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<p>You can skip dinner, making a bed, or answering the door. Childcare can’t be skipped. Or else social services get involved. Someone has to do it. Obviously “being a mom” is more than basic childcare, but why isn’t it a job if the mom is providing it instead of a nanny, etc? And why is most “womens work” considered low skill?</p>
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<p>You are clearly missing the point and taking things way too literally.</p>
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<p>Very simple answer. You HIRE a nanny to take care of your children. You are NOT hired to become a parent. Hopefully, you become one by choice.</p>
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<p>Who said that?</p>
<p>How about “Hobby”? ;)</p>
<p>BTW: Put everything in the context of 200 years ago, and you live on your farm …</p>
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<p>That’s a very interesting take. The only thing is that you are stuck with your kids forever, while you can change hobbies very easily.</p>
<p>If being a mom was a job, we would have all unionized a long time ago. We would have negotiated things like kisses for hard work, hugs for clean laundry, time and a half (paid in chocolate) for help with college essays.</p>
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<p>Homemaker is the term for the job part of it, or the dreaded “housewife.” Back in that Little House on the Prairie, if they wanted to eat it, someone in the family had to cook it; if they wanted to wear it, someone in the family had to sew or knit it.</p>
<p>The farm wives that I knew when I was a little girl had a really long job desciption. Their “gardens” were a quarter of an acre, if not larger. They canned and froze food. They killed, plucked, cleaned and cooked the chicken. They fed not only the immediate family, but the hired hands as well. This work was part of being the farmer’s wife, whether there were kids at home or not. And I bet that if you had asked those ladies what their job was, they would not have answered “stay at home mom.”</p>
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<p>Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. Being a mother is not the same thing as being a homemaker. You can be a homemaker and have no kids. You can have kids and never do any housework ( my mother had six kids and when my dad died we had to teach her how to grocery shop – she hadn’t been to the grocery in over 30 years). What makes you a mother is that unexplicable connection you have with your children – the one that gives you eyes in the back of your head.</p>
<p>I choose to call myself a mom and I don’t find it cutesy. To me it reflects my choice and commitment in the matter. Biology or the law make mothers, but life and choices make me a mom.</p>
<p>Oh my God. What a stupid idea. Yet one more way for women and men to denigrate and devalue the places where women put in far more time and energy than others. Being a mother is one of the most challenging and time consuming jobs I have ever had, and I have always also worked outside the home.</p>
<p>It’s not a ‘relationship,’ being a mother, for crying out loud. A relationship goes two ways. Being a mother is all the time and ONLY one way and always responsibility and always scrutinized by everyone. It’s a job. It might have some pleasant side effects. You migh end UP with a nice relationship with your adult children, but it’s a job with all the attendent responsibilities and none of the benefits of working outside the home.</p>
<p>I’ve done both.</p>
<p>Being a mother is, by far, the harder of the two.</p>
<p>I am sick and tired of all the parents who have children and then make the children a second thought. If someone does not want to invest themselves in their child, then they should not have children. If a parent, mom or dad, cannot raise the child, and someone else has to be paid to raise the child, or the child is left home alone to raise themselves, then those parents should just not have children. Or give their children to someone else to adopt.</p>
<p>And honestly, when I worked, my days were a lot more relaxing and less stressed. It would be great to have the easy life of a working mom. But, I don’t work outside the home. </p>
<p>One could say someone who farms is not doing a job, because they stay home and take care of their own farm. But…the actual farming is a man’s job for the most part…does that make that job invalid?</p>
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The easy life? Are you kidding? Most of us don’t have household help and do all the things that stay at home mothers do, just in a much smaller time frame. When my kids are sick, I get my butt on the bus to work despite having been up all night, work productively for my employer, then go home and take care of my kids, clean the house, prepare the meals, do the laundry, run the errands. All the while being judged by everyone on both sides.</p>
<p>Thankfully, when kids get older, many mothers get more comfortable with their own choices and leave other families to theirs. I would have sold my soul to be home with my kids for more than 10 weeks, but that didn’t happen and I still tried to be the best mom I could always be. It was just often on four hours sleep every night and a truly insane schedule. But I wouldn’t have chosen not to have kids and working was the only way that could happen, so I wouldn’t change a thing.</p>
