Mojo Mom Podcast: How to Avoid the Mommy Trap

We've made it to August and I bet I am not the only Mojo Mom who is burned out! This is the first time in a long time that I have not blogged for a whole week. Fortunately, I have a new podcast to share with you, Mojo Mom and How to Avoid the Mommy Trap.

Listen to the podcast now:


In this week's show:

Amy and Sheryl discuss the recent NY Times article about parents who just can't seem to let go of their children while the kids are at summer camp.

Then we meet Julie Shields, author of one of Mojo Mom's favorite books, How to Avoid the Mommy Trap. Julie's strategies help couples lay out a roadmap for truly shared parenting.

You can learn more about Julie's work at her website, MommyTrap.com.

The article that Julie and I discussed that emphasizes equally-shared parenting was Lisa Belkin's New York Times Magazine feature, When Mom and Dad Share It All.

Sheryl and I talked about the NY Times story, Dear Parents: Please Relax, It's Just Camp, and then yesterday Judith Warner wrote about it in her latest blog post, Camp Codependence.

This week my kid went to sleep-away camp for the first time and there was very little drama, certainly none of the kind reported in the Times. I have to say, sometimes it's a relief to live outside the New York hothouse. Down here in North Carolina, as far as I have seen, camp really is just camp.

I am planning to blog lightly over the next couple of weeks, and we plan to have the podcast return on Friday, August 15.

Podcast will return; Judith Warner's latest blog

The Mojo Mom Podcast is taking the week off, I hope you'll visit our podcast archives and listen to a previous July episode to learn how to enter our drawing to win an iPod Nano.

Entries are coming in and I love hearing from real podcast listeners in Iowa, Hawaii, New York, Ohio, and Canada, to name a few places we've heard from.

Next week I will be talking to Julie Shields, author of How to Avoid the Mommy Trap. I am excited on many levels. I adore Julie's book and it has been a big influence on me. I found it after Mojo Mom was already in press, but I have blogged about it and I'll incorporate some of those thoughts into the new edition of Mojo Mom.

I am working on the revisions and yet I keep coming across new relevant material every day. Take Judith Warner's latest Domestic Disturbances blog post, "The Other Home Equity Crisis." I have not had time to digest it thoroughly yet, but the piece takes a look at the post-Opt-Out narrative. This is the very topic I've been thinking about for Mojo Mom. We need to move beyond that limited storyline, but I can't help but worry that as we risk throwing stay-at-home Moms under the bus in the process. Warner describes "opt-out" Moms (in the context of the media zeitgeist) as "a sort of angel [who] has appeared to guide their way and re-label their unfortunate circumstance as virtuous choice."

Argh. I realize that women leave the workforce for many reasons: choice, circumstance, being pushed out. On a societal level we need to understand these contexts. But on an individual level, what is wrong of making the most of the hand you are dealt? Given our current situation that expects many workers to put in 50+ hours per week, it is rational for one parent to decide to stay at home to care for the kids. It's not always ideal and need not be idealized, but it's a valid choice. And while we are there, why not enjoy ourselves? I'd like to combine work and family with enough time to enjoy and succeed in both roles. This is my idea of an ideal life, not an "unfortunate circumstance."

And do other people somehow get to be career mavericks, but we Moms have something to prove? Timothy Ferriss wrote a bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, built on the premise that he wants to generate an automatic income so that he can race motorcycles in Europe, ski in the Andes, and dance tango in Buenos Aires. He gets to be completely brazen in his life's goal to be a professional dilettante (and he's laughing all the way to the bank right now). Somehow Moms risk getting labeled as a loser for wanting to go off script. And the real kicker is, there are so many scripts out there that there is one to potentially bash every Mom, employed (a la Caitlin Flanagan) or at home (a la Leslie Bennetts).

That's one reason I am excited about the book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. In addition to having a real solution, Cali and Jody acknowledge that work as it is currently constructed does suck a great deal of the time, particularly for caregivers who are expected to function as though they have no other responsibilities.

We have the potential to make work more rewarding, productive and efficient, and less punitive. That would be good for everybody.

We also need a corrective narrative to the Opt-Out storyline, but in the process let's make sure that we don't come up with something that is equally divisive.

That's another reason why I am excited to talk to Julie Shields. She is able to cross the gender divide with really good strategies to help Moms and Dads share parenting. And in the long run, getting true workplace flexibility (i. e. with proportional benefits and promotional schedule) for everyone will allow men to create humane work schedules for themselves, which will allow them more time as Fathers and more options for Moms to work as well.

More on this next week after I talk to Julie!

Wombs for rent in India

Judith Warner has a must-read Domestic Disturbances blog post about "Outsourced Wombs" in India. Warner is troubled but can't quite reach the point of calling this callous exploitation of Indian women, who earn the equivalent of 10 to 15 years of normal income for serving as a gestational surrogate for rich Western couples.

