In praise of working mothers

"Here is my toast to you, ambitious mothers everywhere:  Take hope, take pride and keep the faith.  What you are doing isn't just okay, it's awesome."

So wrote Lara Bazelon, author of  'Ambitious Like a Mother:  Why Prioritizing your Career is Good for Your Kids', in Saturday's 'Globe and Mail'.  Having been a working mother since my children were six months old, naturally I agree.  There was no way I was going to throw over a hard-earned and pricey degree after having a kid to sit around in some pitiable Mums' Club, drinking wine and discussing the latest inane book club recommendation (well, maybe the wine sipping part I'd indulge a bit).  And I certainly wasn't going to be questioned by a husband when I asked for money. 

Nowadays, women expect society to cover their child care; when I had mine, you covered your own.  And so it was that my kids were exposed to a multitudinous bevy of solutions, including, daycare, live-in nannies, neighbours, after-four programs, grandparents and friends -- most of which did a far better job than I could ever have managed.  Never mind that it consumed a bunch of my salary, it was worth it for both me and my children.  Why do women still earn less than men?  Because they have to take those few years off and really never catch up.

In the late seventies, when I had kids, you neither got a year's worth of maternity leave nor your own job back.  You got unemployment insurance and a job back.  (Always pissed me off to see someone else doing my job when I returned, by the way, but thanks to those of us who manned the barricades, this has changed for the better.) 

When I used to visit my stepdaughter in Texas, a card-carrying devotee of the local Mums' Club in a very tony Houston neighbourhood, I would marvel at the number of expensive university degrees and other educational pedigrees sitting around basically doing nothing at such gatherings -- all the while congratulating themselves on having husbands rich enough to allow them to basically sit around and do nothing.  To hang with the money our fathers and mothers forked out mightily for our educational pieces of paper!  We're just going to sit around and do nothing!

But I anecdotally digress.

All studies show that children of working mothers are more likely to be employed, earn higher wages and have jobs with supervisory responsibilities.  They also admire their mothers and feel deeply bonded to them growing up -- in spite of the fact that the mothers were often absent.  So, even if you can, don't quit your job to be a "Real Housewife of....."  Get back into the workforce as soon as possible because if you don't, when your kids are grown and gone, you'll be a nobody with a fancy, never-used degree.