a day from my book research to be there when she woke up.

I admit her second year was a bit harder. I have an office at home, and she quickly learned how to pick up the knife and plunge it directly into my heart. A favorite early sentence: “Mommy, you don’t have to finish that chapter now. Your job is to play with me.” But 3 and 4 filled up faster than I was ready for, with preschool every morning and various superkid activities in the afternoon. If I didn’t work while she was otherwise engaged, I could be a regular Renaissance woman--well-read, well-toned, my garden a bevy of organic vegetables rather than the site of an ongoing turf war between wimpy lettuce and bruiser weeds. And I wouldn’t be distracted when she was around. I’d be serene.

So why did I start my sabbatical in the clothes closet, surrounded by piles of incipient hand-me-downs? For the first time since I became a mom, I had time to enforce the two-year rule: Anything that hasn’t been worn in two years goes away. The same applied to the kitchen pantry. It was time to throw out the impulse-buy Asian fish sauces and the toasted buckwheat. And Sarah’s complete photographic history awaited me--two shelves’ worth of unsorted snapshots, the profit from which has surely paid the private-school tuition for the lab owner’s firstborn.

Truly, a woman’s work is never done--not by herself, if she has an outside job, nor, it seems, by her husband, who carries the what- a- day- at- the- office- I’m- too- bushed- to- do- anything chromosome. My own house reproached me. I was confronted by the true, silent casualty of working motherhood--not my daughter so much as her physical environment. No wonder Sarah’s idea of cleanup time is simply to stack her stuff next to her father’s pile of newspapers or my magazine Tower of Pisa.

While the apple of my newly focused eye spent her mornings with her school buddies, I spent mine on drudge work. It hardly seemed the glorious existence I imagined the stay-home mom to have, but maybe the payoff would come later, when my kid came home and I was ready to engage in a play activity that would exploit her formidable fine-motor skills and guarantee her eventual success as a brain surgeon.

Except when she appeared one day, I was inserting little moth-repellent sachets into sweater bags--an activity Sarah and her fine motor skills found fascinating, much to my horror. I have women friends who never learned to type, lest they be consigned to the typing pool; I harbor the same distrust of certain domestic skills. If you understand arcane rituals like the cleaning of tile grout with a toothbrush, you are doomed to repeat them.

I liked it better when she followed me into my office, turned on the ancient electric typewriter and poked out Happy Birthday Karen Love Sarah. My fondest childhood memory is of hanging around deserted restaurants on Saturday afternoons while my father sold dishes and pots and pans to their owners. In my early days I drank many a solitary Shirley Temple in dark, wood-paneled bars; I consumed fortune cookies while my dad flogged stockpots. Other girls imagined princes in castles. I had real-life adventures among men in tuxedos and women who wielded eyeliner with precise daring. So I like the idea of sharing my workplace, such as it is, with Sarah--and I like to think that she likes it, too.

As to my essential role as the nurturing centerpiece of my child’s universe: On my first Friday I hosted a “play date,” a scheduled interaction that, in this era of justifiable paranoia, commuter students and too much to do, has replaced just hanging out with the kids on your block after school. I usually send Sarah to the homes of non-working moms, but this month I was determined to reciprocate. I proudly drove both girls home from school, served up a snack and waited to see what they might like to have me help them do.

They ran upstairs, and Sarah’s friend tried to close the child safety gate that we haven’t gotten around to removing.

“Don’t,” said Sarah. “We don’t use that anymore. It’s for babies.”

“But if we close it, your mom won’t be able to get upstairs.”

I waited for Sarah to tell her friend how glad she was that I was home and how she wanted me to be with her every minute.

“We can close my door instead,” said the light of my life, with what I thought was inappropriate glee. The next sound I heard was a loud slam. By the time they emerged, I had read two sections of the newspaper.

If she wants to discuss conditions in Sarajevo before bedtime, I’m ready. Heartbroken and feeling not a little displaced, but ready.

The second week was better. I came home from car-pooling and paged through the paper. I renewed my acquaintance with our NordicTrack machine. I had conversations with my husband that were more than two sentences long and did not begin, “I’m going to bed, but. . . .” I dragged out a couple of recipes for the simple reason that I like to cook them. The truth is, most working mothers make time for their kids by eliminating any time for themselves. Full-time moms--or so it seemed to me--at least have a little time to breathe.

Once I got into the swing of not working, new vistas opened up. In the past, I would pick Sarah up at school and bring her right home so I could go back to work. Now we could go anywhere, and we did. As odd as it felt, we went to the park in the middle of a weekday afternoon. We lolled at the frozen-yogurt store while I waited for an officer from the responsibility police to come arrest me. We cruised the aisles at the arts-and-crafts store looking for things to make collages with--and then I sat and watched while Sarah turned our kitchen table and floor into glitter beach, punctuated by rolling waves of glue.

