Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples: What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us about Work and Family

SEVEN. Mama Time

83 chapter seven  Mama Time Hey little darlin’, your mama’s stuck on you wherever you’re going, I’m going there too bless my child with the sun in your eyes and the wings on your shoulders and the blue in your skies bless my baby dee carstensen, “bless my child,” 2001  Kids can be cranky, demanding, and generally maddening, but there’s no feeling in the world like when your two-year-old wraps his arms around your neck and whispers into your ear, “I love you, angel mama.” The world stops spinning. Stress melts away. And you are the dead center of that little fellow’s world. Unconditional love is intoxicating. And it’s hard to conjure up similar moments in the average day at the office. Being a parent or wanting to be a parent, especially a mother, is at the center of this phenomenon of heading home. The women we interviewed indicated that they want to be with their children, even if that involves relying on others to help provide that care some of the time. Many women emphasized that they seek to provide their children with what one woman described as her “version of family life,” and some of the women we interviewed found their goal of creating a family life to be at cross-purposes with simultaneously pursuing a demanding career. It’s not that they lacked drive or ambition , as is sometimes asserted in discussions of who remains in the labor force, but when push came to shove and given the constraints 84 Chapter Seven of their jobs, they made trade-offs. Yet it is also crucial to recognize that this affective dimension of mothering is also deeply cultural. Many women feel they should be with their children, and respond to powerful gendered social norms that instill a particular sense of responsibility for caring for their children. Lower tolerance for risk, higher levels of surveillance, and increased expectations for kids’ lives to be programmed and scheduled all coalesce to make parenthood a more hands-on affair than it was a generation ago. And, finally, parenthood is also inextricably bound up with structural issues in society. In the previous chapter, we documented how the economics and the structure of child care options fail to meet the needs of families. Many women feel they must be home to provide that care, even if that means pushing the margins of what their family ’s economic situation will allow. Our discussion up to this point has revolved primarily around the social, political, economic, and demographic forces that shape women’s relationship to work, but how do women themselves see their behavior? And what do these actions mean to them? Beyond structural “pushes” from the world of work, what pulls women home? The Politicization of Spending Time with Your Kids Here we step into the peculiar politics of spending time with one’s kids. The mother-child dyad is one of the most fundamental relationships in our society. Yet when, where, why, and how much time a mother spends with her children is heavily politicized terrain . Whether you are a mom receiving welfare or at the top of your game working as a financial analyst, someone outside of your family probably has an opinion about whether you should be working , and if so, how much. One of the issues here is the naturalizing of gender roles and society’s efforts to challenge the reductionistic equation of woman = mother. As a point of departure, to build on a famous quote by anthropologist Margaret Mead, while motherhood is a biological reality, it, like fatherhood, is also a social invention . Many contemporary discussions of women and work deal rather swiftly with the affective dimensions of mothering. These Mama Time 85 authors tend to offer their own experience as a mother to establish “street creds,” before quickly moving to the “real story” beyond women’s emotional attachment to mothering.1 We want to take a closer look at how women frame their feelings about being a parent , because we believe that this perspective is important to understanding broader themes of gender, work, and identity in America. Therefore, while we acknowledge that we are entering a political minefield, it is important to spend some time in this book giving voice to what women we interviewed told us about how they saw their role and their experience of being...