Motherhood Requires Women to Weigh Many Costs

By: Cynthia Hall Clements

I am now out of the closet. I admit, I've swung both ways in the Mommy Wars. I was a stay-at-home when my son was a baby, and I went back to work full-time once he started kindergarten.

I've organized play dates, and I've taught political science classes. I've watched cartoons, and I've written political commentary. I've eaten too many kids' meals at fast-food restaurants, and I've been the invited to be a lunch speaker for civic organizations. I'm outed now as walking both sides of the Mommy line. Like many of my women friends, I'm bi-maternal — not that there's anything wrong with that — a career woman transformed into full-time mommy and back again.

So as a former stay-at-home and current working mom, I didn't take offense at Leslie Bennetts' assertion in her new book, “The Feminine Mistake,” that women choose domesticity over financial autonomy at their own and their children's peril. Bennetts warns women not to depend on their male companions for economic well-being for themselves or their kids, lest circumstances change and the domestic cocoon implodes.

But other women who have — even temporarily — abandoned professional success for suburbia, who discarded their suits for sweats and for days surrounded by Play-Doh and Pampers, don't have such amiable, or even ambivalent, feelings about Bennetts' cautionary tale. It amounts to modern feminism denigrating traditional family values, they allege. Instead, today's stay-at-home moms argue the power of choice, including the decision to raise their children themselves and without caregivers.

In one way, they're right.

The feminist movement of the 1960s was about empowering women, about providing women with options — whether career, home, or both. So choose away, ye career-oriented, educated woman wanting to flee the professional path. Choose Ozzie and Harriet and 1950s Americana. Choose to play June Cleaver to your husband's Ward. Be the little lady and her knight toting the kids in the minivan. But also realize that choice comes with consequences, some unintended and unexpected.

Those insulted by Bennetts' call for women's economic self-sufficiency should realize common sense is not a moral judgment, and factual evidence is not an ethical condemnation. Bennetts merely urges women to have a Plan B if A walks, and B shouldn't be another man-protector/provider/paycheck. “Surely not I,” the aghast woman doth protest. “My marriage is intact,” she indignantly proclaims, but smack-you-into-reality says 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce and two-thirds of second ones do, too.

Contingency planning doesn't mean you love your husband any less or you have doubts about the viability of your union. It just means that women should assume responsibility for the what-ifs in life — divorce, death, unemployment — instead of abdicating it to a man. It means being rational about reality instead of a pie-in-the-sky romantic. “Till death do us part” doesn't mean the woman leaves her common sense at the altar. Flying kites on windy days, picnicking in the park and playing peek-a-boo make for priceless moments with the little ones, providing irreplaceable memories. But sentiment doesn't pay the bills. There's not much money to be made in serenading someone with the “Barney” theme song or in playing patty-cake.

And then one glorious day, the last little munchkin goes off to school, and Mom is ready to rejoin the gainfully employed. Time in the business world hasn't stopped while she was at home, though. How to explain that many-year-gap on her résumé? Few professional jobs require previous experience in putting together puzzles and burping babies. Her colleagues who never left the office are far ahead on the corporate ladder, and she is starting at entry level, for the second time, at a much lower salary than if she had stayed.

It's a hard transition from “The Little Engine that Could” to the New York Times, and from “SpongeBob SquarePants” to CNN.

Women, be aware and be prepared if you want to stay home with your children. It might cost you.

— Cynthia Hall Clements has worked for the legislatures of Tennessee and Louisiana and was most recently a columnist for the Lufkin Daily News in Texas. She is now attending law school.