Because moms are not dudes
As the mom of two boys, I live as a floating beacon of estrogen in my house. My fellers are too little to knowingly embrace gender stereotypes, but it's amazing how much boyness seems to have come pre-packaged in them. Even my 10-month-old already knows how to play with cars, picking out big fat trucks that fit securely in his chubby hand and running them back and forth on the floor.
Nevertheless, I am always trying to push them to play outside their stereotypes. My oldest owns a baby doll. He also enjoys having tea parties with Daddy and I, with his gender-neutral blue and green plastic KMart tea set. Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not trying to turn my boy into a girl; I just want him to feel that there are no preset limits to the world of toys. To further our collection of gender-role-ignoring toys, my darling father-in-law, who is apparently very secure in his sexuality, bought my oldest son the Fisher-Price First Dollhouse for Christmas at my behest. The box was barely opened when Isaac, in true-to-boy form, rifled through the contents and said, "where are the boys?" He then proceeded to spend a goodly chunk of Christmas evening playing with his dollhouse in the following fashion. First, he and I would painstakingly set up the furniture. Then, a monster truck would come rampaging through the house, slamming through the furniture or tossing it out the balcony. After the house was trashed, the mommy doll was expected to come downstairs and administer a time-out to the monster truck for making such a mess.
It's funny -- through school, through work, it becomes ingrained in one's noggin that men and women are equals and should receive equal treatment, especially in the workplace. At first to me this seemed completely obvious. I studied science in a lab with a bunch of dudes and could hold my own and more with them. This is despite the stark reality that we are clearly physically not the same. I needed the big German dude to lift that heavy centrifuge rotor for me. I asked my burlier lab mates to open jars, or get things from high shelves. All these things seem superficial, but meaningful if, say, your career is in professional weighlifting or as a UPS person.
It wasn't until I had Isaac that I realized that, for mothers, the notion of equality in the workplace cannot possibly exist. I have been extremely lucky. When I had my first, I was a grad student at a progressive, West Coast university, which meant that I could pretty much define my own terms of maternity leave, that I could work part-time when I came back to work, that I had access to lactation stations nearly adjacent to my office, that my boss would understand. With my second, I had to make a choice. I was done with grad school and, to stay competitive in my field, I needed to pursue a high-demand and high-stress post-doc with less flexibility and full-time hours. I would have to put my oldest and my as-yet-unborn baby in full-time daycare and accept the fact that in insanely ideal world I'd get three weeks of vacation and some flextime to pick them up early some days. An alternative presented itself when my husband scored a job where he would make just enough money for us to live semi-comfortably if I stayed home with both kids. I did not have to think at all before choosing the latter.
I realize there are lots of women out there, including some of the wonderful women who contribute to this blog, who have chosen the former, and I sincerely applaud them. But you have to admit that we breeders pose nearly unanswerable problems to the workplace. Growing babies, expelling them, and subsequently wiping away their sniffles all cause serious workplace discontinuity, and we can't pretend that, no matter how understanding the bosses and coworkers, that they don't find us the least bit annoying. The contributions we make during childbearing years, while significant, can't possibly be as large as what we would make if we chose not to have children at all.
I don't have any real answers for this, but, as a starting point, it makes me sad that our country is so unforgiving in terms of maternity leave. Did you know that only three countries in the entire world lack parental leave benefits? They are Australia, Papua New Guinea, and, you guessed it, the good ol' U S of A. In the overwhelming number of countries that guarantee maternity leave, the cost is burdened by both the parent's employer and the state. Perhaps this, then, is partly how we became an economic superpower, by exploiting new parents and thrusting new babies into the care of strangers. I paint it as a grim picture, fully knowing that there are women who choose to go back to work at, say, six weeks post-partum. To these women, it is a lifestyle choice, one that is right for them and for their family. But what makes it grim is that, as we neo-feminists assert our god-given rights as women through choice -- the choice to work where we want and live how we want -- the choice to stay home or go back to work, a choice that affects not just us but our whole family, and, dare I say it, the proverbial village, is simply not guaranteed for anybody. Those who have a choice at all are the lucky ones.
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