<p>I’ve been blessed in that most of the stay at home mothers with whom my kids came in contact were kind, inclusive and amazing women. They bring their creativity, energy, and presence to so many things that make our community a better place for their generosity of spirit. I don’t for one minute think that being a stay at home mom is easy and it involves lots of sacrifice, but who are you to pass judgment on anyone else?</p>
<p>No you don’t do all the things a stay at home mom does, just in a shorter time. Those are the words of someone who has never taken care of their child full time. The child does not simply sleep all day. The child has to be cared for, taught, fed, interacted with all day. And children are not clean. You have to clean up after them or teach them to clean all day long. There are no alone trips to the bathroom, let alone lunch with friends. There is no going to the grocery while the children are still at daycare.</p>
<p>Yes. I did all those things with my kids. Who do you think taught them to read? If I didn’t clean the kids and the house, are you implying that I lived in filth? I have not had lunch with friends, dinner with friends or any other social event. I have been to three weddings without my kids and two movies in 23 years of parenting. I bet you have a more active social life than most working moms I’ve known. My kids also never went to daycare. You are making yet more ignorant assumptions. Perhaps you should have had someone else raise yours to prevent the ignorance from being passed on to them.</p>
<p>What idiots we are if we fight each other on this. Honestly. The mommy wars are such a great way to keep us from valuing each other and valuing what all of us bring to the table.</p>
<p>Let’s not attack the work women do to keep our society running. Honestly. If you would open up your ears and listen to what Zoosermom is saying, she is saying, “I value the work we are all doing. And we are all working day and night. All of us.”</p>
<p>Sheesh. When will women learn to have each other’s backs?</p>
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I found that when my kids were little and mothers were at that young, insecure age the attacks were vicious. When the kids got older and it was clear that we were all doing fine, the mothers got a lot more mature. Except a couple. But I think they were just whackjobs and the attacks on other moms were just a manifestation of their own personal crazy.</p>
<p>I don’t think the author was inviting mommy wars. </p>
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<p>I think she is saying that while there is so much lip service paid to being a mom as “the most important job in the world”, policy makers and the government don’t treat it as such.</p>
<p>Before this thread is closed, go to the first post on this thread…interestingly, it is one from last night! How did that happen?!</p>
<p>I think the word “job” is in question rather that the word “mother”. For example my D is a musician. She does “jobs”, ie she gets paid to sing and to teach. Each time she teaches or sings, that is her job. But her identity is “musician”. She spends a lot more time as an unpaid musician practicing hours upon hours everyday than she does doing her “jobs”. The hours of practice time are tougher and more significant in the long run than her paid work. I think motherhood is similar. Hard, unpaid work. But the most significant work you will ever do.
That now comes to me. D is an adult who constantly keeps me updated on her life. I am a mother who needs to keep her mouth shut when it comes to D’s life and well being. At this point, I am still a mom but it’s certainly not a job…it’s more like torture.</p>
<p>and really…enough with the personal attacks</p>
<p>I think parenting IS a job, and a terrible one. To wit:
<p>Amen hunt!!!</p>
<p>Well, Hunt, since my children have, in fact, hung the moon, none of those things apply to them. My children had diapers that always smelled like attar of roses. Slept through the night from the first day home (actually my oldest one did that – but only on that first day and it’s quite a funny story), never demanded anything, never made noise, never made a mess. In fact, they float on air and their voices sound like angels singing whenever they speak. They walked at four months, read chapter books at 7 months and could have cured cancer, conducted the NY Philharmonic and won an Academy Award by the time they were ten if they had chosen to do so.</p>
<p>Seriously, though, now that the oldest are adults and the youngest is in high school in a great place, the details matter much less than they did when I was obsessing over ever little thing. If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self that it really is ok, that the kids turn out wonderfully, that the permission slip I forgot to sign in third grade which seemed like an indictment of my whole personhood, really didn’t matter at all. I would also tell me that along the way, some magnificent people will light my life, and I will learn that there are really big things that do matter. Sometimes kids make mistakes that can’t be unmade and change or end lives. Those are the things to sweat, not the window dressing that we all do. I would tell myself that every day that the family is healthy and well is all I could possibly ask for and that the time passes so quickly that much of the day-to-day stuff is forgotten. I would also tell myself that every family has to do what works for it and that no one outside that household will ever know why and how those choices were made.</p>