Cold Comfort

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve just returned from a week at my parents’ house with my two toddlers. A great week, but work was shoved to the side since my husband was at home. Now, I have two book manuscripts and five articles I should be working on. I have blog posts to write, emails to return, editing to wade through, but instead I’m making lasagna for a friend. Why, my husband wonders, am I now running a meals-on-wheels program? Because the friend had a third child recently, and the other nursery school mommies decided that since she didn’t really need any more clothes or toys, we should all just agree to make her dinner one day for the three weeks after the baby comes. It’s a lovely thought, really, and I was glad they asked me. Making mommy friends is harder when you’re a working mother, but it’s also even more important if you want to know what’s going on at nursery school. As I’m sprinkling on the mozzarella cheese, though, I can’t help but think about Alison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, in which the heroine tries to mangle her storebought mince-pies to make them look homemade for her daughter’s school Christmas party. Who am I kidding? I don’t have time for this. And, of course, my friend, who is also a working mother, orders her groceries online and is perfectly capable of eating takeout with her family for three weeks.

Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood

Samantha Parent Walravens (Editor)

Coffeetown Press

269 pages

$29.00

All of which brings us to the most important question in life (at least to judge by the number of words spilled on answering it): How much can one woman accomplish in one day? While blogs like Motherlode (at The New York Times) and The Juggle (at The Wall Street Journal) or even Mama PhD (at InsideHigherEd) purport to offer advice about how to manage the “work-life balance,” they are first and perhaps foremost an exercise in exhibitionism (see above). Reading stories of mothers (occasionally a father’s voice is added for a little color) who have full-time jobs while acting as their families’ cooks, chauffeurs, tutors, laundresses, cleaners, confidants, etc., reminds one of The Cat in the Hat. “Look at me, look at me, look at me now!” the cat says as he holds up a teacup, some milk, a cake, three books, the Fish, a rake, a toy boat, a fan, and his umbrella, all while balancing himself on a ball. If only these moms were having as much fun as the Cat.

Instead, by their own accounts, they are tired and stressed and overworked and underappreciated and unfulfilled. And yet, they couldn’t imagine doing things any other way. This message is driven home in a new collection of essays, Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career, and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood. Here, for instance, are the words of Susan Morse, a law professor trying to raise three daughters: “There are many evenings when I wish I were not racing to cook dinner with my work clothes pinching at my waist, hurriedly helping my children with their homework so I can climb into bed and spend a few minutes alone with my husband before we fall asleep.” But, she continues, “when I think about quitting, it’s like contemplating the amputation of my legs. For me, work is dignity. It is breathing. It is a safety net for the future if something should happen to my husband or my marriage. It’s an example for my daughters, who will most likely experience the same juggling act in their lives.”

The schedule Morse keeps is hardly uncommon. And she is one of the lucky ones—home in time for dinner. As she points out, if she had stayed at a law firm, that would not have happened very often. But her feeling that quitting to stay home with her children would be like cutting off her limbs is startling to say the least.

We’ll get back to the work-as-dignity question in a moment. First, there is the issue of “balance.” As one of the other authors, Carrie Lukas, a policy analyst and mother of three, recalls, when she first had a child, balance seemed possible. “My first few months back on the job went smoothly. I worked at night and during naps. I participated in conference calls and interviews over the phone.” Children fool you like this. You think you understand how much attention they need and what kind of attention they need and then they change. When they are born you say, Okay, you need to be diapered and fed and bathed and in return you will sleep for many, many hours (even if they are not all in a row). And you say to yourself, I can handle this.

But then, as Lukas found out, these babies start moving around. Lukas put her 9-month-old daughter in front of Dora the Explorer for 15 minutes while she did a radio interview. But Molly got bored. Lukas ran into the bathroom to find a zone of quiet. Alas, her daughter “sobbed on the other side of the door for the remainder of the interview” while Lukas “cowered in the bathtub trying to shield the phone from the noise.” Lukas realized her mistake: “The hope that I could be both a full-time mom and a full-time worker without sacrificing something was a farce.”

Like many mothers in the book, Lukas seems to be in a position to take on more or fewer work responsibilities as her time with family allows. While the mothers sometimes make mistakes about how much they can handle, the mistakes are not permanent. A number of the authors in this book are, not surprisingly, writers of one sort or another. They can dip into and out of regular jobs and freelance assignments as the years go on. But others cannot. Jessica Scott is the mother of two and a commissioned officer serving (at the time of this writing) in Iraq. Her husband is also in the military. When she recalls how her three-year-old tells her over Skype that she wants her mommy to come home, the reader’s heart breaks.

Scott does not discuss her reasons for going into the military (or for staying in it while her children are young), but other mothers with long hours at their jobs make similar choices. They say that raising young children does not provide enough intellectual stimulation, that they have no control over the hours, that they do not get a moment to themselves, that no one tells you you’re doing a great job or gives you a raise.

These are all reasonable (to me, anyway) responses to the demands of being with young children. What I find stranger are the mothers who decide to take on demanding jobs because they are concerned with what other people will think. One essayist worries that her parents will think they wasted their money paying for her college degree. Others worry that they must show their daughters or even society at large that women can work, that the feminist movement was not for nothing. Maybe we can achieve work-life balance if we try, but when we add the pressures of entire social revolutions, it’s going to be darn near impossible.

When I finished these essays, my mind wandered back to a conversation I had many years ago with some young women at Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative Catholic “Great Books” school in Southern California. If you ask the women there about their aspirations, most will tell you they plan to join a religious order or to marry and have a significant number of children. The latter seem confident that their expensive education will be put to good use—since they plan to homeschool their children. Passing on to their children the knowledge of the great minds of Western civilization may provide their lives with enough “dignity” that they needn’t worry about feeling “torn.”

But for them, this is not simply an individual choice. The decision to raise large families and homeschool one’s children is made in the context of a community—a community that values marriage and family above just about everything else. And most American women don’t live there. There are women in this book who work in part because of the security it provides them, just in case they find themselves alone. One mother who opted out of work when her kids were young describes how now, divorced and raising two children on her own, she is struggling to get by financially. She tells women thinking about quitting that they should not, that they will regret it down the road.

Torn is a report from the richest, most free society in history, but the lives described here seem so joyless. The sadly overriding message of this book is: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” For the beneficiaries of modern feminism, this is indeed the paradox of choice.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer whose work focuses on higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture. With Christine Rosen, she edited Acculturated: 23 Savvy Writers Find Hidden Virtue in Reality TV, Chick Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture (Templeton Press).