I spent a blissful couple of days making her a dress-up costume, for no particular reason other than I had the time. My husband came home one day to find me sprawled on the floor, surrounded by yards of pink satin and floral lace, sequined braid and the tissue pattern pieces for a generic princess/bride outfit.

He froze. This was not his wife, who objected to pastels on moral grounds and took even the slightest alteration to her long-time tailor. This was the woman who represented a sizable chunk of the household’s annual income. Finally, Larry found his voice. “Is this something you’ve known how to do the whole time we’ve been together?” he asked.

Once convinced that my condition was temporary, he was amused. My friends were not quite so charitable. It’s amazing, the hostility a little initiative can elicit. My working buddies allowed as how they would never have time to make a costume, even if they did know how to sew, which of course they didn’t; it was such a retrograde pursuit, after all. Women who didn’t work acted as though I had poached on their turf. I had a career. It wasn’t fair for me to know how to sew.

All I had done was dust off a vestigial skill to make my daughter happy. But I felt like a traitor. Just for a moment, I had blurred the boundaries between working women and home-moms--and taken all the fun out of the competition. A true adversarial relationship requires a foe who’s clearly not like you. Otherwise, you have to wonder, why all the animosity in the first place?

At least Sarah was pleased. Ecstatic, actually; she wore the costume every time we had company. She put it on when she got home from school. She implored me to make a matching veil, and I did. She told everyone who asked, and several people who didn’t, that her mother (it sounded like she spelled it in all-capital letters) had made it for her.

Heady stuff, to be the object of such unedited affection. Still, some little part of my brain protests: Play with her, it says, but do something else, too. I’m beginning to think that the categories are wrong. It’s not working mothers versus stay-at-homes. It’s a matter of how you define the world--whether you need a public life or not. I know one ex-worker who stays home now with two boys and is busier than ever, fund-raising, working for political candidates; she needs to be, whether she gets paid for it or not.

Halfway through my month, God snickered, and for a daunting week I was completely on my own. My husband left town. Our child-care person, as if on cue, got sick. My sinuses flooded, but there was nobody around to feed me tea or tuck me into bed. When Larry gets sick, like most men, he assumes a woeful countenance and a prone position. But that kind of behavior presupposes the presence of a nurturing soul to look after him. Sick moms usually stay on their feet, particularly if there’s no one above the age of consent to help them out. I was on call, dawn to dusk. Sarah is a reasonable child: Once we negotiated the number of times I would read “Nutcracker Noel” in any given 24-hour period, we were fine. But I kept thinking about what life would be like, hardest case, if both of us were sick and I had to be at the office, and there was no dad or child-care person coming back soon.

Maybe it was an auditory hallucination, some side effect of the cold pills, but David Byrne’s lyrics kept pumping through my soggy brain: “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around.” The stripped-down, strapped mom--the one who lacks the resources to hire in-house child care or stay at home herself--faces a world that is pretty unfriendly to the institution of motherhood it pretends to revere. The rest of us, the luckier ones, get distracted by all the infighting over what we ought to do, which in turn supports legions of social pundits looking for a topic to take a position on. But hey: Want a good mom? How about some decent corporate child care? How about participatory dads? How about paycheck equity, so that a woman’s work is worth as much as a man’s, and she doesn’t have to stay home by default just because she earns less? I came of age in the era of conspiracy theorists: How about the notion that as long as middle-class women of clout keep snapping at each other, they’ll be too busy to notice that momhood in general needs a societal helping hand?

So now, on top of everything else--including my pending return to gainful employment--I have to think about being a more charitable human being. I have to stop envying the top tax brackets and be more aware of what moms in general need. It’s a full life.

Toward the end of my self-imposed exile, I attended a baby shower for my daughter’s departing preschool teacher. We ate, swapped stories and watched her open presents. Then one mother presented her with a truly priceless gift--a poster full of photographs of the kids in her class. She barely got her hands on it before the moms started passing it around, searching out our own children and our kids’ best pals.

In the thin, wistful light of that autumn afternoon, our fingers lingered on those little faces, and then a strange thing happened. One woman called across the room to another, to tell her how lovely her daughter looked. Another commented on a happy, rascally picture of two boys. The generosity of the day demanded that one mom acknowledge another’s delight. We had come to know each other’s children so well that we could judge the appropriateness of an expression: Sarah, caught in some serene reverie, looked just like Sarah, and I was not the only one who knew it.

We are circumstantial friends, of course, brought together not by anything lasting, but by the single coincidence of our children’s age. Next year, when many of them head off to kindergarten, only some of us will remain in touch. But we have handed our children over to the outside world together, if only for three hours a day, and that makes a bond--one that for the moment blots out the differences among us.

