If there’s a type of article I can’t resist commenting on, it’s an article about motherhood in the Wall Street Journal. This one is about grandmotherhood, focusing on the trailblazing women who worked full-time while their children were small in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Now in their 60s and 70s, these women are, many of them, still working. The piece was for me…underwhelming. Written by a grandmother who is herself working on a laptop while helping out with her daughter’s baby on occasion raised existential questions about how we want to spend our time and why.
From the article:
Their generation came of age when the “Mommy Wars” demonized them and experts ominously warned that they would ruin their kids. Decades later, many are still at work—and determined to “break that cycle” of “doom and gloom” as Andersen puts it, now that their grown kids are becoming working parents themselves.
These grandmas remember all too well the struggles and stigmas they faced, and they are determined to ease the way for their working-parent kids.
By 1998, an Arizona public official declared in this newspaper that two-career families are “a profound tragedy whose bitter fruit will be reaped for decades to come.”
The sense from the women interviewed was that—even if they only had two children—somehow they each had four babies simultaneously in diapers. Each was judged harshly at daycare drop-off. Each faced the unwarranted ire of the public, as captured in the heinous quotation from the Arizona public official above. None mentions a husband, though presumably he figured in the picture at some point.
The real question in all this is how these successful career women of the late twentieth-century were likely part of dual-income families in a time when a single income could get you good living—and yet they did not save sufficiently to prevent the need to clock in on the laptop while waking up in the night with a newborn grandchild. What happened to all that income? Spent on daycare, I suppose. Or, given that no husbands are mentioned, how many were divorced? An often economically devastating development. These are mere speculations, mostly unfounded.
The insistence that our society is none the worse for having mothers en masse clocking in at the office is suspect. People like to proclaim with feeling that the kids are “just fine” while ignoring the cataclysmic rupture in civil society. Allegedly, every last one of the grandmothers’ children turned out okay. Many stories introduce nuance. Yes, I’m sure there’s a study showing that the outcomes will be great; mom need not be around. But family is an individual experience; the subjective quality of our days do, in the end, matter. As Caitlin Flanagan writes so movingly, is it not better to return to an orderly home with a beloved person to spend time with and share meals with than to languish in aftercare while mom moves up in her career?
A question that naturally follows: Should these grandmothers not have worked?
Drusilla Beyfus in Valerie Shore’s “The Compleat Woman” puts forth her approach to motherhood and work. She said, “I feel combining work and motherhood requires you to plunge into your own conscience to decide how to arrange your priorities so you can live with yourself. But I do know that a lot of people don’t feel like that at all. They may feel they have a great creative talent and are prepared to sacrifice the family for it. There is no question in their minds but to pursue their art. I only know it is an endless quest to find a balance between all these dismally conflicting and competing needs, and your own needs.”
I would contend that it is not endlessly dismal. There are joyful ways to manage life with adequate rest and rejuvenation. What I love most about Beyfus’s old-fashioned perspective is that it is personal: it’s up to you and your conscience. Mothers tend to agonize over “natural” labor or epidural, breastfeeding or formula, mothering totally or daycare, which school to choose. These are not, strictly speaking, moral questions, and only you can decide for yourself, with incomplete and imperfect knowledge, of course. As Beyfus rightly identities, making the decision you can live with is the path out of chaos.
It’s interesting to read her description of some women who “feel they have a great creative talent.” A truly gifted and exceptional woman might be more readily understood for fitting family in around her career, not the other way. There was a time when such a woman of such towering talent would have foregone family life to focus on her craft. But what great creative talent is expressed in dashing off emails and rearranging spreadsheets? There’s more to say here, especially about the temptation to reduce the care of young and the elderly to billable hours, quantifiable tasks. Women ensnared in this materialism express great sadness that infants will not remember all the care given to them. What a strange sadness to nurture!
Not everyone was meant to be a grandmother of abundant presence: available frequently, often around, hosting teas, leading songs, reading books, and seeming to have nothing better to do than enjoy the presence of their children’s children. What the valiant defenses of working mothers and grandmothers leave out is that some of us aspire to just that. Economic necessity may assail us in this vale of tears, but perish the thought of checking email while basking in the presence of a new baby. “Juggling,” fractured attention and divided time, is not the fate of us all if we can manage our circumstances well and experience a modicum of good fortune.
