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Susan Wagner of Friday Playdate let me and other BlogHer Contributing Editors know about this beautiful video at The Washington Post of Jefferey Barehand and his son. The video is part of the "On Being" series.
Barehand is a stay-at-home-dad who shared the following anxieties.
As a stay-at-home parent sometimes you feel you're not as accomplished, or you could be doing other things in terms of career or climbing the ladder. Part of me thinks I should be doing that as well.
I don't actually see us ever getting divorced but it happens. I mean what happens if I'm not doing anything. I'm not working on a career and that happens. Horrible. I'm not sure if it's at that point still yet where you actually get the kudos you deserve. ...
Susan Wagner said she sent the video link because she was glad to see anybody talking about parents and not just mommies. I'm sharing the video with you because I'm glad to see somebody other than mommies talking about the anxieties of leaving a career behind to stay home with children. Barehand cares for a total of four children.
Before you yell, "Oh, but he shouldn't say he's not doing anything. He's doing something. Stay-at-home parents are doing something," I ask that you calm down and get real. You know what he means.
You know that when you apply for a job and put down that your job for the last five years was "stay-at-home" mom, most employers don't put you on the fast track, march you to a corner office, give you a company car, and your own personal assistant. If you don't have marketable office skills, you'll be lucky to be someone else's personal assistant. You know what he means and that corporate America lies through its teeth when it says it values stay-at-home parents.
Jefferey Barehand is voicing the fear that crawls in the back of many stay-at-home parents' minds, one they turn toward and squash like a bug. They don't want to hear it, not even its annoying distant buzz.
We live in a country where it's reported that nearly half of first marriages end in divorce. When it comes to matters like finances, considering that your marriage may be on the splitters' side is not being pessimistic anymore. It's being practical.
Still, like E.J. Graff, who also has a piece at The Washington Post, I think the moms who stay home vs. moms who work battle is getting old. I'm sick of it. While it may have been real at some point, I think women who judge other women about their choices to work or stay home are simply being judgmental or possibly showing their own insecurities about their own choices.
Why must I put down your choice in order to feel good about my choice? What's that about? The reality is that many women have to work; it's work or starve. There have always been women with children, poor women, who've had to work.
Graff writes in the article "The Mommy War Machine" that publishers and media outlets are pushing a war between women that no longer exists.
... This is a war that isn't.
The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds -- and the marketing machines -- of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom news flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950s. All while the number of working mothers has been rising.
I agree, but this marketing machine has some pretty loyal, female foot soldiers who don't gain anything from pushing the war but enemies, but they push it nonetheless. Some women seem to buy into the so-called war and are quite sensitive about the choices made by other women as you can tell from this roundtable show on Oprah, Every Mother's Dilemma.
Oh, if you check out the Oprah link, it's not the show about Elizabeth Vargas leaving her television anchor spot after she had her baby. The Vargas show, according to Graff is an example of media misrepresenting stories about women in the workforce to fuel the questionable mommy wars. The "Mother's Dilemma" show features ordinary women discussing the choice to work outside the home versus being solely stay-at-home
