KAREN I. writes:

Below is an excerpt from an article in Redbook magazine in which a working mother admits that she left her 18-month-old child in the care of someone whose last name she didn’t know so she could get to work when her nanny called in sick! I am shocked she would admit this to the world! Even worse, judging by the line at the bottom of the page, she seems to think it is amusing! 

Of course, there is a lot about work/life balance and guilt in the article as well. There is also an admission that the mother really could have called in sick and not lost her job, along with an admission that the most important reason she did not do that was because she did not want the “shame” of failing to manage her personal life in a way that didn’t interfere with her job. Apparently, the author feels it is less shameful for a working mother to leave a small toddler in the care of a total stranger than to call in to work! 

Here’s an excerpt:

During my commute to work that day, I couldn’t believe I had left my kid with a stranger. If I’d stayed home, would the office have come to a standstill? No. Would I have been fired on the spot for taking a day off? Unlikely. But in the panic of that morning, all I could think about was the giant to-do list waiting at my desk, the inconvenience I’d cause my boss, and, most importantly, the shame of failing to manage my personal life in a way that didn’t interfere with my job.

It’s as if the day I became a mother I’d made some tacit agreement to never let my new, non-paying job interfere with the one that gives me a salary. How hopeful I was — and how very wrong. I had no idea that life with kids would be so messy and unpredictable, so marked by those WTF moments when the urge to be a perfect employee and the urge to be a perfect mom rush at each other in a game of chicken. Inevitably, one of them goes screaming off the track.

Most of the time, it’s only a temporary derailment. Your boss forgives you and your kid forgives you. What’s tougher is forgiving yourself. We aim for peak performance at home and at work, especially in this uncertain economy. My income helps pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and save for college and isn’t something I can casually toss aside. Plus, I like my job.

In a new poll of working moms conducted by REDBOOK and Yahoo!, 76 percent said that despite its stresses, working makes them happier. Yet 70 percent also admitted to feeling guilty when they can’t do things for their families because of work, and 41 percent say that people in their lives judge them for their choices. Tellingly, 34 percent admit that they’re doing the harshest judging themselves.

“I don’t think you can be a good parent or a good employee without feeling guilty. I feel guilty every day,” says New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin, the author of Life’s Work: Confessions of an Unbalanced Mom. Belkin suggests that much of this stress is a byproduct of progress: Work is more critical to women than ever before, and they have the ability to get jobs they love, to earn more money, and to rise higher in their careers. “Choices,” she says, “require trade-offs.” In fact, a new study from the University of Washington suggests that working moms who recognize that they can’t juggle everything seamlessly are less likely to be depressed than those who think women can do it all — something researchers call “the supermom myth.” They note that we become far happier once we accept that most days call for tough decisions.

Not that it’s any fun having to make those decisions. I don’t like going to work when my daughter is sick at home, and I hate that I missed her first trip to the zoo. All of which makes me appreciate the times we do have together. On a recent Sunday, my husband and I took Ida to the beach at Coney Island, a spur-of-the-moment trip. She held my hand and ran around the shoreline, laughing every time a wave crashed in front of us. It was an image I carried with me to the office the following Monday and all that week as I scrambled through work, dashing in and out of endless meetings. Even on the mornings it hurts to leave her, I know I’m headed to a place that stimulates and energizes me in a totally different but significant way.

Maybe this is as close as any working mom comes to attaining “work–life balance” — a term I’ve always disliked, since it implies that what I’m doing five days out of the week isn’t actually my life. I may not have achieved balance, but I try not to let the imperfect days drag me down. It helps to know that WTF moments happen to everybody, and proof is on these pages, in multitasking-gone-wrong stories from famous women, corporate powerhouses, and admirably honest REDBOOK readers. Their willingness to share makes it easier for us all to muddle through — and to remember that if we’re lucky, a WTF moment makes for a pretty good laugh later on.

Oh, and Lisa Whatever-your-name-is, I owe you one.

                                                          — Comments —

Leslie writes:

Here’s the ugly truth that the working mother doesn’t know, and won’t know unless Ida chooses to tell her:

Maybe Ida gets sick, and maybe sometimes she’s faking. Maybe Ida gets sick sometimes at night when she’s around 3 or 4, preschool age. Ida will cough and cough and cry and scream for her mother, who has to get up for work very early (!!!). Mother will soothe her with some cough medicine and tell her to sleep. Maybe sometimes Ida forces herself to throw up in her bed. Maybe Ida knows that if she throws up her mom will HAVE to get up, change the sheets, make sure she’s okay, and spend a little time with her. The next day Ida won’t be running a fever, but will continue “feeling ill” so that there is an off chance that she won’t have to go to preschool. When Ida is sick she gets to stay with her grandparents, or her mother may even call off of work and stay home with her.

God has not blessed me with a family yet, but it seems to me from my own experiences that mothers with this work-life balance “struggle” think that family and parenting is a one way street. I don’t blame my mother for working since my father left us, but when these women have a choice it saddens me to think that how I was feeling when I was little is how this girl will be feeling too later, and that her mother will choose not to stay home with her. Instead she will place her in someone else’s care.

Ida will grow up with her mother putting pressure on her to have this balance too. Get the grades, go to college, then do work life balance. And when Ida is grown (and has gone through college and got a job and is working on love and marriage and the baby carriage) and suggests to her mother that maybe she’d like to be a housewife when she has babies, mother will say no, it’s not possible in this day and age. You have to do it the way I did it because this is the new normal.

Thank you for your blog. It is really opening my eyes to a better life.

Laura writes:

Thank you, sweetheart.

Anonymale writes:

This is very painful reading. When I was a toddler in the late 60s my late mother wrote one of those articles for “Women’s Day.” Maybe it was among the first of the genre. The lede, if I remember correctly, was a scene with her on a supermarket line, with me and the groceries in the cart. She was having an epiphany over how angry and resentful she was at having to be in that place at that time. It went on to celebrate the notion of living in communities where mothers could drop their children off with neighbors and reciprocate at some point later as they went about finding their true callings.

Flash to the 70s and we’re not in that kind of community any longer, if it ever existed, and there’s an entry in her journal at my second birthday party wishing she could go into the bathroom and slash her wrists with a knife. And then, when I’m eight, she’s coming back from weekly feminist consciousness-raising sessions calling me a male chauvinist piglet, with a four-month reprieve due to a stint in a mental institution when she had a manic depression breakdown. She adopted a policy later that I’ve heard Hillary Clinton espouse, something about children having all the knowledge, as an excuse for neglect. She was probably afraid of the influence she was having.

It’s sad to think of all the brilliant, disordered minds contributing to the propaganda that advances societal destruction.

[Jan. 8, 2011]

Anonymale adds:

I made an error in chronology in yesterday’s post. It was not my second birthday party but rather after my seventh birthday party when mother made a journal entry fantasizing about slashing her wrists with the knife she used to cut the birthday cake earlier that day. The 8th birthday party was family-only, taking place in the mental institution. We brought in pizza, but I came down with the flu and threw it up.

It’s interesting reading about the author of the Redbook piece, she’s the managing editor for Tina Brown’s Newsweek. That’s the lady makes her feel guilty if she calls in a sick day. And the writer of this WTFentry lives in Brooklyn, where I lived with my family when my mother wrote her piece for Woman’s Day. Looks like she could be my sister.

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