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I have a few memories of being a little girl. In one, I am clinging to my mother's leg as she tries to leave me at daycare. I'm hysterical, and all I want is her softness, the smell of her hair in my hands.
Another is nap-time. I lie on a blue vinyl cot, looking around in the afternoon darkness of a school room. I am either drifting off to sleep or waking up, but there are strict rules about getting off the cot, and I fear I'll break them. I think of my mother, but she feels far away, too far. Despite being surrounded by other children my age and a few cold teachers, I am alone.
On another day, I sit on a school bus for the first time ever, en route to see a puppet show in the middle of the day. I pass the street where my house is and more than anything, would like to be nestled on the soft couch instead of these sticky brown seats.
As with all children, my mother's face encompassed all the joy and warmth that existed in the world, and seeing it at the end of the day made everything seem right again. I didn't know that she existed without me, or me without her. Still, I felt quite proud on the occasional instance when I visited her job. Vending machines held a joy I had not known in such few years on the planet, and I liked sitting at her desk and spinning in her chair, meeting her coworkers for whom I was a mini-celebrity.
While I remember the strong desire to have my mother with me (even more now that I have my own children and feel their needs more than my own), my mother had to work. She had no choice. She was a single mom, the sole person responsible for me -- for doing the grocery shopping, the cleaning, the bedtime stories; for buying shoes when my feet outgrew the last ones, or presents for my birthday; for picking me up from the brick schoolhouse and bringing me home to our rowhome in Southwest Philadelphia. She balanced the checkbook. And changed the sheets. And picked up the mail. And struggled.
When I was teaching at a girls' school, planning my family and the adjustments I'd have to make, I asked the girls what their mothers did, what they thought they'd do when they had children. Many, if not most, wanted to be stay-at-home mothers, much to my chagrin. (So why was I busting my butt giving them a solid education and promoting female leadership if they had zero career aspirations? Was I Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile or something?)
The students were upper middle-class, affluent enough to go to a private school, and many of them never knew a mother who worked. When I assigned Linda Hirshman's article "Homeward Bound" in the November 2005 edition of the American Prospect, in which she calls on women of elite universities to get to work and stop staying home with kids, the girls got angry. This woman was wrong, stone-cold. Didn't she understand that mothering was the most important job in the world? I heard the question over and over again -- "Why would someone have kids just to leave them with someone else?" (This same question was not asked of men.) So I shared my own concerns about how important it was to be able to fend for yourself even in marriage, even as a mother. They tried to make me feel better; "You're a teacher. You'll have the best of both worlds." (Because as Fox News and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker will tell you, teachers don't work that hard.)
But what about other women? I nearly pleaded as the bell rang and they walked out of the room, the scent of berry lip gloss wafting by. How are they supposed to do it? What does their staying home, my staying home, teach you, the next generation, about the importance of having a career to call your own? What might women lose if we continue to make this decision?
I was never fully honest with myself about how emotional my considerations about working and motherhood were, but of course they are hugely impacted by my childhood. I learned from an early age that dependence on a man often resulted in heartbreak and near-poverty. Pick any of the last three generations of women in my family, and
