Each Family Must Do What’s Right for It

Listening to the fallout from a new report that says children of stay-at-home moms show no significant difference from children of working moms, it occurred to me that I am in an ideal position to comment on this subject. I am a mom who had the good fortune to be a stay-at-home mom and loved it, and I am the child of a stay-at-home mom who hated it.

My intelligent and knowledgeable mother was a happy working woman before her marriage in 1936. After I was born in 1938, she worked until I was 4, when, because of the war, she says, she couldn’t find good help to take care of me. (What did the bad help do to me, I always wonder.) So she stayed home. My brother was born in 1946. My mother was miserable (and that’s an understatement); the house was a disaster and the meals consisted of boiled vegetables and broiled meat. Standing at the sink in our tiny, littered kitchen, my mother, dressed in her housedress and my father’s old shoes, would cry, “If you’re no good at a job, you get fired. Why won’t someone fire me?”

So, why didn’t someone fire her, or at least send her back to work. Why? Because it was the 1950s (that decade we are all so nostalgic for) and women didn’t work. We were poor enough, so that wasn’t the problem, but my father worried about “how it would look if his wife went to work.” None of the other wives were working. Besides, being a male from the old country, he liked to come home, after a long, hard day of physical labor as a floor-layer, to his bath, his paper and his dinner, even if it consisted of overdone broiled meat and boiled vegetables.

So what do I think? I think my mother should have gone back to work and used her salary to pay for good help.

In 1961, I was a reporter on the Oakland Tribune with no particular interest in cooking, housekeeping or children. I wasn’t unhappy, but the “back to the Earth movement”--chop your own wood, grow your own food, make your own clothes--had its allure and drew my husband and me to the woods of Northern California, where we eventually had two children. Due to the circumstances and the times, I became a stay-at-home mom and I loved it, much to my mother’s dismay.

Looking back on it now, from the vantage point of a reemployed woman, I feel so fortunate to have been able to do so. The ‘60s was a time when it was OK to stay home and enjoy your children. It was OK to take time to breast-feed and toilet-train your babies, read to your kids and finger-paint with them in play groups.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. I wasn’t the world’s greatest mom. I didn’t bake cookies or play Monopoly with them. I did my fair share of proclaiming, at difficult moments, “Next time I’m going to raise baby alligators,” and feeling that I would never again have a moment to myself. (If only young mothers knew how quickly those moments pass, how soon your children are too busy for you.) But what I did have with my children was a lot of shared time, good and bad, and I’m grateful for that.

I’ve always felt that feminism had an unsolved or possibly unsolvable problem. As a feminist, I want every woman to be able to have any career she wants, but I have never understood the point of having children if they are going to be raised by someone else.

So what’s the moral of this story? It’s an argument against being dogmatic. Against blanket pronouncements, whether they be “a woman’s place is in the home” or “all women should be in the work force.” Families should do what seems right for them. My mother was unfortunate. What was right for her was out of step with the times. She should have gone to work. I was lucky. What was right for me happened to be the thing of the moment. I got to stay home.