Sherry Chandler

Mommy Track

I have been seeing references around the web to the Mommy Wars but I’ll admit I haven’t been paying much attention. My boys are grown and it’s the problem of paying my old-age medical bills that engages me now.

However I did enjoy reading this book review by Sandra Tsing Loh of Mommy Wars: Stay-At-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families . I’ve been meaning to talk about it for some time and this Saturday before the great Hallmark orgy of Mother’s Day seems an appropriate enough time:

More and more these days, reading women’s writing fills me with a vague, creeping, slightly nauseating feeling. Lying in bed the other night, cradling some seltzer water, my stomach gurgling, the word for my malaise suddenly came to me: “afflufemza,” wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading first-person essays about it, over and over again. We’ve always had rich mothers, of course; it’s just that the boundaries between the privileged and the un- used to be clearer. Back in the eighties, for instance, I was among the many couch, or at least futon, potatoes who used to love Dynasty — the Mothra-versus-Godzilla grapplings of the Carringtons and the Colbys, of Joan Collins’s deliciously nasty Alexis and Linda Evans’s nurturing, oddly affectless Krystle. Alexis was the Execu-Bitch; Krystle, the Saintly Wife. It was the eternal female ur-struggle, ever campy, ever watchable, ever conveniently framed for us — out there in the distance — by that swoopily hammy Bill Conti score, those soaring trumpets, those glittering Denver skyscrapers.

Twenty years later, gone are big hair, big diamonds, and big shoulder pads. In their place, among America’s most affluent mothers, is a kind of gnawing, grinding anxiety — and a mediacentric conviction that this fretfulness is somehow that of every woman.

Loh’s is a devastating piece of writing – I wish I were that good. I’m pretty sure I’ll never read Leslie Morgan Steiner’s Mommy Wars. My own choosing stay-at-home several years ago put my family in a financial deficit we have yet to climb out of, but the decision is behind me. Too late for me to worry whether it would have been better to have given my children less of me and more of the things money could buy – like music lessons, say, or private school – that might have set them up better in a career. Or even designer jeans and sneakers that would have subjected them to less teasing. These are not the choices Steiner is facing. As Loh points out “…even when the media moms [who contribute to this book] quit work to raise their children, they’re still able to spend a lot more than I do, on a daily basis.”

I see such young stay-at-home women from time to time, climbing out of their SUVs to have a break with their pre-schoolers at Starbucks or Great Harvest. Am I jealous? Yes, a little. Mostly I just wish they’d curb their toddlers while I enjoy my coffee. Someday I hope my (potential) daughters-in-law will be privileged enough to have such problems. Until such time (and I’m not holding my breath), I’m not going to worry over the choices these women face. These are not the issues of feminism.

[Note: Okay. I admit to being a little bit rhetorical about the private school. My family believes very strongly in the public schools and, while we did discuss private schools briefly and while we really would have been hard-put to afford tuition in those pre-voucher days, in the end the only choice for us was always the public schools.]

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