Last night was not a good night. First, I was in tremendous amounts of back pain and my patience was wearing thin. Second, I had that awful third-trimester heartburn that keeps me up at night, and I just couldn’t get comfortable. Then, just as I was drifting off to sleep (after a lovely new episode of Men In Trees), I caught a short feature a.k.a. the lead story on 20/20 on Working Moms.
The 20/20 story, called Can Working Mothers Have it All? was billed as an investigative piece, but it was just all so much fluff to those of us who have read, talked, journaled, and taken action on this issue both in our communities and in the blogosphere. There were the usual hateful comments, this time by a broadcaster who questioned the right of women to even want to work while raising kids, and callers who backed him up, asking why they should subsidize another woman’s choice to have children (um, survival of the species?). There were the usual pictures of harried moms, trying to get dinner on the table and pay the bills and entertain their kids all in the short hours between daycare pickup and bedtime. There were the platitudes, the bromides, the standard lines that we’ve heard so many times before, all presented as if they were a new story, because Elizabeth Vargas has returned to work after her maternity leave. The end of the piece did feature three moms discussing maternity leave policies, with a few statistics comparing the U.S. to other countries — we all know that the U.S. policies are abysmal — but no call to action. No resources, no pending bills in Congress, nothing for us to do but be outraged.
Well, I’m outraged. Great. If you’re outraged too, let’s head over to Moms Rising and take action together. They have amazing resources and campaigns all set up and ready for us to step in and join the fight with whatever precious time we can spare during the baby’s nap or a toddler’s playdate.
But wait, there’s one more thing.
As I was fuming and the story was winding down, my wonderful husband turned to me with a similar look of outrage and said, “Where are all the fathers?” He’s right. Not one shot during the 11-minute story had so much as a father cooking, cleaning, reading, playing, or working in the background. Like so many other features, ABC had taken the easy way out and let the fathers off the hook — and kept them away from the solutions. For change to happen, we must start talking about this issue as a family issue, not a mommy issue, and include the dads in the solution. After all, we didn’t create these kids by ourselves and we’re (mostly) not raising them by ourselves. Let’s talk about maternity leave, but let’s also talk about paternity leave. Let’s talk about flexible schedules for ALL employees, male and female, those with infants and those with teenagers, those with special needs and those with elderly parents. It’s the 21st century, people. Let’s start encouraging telecommuting whenever possible, and consider — just consider — whether some jobs can be accomplished by a split schedule, where employees could choose to work in the office in the mornings and at home in the evenings, after the kids go to bed. The years that any one employee needs these kinds of consideration are short. But the payoff to rethinking the workday could be tremendous.
If working moms (and dads) could spend more time at home with their kids during daylight hours, and if stay-at-home-moms (and dads) could have more opportunities to contribute to the outside working world, the impact that we could have on society and on our kids would be powerful.
