With an opinionated father like me you can imagine that my four children are all rather headstrong. And of course, they are. They all run their own businesses, hold strong convictions, and will not hesitate to express their opinion in an instant.
Of course I blame it on their mother.
Even though, as you have seen from this near daily column, I do not hesitate to express my opinion as fact, I still say they all got their obstinate ways from their mother. I say she can’t help it, Italian mothers have a way of becoming a battle axe, it is in the blood. The woman has been running my life for the past almost 50 years, I learned very early there was no other way it was going to work. Seems we are only truly happy as a couple when she gets to be in charge. Go figure.
Anyway, what prompted this column was a text thread that ran through the family like a wildfire over the weekend, my son the shit-stir’er decided to go all “Handmaiden’s Tale” on his sisters, one in particular, and make the claim that women are happier as stay-at-home moms and that the nuclear family was under attack in America, and that it was important for strong fathers to stand up for the traditional family.
I didn’t even see the conversation until I picked up the phone and saw 158 text messages had been shared on the family thread. Now perhaps for your family that is a normal experience, but in our family we don’t exchange 158 text messages in a single morning. Even after a kid’s birthday party we don’t share that many texts, when it becomes a photo sharing experience.
Now knowing my son, he was sitting around on his back porch bored and just decided to poke the bear. One of his sisters went to college in Los Angeles and it is impossible to live in Los Angeles for more than five minutes absent becoming an extreme Liberal. You simply cannot survive in Los Angeles, California unless you become a radical feminist, somewhere to the Left of Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Helen Gurley-Brown, Gloria Steinem, with a dash of Helen Reddy thrown in for good measure. So one particular daughter is a bit Far Left. It makes for interesting conversation at those Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. And somehow, the youngest can also espouse some rather radical feminist views. She appears to me to be a conservative in almost every way, but man, don’t get her started on any conversation that is about women, and their role in the family or society. You are going to face a shit-storm of feminist values.
If, perhaps, I begin to regurgitate the position of say, my own Catholic upbringing on some subjects concerning women, that one will blast me so hard it is as if she turned on a fire hose of words and phrases with which I cannot compete. She is exactly like her mother. In every way. Oh, and I better add I say that “lovingly”.
You might think as opinionated as I am that I jumped into this conflagration with both feet, but you’d be wrong.
Knowing my role as the Patriarch, a running joke in my family as no one values my leadership or opinions any longer as they are all grown adults, I did the adult thing and told them “enough”. I politely asked the shit-stir’er to stand down and stop annoying his sisters needlessly and to find some golf on television to watch. And told the three sisters to stop allowing their older brother to wind them up this way as he has been doing so since they all began to walk, and that they shouldn’t fall for his act yet again. They know he loves to wind them all up, ignore him and he will find others to bother. He probably doesn’t even believe the crap he is saying to them all, he just wants to irritate them the same way he did as a five year old. They never really change. Almost forty years later they still interact as if they are all under seven.
I played peace-maker, calming influence, loving and reasonable father. What an act.
But I do have to tell you, my son’s arguments did get me thinking, and I asked myself the question, are women who stay-at-home a happier bunch than those that trudge off to work each day, dropping the off-spring at the day care and chasing a career?
I want to say here very strongly that I have myself lived through the entire movement and do think I understand the feminist movement very, very well.
I had a sister seventeen years my senior. She was capable, talented, intelligent, and can you imagine, rather head strong. She said in later years that as she came of age in the very early 1960’s she felt as if she had two career choices, secretary or nurse. She felt trapped as a woman who didn’t take the college career path. Companies were not going to hire her in sales, or in some management training position. She graduated high school in the late 1950’s, went through nursing school and pursued that career until she had multiple children. When she became a stay-at-home mom. I’m not sure she ever felt a sense of fulfillment, of self-achievement, that satisfaction one finds when they accomplish in business or the work force. I know until the day she died she felt as if she’d been a victim of the age she lived in, coming just ahead of the feminist movement, in those “Mad Men” days where all the old rules still applied.
And of course the “Irish twin” sister I had just under her in age, graduated high school and went off to become a secretary, winning work awards, and being a star in the secretarial pool. She was also very talented and capable, but was hell bent on the path to become a stay-at-home mom. That is what their generations did.
I heard Helen Reddy “roar” while I was in high school. I understood the movement. Mom had gone back into the work force since all the kids were grown and it was practically “empty nest” at home. Never the type of woman to sit still she re-entered the work force to earn added money and recover a sense of self-worth, of contribution.
My own wife was a product of the feminist movement. She went to college, obtained her CPA certificate, entered the professional work force carrying the brief case, working long hours, fighting for promotions, and trying to move up the corporate ladder. All while having four children. I supported her in every direction, I took pride in her achievements and being a CPA, God knows I could have never passed those tests. And when she achieved in her career we celebrated, I championed her success.
But I was also there when she didn’t want to return to the office after birthing one of our children. When she cried, wanting to be a stay-at-home mother, and didn’t want to leave the baby so soon.
Of course we’d gotten on that treadmill where it takes two incomes to survive. We had the two cars in the garage, the private school tuitions, the mortgage, the season tickets, the country club membership, the big monthly nut. Sometimes the decisions to be a stay-at-home mom, or a career working girl are made for you. Either get out the door and earn or they’ll come tow something away.
I was there for it all. I saw how my wife enjoyed her career at work, felt that satisfaction of a job well done, gained recognition in the office as a great worker, a fine employee. Had offers from clients and competing firms to work elsewhere. Had the respect of her peers. She made the “big bucks” and was a respected professional. Made me happy and proud of her. Why not?
