OFFICE MOMS: Last night Shamed, Russo and I went to a roundtable sponsored by the America’s Future Foundation, on the topic, “Can women have it all?” (Apparently not, since one of the things I’d like to have is a world without cliched debate topics!) It was basically three women proselytizing for stay-at-home motherhood. I’m very sympathetic to this, as you might expect, but I think the discussion of mothering options tends to get bogged down in myths and stereotypes–on the one side you have figures like the Woman Who’s Just Like a Man/the Daddy Who’s Just Like a Mommy; on the other, there’s the Child Who Spent One Day in Day Care And Is Now Tonight’s Episode of “America’s Most Wanted.” So here are some scattered thoughts that are meant to point out that the range of good options is a lot wider than the somewhat calcified public debate would suggest:

You can work outside the home without putting your kids in day care. I tend to think day care is a pretty bad idea–it’s like school without the schooling, and what on earth is the point of that? Better options might include having Grandma or Auntie or Lisa Down the Block (not to be confused with Jenny From Ditto) look after your kid for part of the day. Very young children need much more care; by the time they reach pre-K age, they’re generally just not as fragile.

My own situation: My mother has worked outside the home for as long as I can remember, but between school, babysitting, and knowing Mom was on call if I needed her, it never even crossed my mind that she was somehow “choosing her job over me.” It was so obvious that I was loved and protected that this thought just didn’t arise. So I’m skeptical of overly rigid stances that assume that children are super fragile beings who will be permanently damaged if Mommy works. Piecemeal, patchwork arrangements can be the best thing for an individual family–even if they are hard to justify to strangers since they don’t play into the Supermom or Superhomemaker imagery.

Couples should investigate full-time homemaking and patchwork options. A lot of couples just assume that they can’t get by on one income, rather than going through it realistically and saying, “OK, if you work full-time we’ll need to pay for child care, transportation, work clothes; if you stay home, we lose your salary but save those expenses, plus you get full-time motherhood and the kid gets lots more time with mom. Ultimately this means we [fill in the blank–have to spend longer paying off your student loans, have to seriously slash our entertainment budget, have to save less for the kids’ college funds, have to accept greater financial uncertainty if there’s an emergency].” The financial sacrifices are often smaller and more worthwhile than we might think.

Also, how about working from home? Is that a way to minimize the financial hit while still maximizing time with the children? Jobs from caring for other families’ kids to journalism to Web design can be done at least partially from home; all it takes is initiative and creativity. (Also, saving money requires time. Convenience foods are a great example–it’s often cheaper and healthier to cook from scratch but it takes more time. Bargain-hunting, repairing rather than replacing, etc. similarly take time. Domestic economy is a real skill, a real way to “work from home” not by earning money but by saving it.) I get the impression that, because there are “sides” in the “mommy wars,” too many people overlook possible ways of combining work and home.

What about the extended family? I don’t know, what about it? All I know is that this subject is rarely even touched on when people talk about mothering.

Motherhood focuses the attention homeward. As far as I can tell (never having experienced it), this is just true, and all three of the panelists talked about the way in which their interest in the outside world and their desire to pour their energies into improving that world diminished after their children were born. This sometimes makes it sound like mothers callously turn away from the rest of the world and selfishly say, “You all can go hang–everything for my little Precious!”

Instead, I think it’s a matter of emphasis. Easy example: One of the women who volunteer at my pregnancy center herself became pregnant. She stopped volunteering. Score one for Baby, zero for World, right? Well, her baby got older, she worked out a schedule with her husband, and she was able to fit volunteering back into her life without neglecting her own kid.

However, it’s true that the world does rely on those who do not have pressing family responsibilities of their own. The center relies on single women like me, and on older women whose children are grown. This is one of the material reasons the world needs nuns outside the contemplative orders–teaching sisters, hospital sisters, Missionaries of Charity and the rest. A society that strongly values motherhood needs to strongly value single and religious men and women as well, since these people provide so much service. Singles vs. Mommies is just another false either/or.

Childrearing is a creative act. We often picture young mothers giving up the life of the mind, their thoughts filled with dity diapers rather than Shakespearean sonnets. There’s an element of truth there, of course!–especially when the children are in infancy–but teaching and raising a child well also require great mental flexibility, and kids’ antics, oddities, questions and unexpected insights provide fodder for an active mind. Frederica Mathewes-Green has made the excellent point that we always think of women giving up “careers” for their children–we picture (and the questions at the AFF event definitely played on this image) scientists who could have cured cancer if they weren’t at home cleaning up baby’s messes, or poets who would have given the world the next great epic, and so on–but most women don’t have careers. What they have are jobs. And raising kids well both requires and provokes a lot more mental liveliness than most jobs.