My Happy Inner Housewife

So Jen is it really so beneath you to vacuum your drapes once in a while? Are you really too smart, too good and too busy to do anything domesticated? How dare you put down women who clean their homes. Most women take great pride in their homes and they are sick and tired of feminists making them feel bad about it. For your information Jen I did go to college. I do have a graduate degree and I did have a career. I was making a high six figure salary when I traded in my job for mommyhood. Why do you find it so upsetting that women want to be home raising their own children? Does this mean we are throwing away all the hard work of the feminists? No. What it means is if we want to opt out of the fast track we should have that choice without being ridiculed by so called feminists such as you. And if you have noticed, right from my house with my vacuum in one hand and my mop in the other I did manage to write a book. I co-host a nationally syndicated radio show in the mornings after I get the kids on the school bus. Oh, and get this crazy idea, I actually have time to cook dinner for my family at the end of the day. Oh my! How radical. And Jen,you misquoted me but you got the idea. Our generation of women has been burdened by our mothers with liberation and equality. Our mothers opened doors for us and taught us how to compete with the good old boys but they never told us what to do when we got pregnant. What to do with the tears at the desk when we miss our child’s first steps. They didn’t tell us how hard it would be to juggle it all. They certainly didn’t tell us how many women would be popping anti-depressants because they feel useless. Yes, the feminists opened doors and they opened a Pandora’s box too. Get out of your little world Jen and talk to moms in their forties. They are going crazy trying to stay super-women. You should be on my side. Why are you trying to start a war between the working moms and the stay at home moms? I don’t care if a mom wants to work 12 hours a day. I wrote Happy Housewives for the moms who don’t want that. I wrote it for the moms who are home. The moms who want to be home. Jen, where do you write your blog from?

Okay, Darla, I understand why you might feel attacked here but you need to understand Jen’s perspective here.

I haven’t read your book, so I can’t comment on it specifically but I can comment on the type of thing Jen is reacting to in general.

I am a stay-at-home mom (as is Jen, by the way) and while I love my work, I find it frustrating that stay-at-home parents get so little respect, so little help, so little support, and no benefits like pension plans, sick leave, etc. Many moms find it difficult to cope with the difference between the power they had before staying home and the power they have afterwards.

A number of writers have jumped on this issue (and I am NOT saying you are one of them, again, I haven’t read your book) and are telling us that the problem is us. They feed us a revamped version of the old Freudian solution ‘you have not accepted your femininity’ and try to tie being a woman to an automatic love for things domestic and child-related. That the solution is to further embrace the things that can make us feel overwhelmed and unappreciated, that we will find fulfillment in cleaning behind the toilet and in creating elaborate confections for our children’s birthday parties.

If people do find fulfillment in those sorts of things, that’s cool, but if they don’t they should not be berated and accused of being unfeminine or unmotherly.

Writers like Jen (and me, less prolifically) are trying to point out that there might be another solution, that the problem is systemic. That a society that claims to value children and family while undermining and putting down those who care for children and nurture families is not a workable one.

The problem of how to adequately care for a family is not just a private issue, it should be a societal concern. If human societies want to sustain themselves they need to find a means to support the youngest members of that soceity and the people who care for them. Advocating that women need to retreat further into stereotypical roles in order to be fulfilled is not going to help anyone, it is just going to create a further divide between the sexes and create more problems. (Again, I am NOT saying that you said that, I am explaining the type of thing that we are reacting to. Your book may or may not embrace those ‘back to the domestic sphere’ values.)

As for our mothers letting us down when it came to preparing us for pregnancy and childcare, I think that’s a lot of blame to place on a single generation of women. It is true that we have not been prepared for this, but that has a lot to do with the older age of many first-time mothers (so once we had kids it had been many years since we had spent time with new mothers or small children, and we probably hadn’t seen anyone breastfeeding at all), the structure of the workplace (which in many cases doesn’t allow for family friendly options – part-time work, job-sharing etc), and the fact that women’s expectations have changed but society has not expanded to allow that. So we have a generation of mothers who are expecting to be treated as adults, as equals, and instead they are told that if they stay home, they don’t matter and if they work after having children, they are bad mothers. There is no upside there.

I also think that we need to separate stay-at-home parenting from housekeeping, because both you, Darla, and you, Debra, seem to have misunderstood Jen here. She is not putting down stay-at-home parenting (I’ve never gotten that from her at all), she is putting down the notion that the person who cares for the children should also automatically strive to have a perfect home. She is objecting to the fact that in many cases the stay-at-home parent becomes the servant for the house because so much value is placed on the income of the working parent that the working parent’s time is seen as more valuable.

I don’t know what your book suggests, Darla, and perhaps Jen has gotten it wrong but her writing is not about condemning parents (stay-at-home or otherwise) and you should not imply that it is. Just because she disagrees with you about the importance and fulfillment to be found in the domestic sphere (and let’s keep that separate from childcare when debating this), doesn’t mean that she is an enemy, bent on destroying all you hold dear. She feels that there are some important issues that tend to get ignored in the parenting debates and she has every right to keep bringing them up. It IS shortsighted and demeaning to tell mothers to quit whining and get with the program, and people ARE saying that, even if you are not.