And of course we struggled at times with the cement head men in her office, who saw women as objects, and made the crude remark in front of my wife, or were rather misogynistic at work, or sexist. And I urged her at every turn to fight back. I wanted to go into her office and punch out more than one male asshole. Women in the work place have a tough enough time competing on equal footing, they always feel the pull from home. The call from school about a sick child usually lands with the wife, not the husband. A woman faces a “taffy-pull” way more than men over the children.
If you have kids at all you know that at times, when they have a fever, or have had a particularly bad day, they want “mommy” and no other. Daddy just won’t do.
Career women face challenges men can never understand. I don’t care what kind of modern feminist you are, if you deny that women are more nurturing as a gender then you are just lying, you are ignoring reality. Find any child running a low grade fever, male or female, see whose arms they want to run to, that’ll tell you.
So I feel as if I’ve had a front row seat to the entire feminist movement.
I saw the sadness in my sisters that they were doomed to low level careers back in the “cave man” days of “Mad Men”. I saw my own mom return to the work force and deal with the changing conditions in the work place as cement headed men supervisors had to learn to deal with a new dynamic in the workplace.
And I lived the entire feminist career movement through my own wife. Lived it all.
And yet I’d have to say, I’ve never met one woman who had a child and didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mother. Not one. Every one of them returned to work out of necessity not want. Every one of them cried real tears of sorrow and sadness dropping the child off with strangers at day care, and driving away from their newborn.
Every one of them wished their financial circumstances were different, so that they could stay at home with their child and raise them until school age, and to be there with them as they took the first steps, said their first words, and to play and see the growth stages of their young development.
Every single one.
Now one might say that we all create a prison of our own needs. If being a stay-at-home mother is the most important job in the world, and more rewarding for the mother than any career, than the lifestyle can be changed to accommodate that reality. Sell off a car, downsize the house. Create a lifestyle that requires but one paycheck.
Certainly that is an option.
But few families wish to go backward. To sacrifice. To give up material comforts. And for some it isn’t an option at all, the wife is the breadwinner in the family. The biggest earner. She has the one salary they can’t afford to lose.
Now an added dimension to this entire argument is societal pressures. Women are just indoctrinated from high school and especially through college into feminist doctrine. They are almost shamed over any decision to sacrifice self achievement through career in favor of being a stay-at-home mom.
Any discussion of wanting to be a stay-at-home mother is framed in some way as being a subservient brain controlled individual Ala “The Handmaiden’s Tale”, or “Stepford Wives”. Which is a complete shame.
My own position is that part of a woman “having it all” is in having the choice to be either a career woman mom, or a stay-at-home mother. Taking the latter choice should not be seen as “lesser”. It should not be seen through the prism of placing the husbands role and career as superior.
I believe that “my body, my choice” should be extended into whether or not a woman would prefer to rear her own children at home for those developmental years.
That shouldn’t come with a stigma.
As if that woman has decided to accept a second class role to her husband and his career, or as if she lacks the ambition required to compete in today’s workplace.
Make no mistake. This single subject has changed our society more dramatically in the last sixty years plus than any other. We are a vastly different society today than in 1955. In every way. And no more so than with the advent of the working woman.
Women entering the work force in greater numbers exploded housing costs with two incomes chasing price verses one income. Women entering the workforce added an entire child care industry that previously didn’t exist in great numbers. Grandmothers pitched in back then to assist, or other family members. “Day Care” didn’t exist in the size and scope we have today. “Day Care” wasn’t one of the three, or four most important Presidential topics of 1956.
And women are still up in turmoil over the subject of staying at home to raise their own family, or to enter the workforce, every bit as much as in 1972 when Helen Reddy “roared”, or possibly even more.
We are having an ongoing argument over the stay-at-home mom today as loud as ever.
One of my next Monday morning phone calls will be to the prankster son of mine. Who doesn’t look like me one bit, but must be my offspring as he can’t help himself, he simply must stir it up anywhere and everywhere he can. Irritating others is a male Herman “gift”. We will needle and tease and start an argument in an instant. So I will call my son and tell him to cease and desist riling up his three sisters constantly. Nothing has changed in almost forty years. He has to tweak them, he knows just what to say to get them all started.
And don’t feel sorry for the daughters, oh no. They give it all right back. The California Liberal gave it right back in spades to the boy. In effect calling him a “townie” who thinks a regular visit to Disney World is a cultural experience. She loves to lord over him that she has traveled the world, presently resides in Australia, and makes trips to London, Paris, or Los Angeles with frequency. As he sits in Jupiter, Florida growing a business and having a more traditional family.
Shed no tears for the three women we raised. They all got that Italian battle axe inside them from their mother. With a dash of my own Irish gift of gab and temper it can make for a volatile response. I can guarantee you wouldn’t win an argument with any of the three of them. I certainly don’t. They dismiss me out of hand. The youngest didn’t like a column I wrote six months ago and dropped her subscription. My own daughter. Carbon copy of her mother, that one.
I know you wouldn’t want to be a part of those 158 text messages. The personal slights were flying right along with the points made. The daggers were just flying.
When I have to step in as the Patriarch and voice of common sense and decency, you know it can’t. be good.
But it is an argument we all need to have as a society.
Stay-at-home moms shouldn’t face a stigma. In fact, in my humble opinion, it should be the holiest of callings.
Trump never really answered the debate question on what he would do about the high cost of child care. That cost may resolve the issue of stay-at-home motherhood.
Biden had a perfect answer which he failed to give: "We're already working to solve the high cost of child care with our border policies."