Ditching the Mommy Trap

A light went on while I was sitting at my friend's kitchen table a few years ago. She was pregnant and telling me that she planned to take a four-month maternity leave from her high-tech marketing job, after which her lawyer husband was going to take a six-week paternity leave. I was only thinking about having kids then, but new possibilities started multiplying in my mind. Oh, so you could add a significant paternity leave on top of a maternity leave -- I hadn't thought of that. Later, my friend offered even more inspiration: She and her husband both scaled back to four-day workweeks, cutting day-care time to three days a week.

When our time came, my husband and I came up with our own permutation. Between us, he and I stayed home for the first eight months of our daughter's life -- me for the first six, and my husband for the following two. Then, for the remainder of that year, both of us went on four-day workweeks. My husband, also a journalist, felt he couldn't ask for that schedule indefinitely and eventually went back full time, but I've stayed part time.

And as obvious as it sounds now, here's what surprised me, what contradicted everything I had been led to believe: I love it -- not just working less, not just spending more time with my child, but everything together in combination.

We are surrounded by a barrage of negative information about the choices parents -- in particular mothers -- make between work and home. It's usually presented as an either/or thing -- what can seem to mothers like a Hobson's choice: Either give up your careers or neglect your children. Whatever you do, you're bound to be not only condemned by someone but, in the popular imagination, miserable to boot. Just think of the relentlessly pessimistic story lines that have prevailed in the media: the frazzled mother unsuccessfully trying to juggle work and home, and the "myth" of the superwoman; the purported failure of the women's movement to get men to do their share of child rearing and housework; the "mommy track" that traps even women who do choose to remain at work; the self-esteem problems of stay-at-home moms who are disdained by the working world.

The ideological war between traditionalists and feminists furthers this negativity, with each side casting the gloomiest possible portrait of the other. Strangely, what both sides seems to agree on is that women can't have it all. For traditionalists, the thesis seems natural enough: Women are supposed to stay home, and that should be enough for them. Feminists, though, seem to have fallen into this ironic message due to their habitual critique of a society believed to be sexist. Like the media, a slew of feminist academics, pundits, and authors have urged us to look at the terrible lot of mothers.

Naomi Wolf, for instance, in her new book, Misconceptions, depicts one downtrodden mother after another who married supposedly feminist husbands only to find out, after giving birth, that they were the ones expected to make all the sacrifices in order to raise children. There's a clincher of a scene in which Wolf's brother confesses to what he portrays as the dirty little secret of dads: love their children as they might, they would never, ever compromise their careers because of it.

I'd love for Wolf to meet some of the dads I know -- or, for that matter, some of the moms. All around me, women and men are coming up with creative and untraditional ways of balancing work and family life, whether they be taking long and sequential parental leaves, shortening their workweeks, working at home, or taking turns staying home. Quietly, these families are forging a new lifestyle that expands conventional notions of what is possible.

They're not the norm perhaps, but they're out there. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that last year some 15 percent of employed parents with children under 6 worked part time (mostly women, but also around 3 percent of working men with children that age). According to the bureau's latest statistics, about 30 percent of both men and women with children under 6 have flexible schedules, which could mean working, say, four 10-hour days or varying the time they begin and end work each day.