Working Mother

The title phrase implies that there is a different kind. A woman whose job is to raise her children and run her household is not considered a working mother. The mothers who work outside the home are seen by some as not doing their jobs. No winners.

In yesteryear, a mother would not have understood the term “working mother.” To specify a certain class of mother because she had a job outside the home would have seemed pointless. That mother would have simply been doing what she had to. At the same time, the notion that the mother without such a job was somehow not working would be just as ludicrous.

Everyone can think of a woman they know or know of who has a nanny, a night nurse, a housekeeper, or landscapers, pool boy, cook or all of the above. Sometimes these women work outside the home, sometimes they do not. Is the stay at home mom with outside help not working? Is the working mother with outside help working less than her counterpart who does it all? They are both still working. They just have clean houses as they accomplish things elsewhere, simultaneously.

Maybe that is really the point. Instead of each camp pointing the finger about who is working and who is not, we should remember that we all are. Motherhood is a job done 50% in the head. We are the ones who worry and lose sleep over the minutiae of our children’s lives. We are the ones, all of us, who think and ponder about our baby’s future and their happiness and heartbreak. If some of us outsource the other 50% of the work, is it really lightening the true load going on in our minds as we try to drift off to sleep? No, it is merely crossing things off the to-do list, keeping up with the laundry while the weekly shopping is done, bringing in money to pay the bills while the kitchen still gets cleaned, spending special time with one child while the others are tended to.

The term “mother” implies work all by itself. Any other qualifier only serves to define us as something besides someone’s mama, which is meaningless in the eyes of our children and that is what counts.

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