Only a handful of us work (we’re the ones quietly checking our wristwatches). Would any of the other women in this room, right this second, really be willing to say that we are bad parents? I don’t think so. I don’t know that the full-time moms are falling short, either. I can’t be so condescending--or so defensive--anymore; I can envy them and do a good five-minute rant on how life is unfair, but that has nothing to do with them.

You might have thought that was going to be the soft-focus end of this little experiment. Not a chance. I am about to leave my kid again, so I’m looking for a bad guy to blame. If all moms are potential allies--or if the dreadful ones are driven by individual character flaws, rather than their membership in a particular caste--then where did we get the idea that we were at war? From Sarah’s bookshelf. From the great childhood legends of our time--or rather, the ones that the good people over at Disney have chosen to immortalize. We tried a Disney book embargo at one point, since they read like bad studio synopses and are riddled with redundancies and not a few typos, but gift-givers did us in. We are surrounded by tellings and retellings of a handful of fairy tales--and who are the villains? Women (more often than not, moms and stepmoms).

There’s the wicked queen in “Snow White,” the nasty stepmother and stepsisters in “Cinderella,” an octopodous Mama Cass look-alike in “The Little Mermaid,” and the evil Malificent in “Sleeping Beauty,” a far more interesting lady than the heroine’s mom, who is such a cipher that the storytellers don’t even bother to give her a proper name. Wonderful moms tend to die young and leave their daughters vulnerable: Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” must have inherited a whopping genetic legacy from her late mom, which spared her from resembling her Pillsbury Doughpop, Maurice, but we never get to meet the lovely matriarch or even find out what happened to her.

Where are the dads, meanwhile? Out, it seems--or at least out to lunch. Snow White’s father was too dense to realize he was marrying evil incarnate and no match for it once he had; Cinderella’s pop made a similarly awkward choice and then dropped dead; Sleeping Beauty’s dad, Stephen, is an ineffectual dolt; Ariel’s father is in great shape for a guy his age, for all the good it does him. They are all too busy ruling their respective kingdoms--or, in Maurice’s case, trying to invent one.

In every story, the blame rests squarely on the distaff side: If mom had been less concerned with herself and more involved with her dear daughter, that sweet young thing would not have slept in the ashes/nearly had her heart cut out by the huntsman/pricked her finger on a spinning wheel (any mom worth her salt knows that you borrow extra plates rather than snub a single fairy)/faced a long life listening to a candelabrum do a Maurice Chevalier imitation.

So our daughters go to the movies and find out that Prince Charming is going to rescue them, and they’ll live happily ever after, a lesson that guarantees job security in the fields of psychiatry and talk-show hosting for the next 30 years. And they learn that it’s mom’s fault they got into trouble in the first place.

Mothers, in turn, get the not-so-subliminal message that they should and could be doing a better job. My husband, who also works at home, is held in high esteem by a lot of people who admire him for spending so much time with his daughter. But we both agree that I spend more time with her (which is why he can tell you what was in the newspaper this morning and I can’t). And all I get is people speculating about whether I ought to spend more. How’s that for a double standard?

I no longer think that happiness is a function of working or not. Nor do I think there will be a winner in the who’s-the-best-mom sweepstakes. As the computer said in the movie “WarGames,” after a frustrating game of thermonuclear tic-tac-toe, “The only winning move is not to play.” I want to make my peace with me and with Sarah; that will suffice.

So at the end of the month, I told her what came next. Mommy was going back to work, in spades, about to spend six months researching a book that would keep me out of the house most of the week. I tried to be as matter-of-fact about it as I could, but I was wildly ambivalent. Not that I wanted, any longer, to be home full time. All I really wanted was choice--which is, when you think about it, what any mother wants, the opportunity to do what she thinks is best.

Sarah wasn’t ambivalent at all. Her little face got long, and the edges of her mouth and eyes seemed to dip ever so slightly.

“I am sad to hear you say that,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “It makes me sad, too. But do you think you and I could make a plan for special time together?”

Instantly the skies parted, and the sun shone through.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, shuffling madly for an answer, “how about nighttime play dates? We’ll get Daddy to make dinner, and as soon as I walk in the door, we’ll just play until bedtime.”

She was thrilled by the idea, and too polite to remind me that her father’s idea of cooking a meal is paying for takeout. Life was back to normal. I am Sarah’s mother and Larry’s wife and the book’s author, and if I have time for a monthly haircut, I’ll feel that I’ve indulged myself. On bad days, I feel like the Oakland of human beings; as Gertrude Stein said, there is no there, there.

But most of the time it’s OK. Really. The reflected light can be quite nice. The next day Sarah walked into what she considers our office, put a sheet of paper in the electric typewriter, typed madly for a moment and then handed the indecipherable results to me.

“Want me to read it to you?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She pointed to the letters and recited, “I love you Karen. When you are the best working girl I can love you very much.”