Written by MOTHERS volunteer Kelly Coyle DiNorcia (ahimsamama.blogspot.com)
I work from home (as a paid employee) for a youth sports organization. I have an almost four-year-old daughter and an almost one-year-old son. Though we have a sitter who comes once a week so I can have some undisturbed time to work, I am mostly juggling my caretaking and wage-earning responsibilities all at the same time. Most of the customers I speak with are, by definition, parents, so when I have to interrupt a telephone call to remind my daughter for the ten thousandth time that day that she will have to wait until after Mommy is done with her phone call for a cup of juice/something to eat/help changing the channel/a playmate, or to soothe my crying baby, I am rarely met with impatience. More often – particularly if there is a mother on the other end of the call – I am asked how old they are, and told how lucky I am to be able to work from home and be with them while earning a living. And I agree. I am lucky. I work in an extremely family-friendly environment (which included two sixteen-week fully paid maternity leaves) and for this I am grateful.
The most recent issue of Mothering Magazine contains an article by Laura Ulrich called “Home is where the job is: A savvy mother’s advice on loving, money-making, and leaving the laundry behind”. This article ends with the statement, “The more we as mothers take ownership of the right to integrate our lives, the more society at large will evolve to support such work arrangements.” However, all but one of the mothers interviewed for the article were self-employed, and found ways to carve out a self-designed (and defined) niche where they could meld caregiving with wage-earning. Absent were mothers who were able to achieve this sort of synthesis while working in professional or traditional jobs.
When we bought our house, the seller’s attorney was a WAHM. She brought her young daughter to the closing, and although the young girl made nary a peep during the very lengthy transaction, our realtor commented on the way out, “How UNPROFESSIONAL to bring a baby to a closing!” We were childless at the time (I was pregnant with my daughter), but I had no problem with her presence. She was not disruptive, and I had respect for a woman who tried to juggle career and parenting in this way. Apparently, I was in the minority.
I wish it were so easy for women to gain a degree of integration between family and employment, that we could just show up and demand “Hire me, accept my kids!” and suffer no ill effects from it. Alas, I think it will be quite some time before the vast majority of workplaces offer their employees that sort of flexibility. For those of us who have the opportunity, we should make the effort to include our children in our work, if for no other reason than to show that it can be done thereby paving the way for other mothers to have greater options. In the meantime, we still need to join together and demand widespread political support and respect for family-friendly policies that support the caretaking work we do.
