The Noble Profession

March 28, 2005

 

My friend Brooke, a mother of two and a senior vice president at a boutique private banking firm in New York City told me a story recently that epitomizes how much we are defined by our careers.  When Brooke's lifelong friend, Kate, a stay-at-home mom came to visit Brooke and her children, Brooke's precocious three-year-old daughter Lilly, all of a sudden, asked her mom's friend earnestly, "So what do you do?"  Kate, was stunned.  "I'm a mommy," Kate said sweetly.  Lilly didn't quite accept that answer.  After all, having spent three years in daycare, all of the mommies Lilly knew did something else besides just being a mommy. 

 

I don't personally know Brooke's friend, but I wonder if Lilly's comment struck a nerve.  I know it would with me.  About two years ago my husband and I were in the arduous process of buying a house.  At the time, I was seven and a half months pregnant with my second child, and the Internet company I had been working for had just imploded when the dot com bubble burst and at the same time I was working on a proposal for my book, How She Really Does It."  In other words, I thought of myself as a quite busy working mom.  In fact, in showing that we were house worthy, I had explained to our mortgage broker in great detail all of my jobs over the past few years, Capitol Hill press secretary, associate producer at Dateline NBC and now an unpublished, but determined, first-time author. 

 

But the bank where we were getting our mortgage from didn't see me that way.  When our papers came back, next to my profession in bold letters, it read "Homemaker."   I had a radioactive reaction to this label.  I know that motherhood is a noble profession, but to have no other identity other than the retro career of "homemaker" frankly makes me break out in a cold sweat.   

 

Our careers are completely entwined with our identities.  It's partly a cultural thing, and probably not an entirely healthy situation.  But nonetheless, we tend to define ourselves by what we do.  Many stay-at-home moms tell me that having surrendered themselves to fulltime motherhood and given up their careers they now feel uninteresting not only in social situations outside of mommy events, but sometimes even at home with their husbands.  They tell me that having given up their careers they feel a sense of loss. A loss of who they once were, how they were seen in the eyes of the world, and how they saw themselves.  I'm sensitive to this as well.  Up until I had children, I had always had Big Careers.  So even while I have been working on a book for several years, but working from home, I often found myself defensive about what it is that I was doing.  I was quick to tell people that I'm not just a mom; I'm writing a book.  That gave me worth, an identity other than mom.  And frankly, the work gave me stimulation I desperately needed outside of raising my kids.

 

Studies show that having a career is important to our overall self-esteem and worth.  Having a career is also important for a woman's marriage and relationship with her spouse and children. 

 

In this "age of anxiety"  where motherhood has taken on almost religious fervor, the least anxious mothers I've met are those who have careers separate from that of only raising their children.  They don't have time to overparent the way some at-home moms do. They are putting their energy and time not just into their children but into something separate from their family -- and this is a good thing.  We should be encouraging moms to stay in the workforce --- making it work for them, so they are happier mothers with healthier homelives.

 

 

(Reminder: You can see the book at Amazon by clicking this message's title.)