The Existential Crisis of the Wait-at-Home Mom
“I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bed-maker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?” says one woman who very well could be sitting at this dining room table in Bryn Mawr in April 2008, except that she’s not. She was sitting at a table in the early 1960s, talking to Betty Friedan, who was researching The Feminine Mystique. And talk about freaking people out: comparing vacuuming to animal labor? Claiming that being relegated to the home is “burying millions of American women alive?” It’s no wonder Friedan’s book exploded into, as writer Anna Quindlen puts it, “the greatest social revolution of 20th-century America.”
“I’ve always felt that we were undervalued as mothers at home, and I still do,” says one woman who could have been talking with Friedan just after The Feminine Mystique hit bookstores, but is, instead, sitting at the dining table in Bryn Mawr. “I’ve probably worked harder as a stay-at-home mom and managed more things and did more multi-tasking than when I was working in advertising in New York. This is definitely more demanding, but nobody really gets it.”
In fact, a More magazine article from 2007 advised women who are trying to get back into the workforce not even to mention the bake sales during interviews: “If you argue that you can manage employees because you can manage children, you’ll lose credibility.” Of course, the same article goes on to say that the value of women’s previous work experience diminishes with time: “A three-to-five-year absence is now fairly easy to explain. Ten years-plus is a lot harder.” Which sends a very clear message to these six first-generation “opt-outers” having lunch in Bryn Mawr: You, ladies, are screwed.
Okay, they’re not all screwed. Debbie Clower hunted and hunted before landing a sweet part-time gig with an executive search firm. She works 20 hours a week and decides when to work them, because she still wants to be available to her three kids. Another luncher recently started helping an acquaintance with her flower business on a per-project basis, and another works the counter a few days a week at her sister’s gourmet food shop for a $90 paycheck. (“When I get that check, I’m so proud of it,” she says. “It’s so silly.”) But 47-year-old Clower is the only one who is officially back in an office, which she credits to the owners of the search firm being willing to recognize that she was “an untapped resource.”