The post and the reader comments are all worth reading to see the variety of angles that people take on this issue. I am haunted by the AP Photo of anonymous surrogate mothers in Anand India dressed in surgical scrubs, complete with masks. They might as well be wearing burqas. (I can't reprint the photo here; be sure to follow the link to see it.) The women are wearing blue or pink scrubs, which I assumed corresponds to the gender of the baby they are carrying. How would you like to have your identity covered over with a label representing the fetus you were carrying?

I think it's ultimately harmful to all women any time women are objectified solely as baby-making machines. These are people, adult women with lives, thoughts, personalities, human and reproductive rights. Some will argue that this includes the right to rent out their wombs, much as some people would argue in favor of sex work or selling body organs. I can't support the concept of commercialized surrogacy in any way, shape or form.

Think about the larger social implications. Women are poor--hey, they can rent out their wombs, right? Indian families can't afford to take care of their children--no problem, just gestate an extra baby for a white American couple. Is this what colonialism looks like in the 21st century? What about Indian women who can't have children? What about the effect on the women's families while they are "away" gestating? What does it mean about the way we view women's bodies as a commodity? What does this say about the value of Indian children?

Would we assume that women like us could carry a baby for nine months and give it up with no emotional attachment? What does it mean to be a mother? Is it all in the "seed," the genetic material in the egg and sperm? What about the contribution of the mother who nourished those two cells to grow into a human being?

Last September I heard Dr. Barbara Katz Rothman, a sociologist and adoptive mother, give a provocative keynote address at the Symposium on Breastfeeding and Feminism at UNC. Taking a look back at my notes, she argued that the language of "seed" is the language of patriarchy, the language of control, the language of getting the women to do the right thing. In this framework, the baby belongs to the man, to the state. The woman has nothing to add. Nurturing becomes about minimizing the damage you do, because you can't improve the original essence.

Economically-driven surrogacy seems to invoke all these dynamics, perhaps allowing the paying women clients to assume the man's role in this "seed driven" world, but that is a hollow victory in a process that ultimately exploits human relationships.

I didn't become a feminist so that some day I could exploit other women as well as a man can. Did you?

Working moms feeling untethered by our summer schedules

I have been linked to the school year schedule almost my whole life. Since entering kindergarten myself I have timed my life to summer and back-to-school for my daughter or myself almost every year: 32 of my 39 summers total.

This summer I feel that I have become unmoored, unglued. Half the time I don't know what day of the week it is, what date it is. My daughter is generally in day camp but I have to leave at 2:30 each afternoon to pick her up. Is it my imagination, or is my "vertical information storage system," aka the stack of work on my desk, only growing and never shrinking? I managed to start a new job on the first day of summer break (not my choice of timing!) and it's all been downhill since then. Today my daughter is home "sick," and I am not sure if it's really a mental health day or what, but I told her she needs to rest and entertain herself. I believed that she felt off her game this morning but now she's back to normal and bouncing off the walls.

My friend PunditMom wrote about her Mommycamp schedule with her daughter--so if you want to hear from someone who can make that work, I recommend her blog. More power to her, but it is so not working for me.

I am feeling a lot more in tune with Judith Warner this week, who writes in her blog Domestic Disturbances about her resentment about the myriad school and camp events that ask parents to drop their work to come visit or volunteer during the day.

Judith's rant was cathartic for me. She said:

"Conversations about parents who break promises or let their kids down or generally make them feel less important than work shouldn’t be common. But they are. I hear snippets of them every time I attend a school event during the workday. And I’m fed up. I’ve just about had it.

"But not with the ill-accused parents.

"I’ve had it with a culture that willfully refuses to face up to the fact that almost 80 percent of mothers with children beyond pre-school age – and, of course, a much greater percentage of fathers – work. This refusal to face facts, coupled with the ideology of 'parental involvement' as a panacea for all social ills, has created a situation in which not only guilt-ridden parents, but children are needlessly suffering.

"It doesn’t need to be this way. It only takes a quick look across the Atlantic to see that many other countries have done what’s necessary to grow up and embrace the 21st century. They provide kids with a longer school year, a longer school day and subsidized summer activities. And they consider that a parent’s place is in the home – not in the classroom."

Add in the uber-competitive nature of parenting in some affluent communities and working parents can really feel left out of it all.

Interestingly, Judith's post got over 160 comments and of the ones that I've read, the vast majority of those who wrote in supported her point of view.

And yes, both Judith and I realize how lucky we are to have jobs that allow us to flexibly break away when needed, even at the cost to our work. It's important to remember that as Judith points out, 50% of Americans have no right to sick leave and 25% have no vacation.

Life calls me away from my desk at the moment, so I will leave you with one more link to an article that says that parents shouldn't have to feel that they are their kids' playmates and entertainers: "Leave those kids alone" from the Boston Globe. The tide may be turning away from child-centric rearing and back to a more sustainable approach.