Michelle Hickman has talked with hundreds of new mothers.
She is organizing local chapters of a mothers` support group, Las Madres, and women who have had babies this year are calling her to join. Almost every conversation has hit on one subject: working.
”It is the question,” Hickman says. Some new mothers hesitate to admit that they`re going back to work. Others are zealous about their decision to stay home-and don`t want their kids at houses where Mom heads to the office. Most aren`t sure which side they`ll join.
No wonder that Hickman, who has to place the women in compatible groups of 15, is treading carefully.
For those with the luxury of choice-even at-home moms don`t fault single mothers or families in genuine need-the decision of whether to work outside the home or be a full-time mother has created two distinct paths. Each has its benefits and drawbacks. But no matter which one a woman chooses, she can expect to be pushed in the other direction.
Sometimes it is by other mothers. Most new mothers are so terrified of doing the wrong thing that once they decide whether to return to their jobs or stay home, they become dogmatic, even evangelical, in the belief that theirs is the ”right way.”
At-home mothers accuse those with careers of neglecting their children. At-home mothers resent getting used as a shuttle service or a baby-sitter while their counterparts are at work. They also are worried about leaving behind careers, missing out on part of life and doing something, staying home with children, that women in their 20s and 30s were not encouraged to do.
Off-to-work moms refer to at-home mothers as ”mental slugs” and resent the time at-home moms have to spend with children. Moms with jobs don`t like being excluded from parenting groups that meet during work hours or having their children labeled ”day-care kids” or being made to feel guilty about
”neglecting” their children.
Says San Jose mom Leslie Cooper, who left her teaching job a year ago to stay home with two babies, ”You want your position to be right. You want to justify what you`re doing. You want to reassure yourself, but you aren`t entirely sure yourself.”
Each group has its own experts.
At-home moms point to Pennsylvania State University researcher Jay Belsky, who has reported that babies who spend 20 hours or more a week in care away from their parents during their first year face a greater risk of becoming insecure.
Moms with jobs prefer studies such as those by Lois Hoffman, a researcher at the University of Michigan, who has shown that their children are actually better off.
Results of different surveys published during the last year support both points of view:
A Public Opinion poll last summer asked women if they agreed with this statement: ”If I could afford it, I would rather be at home with my children.” Eighty-eight percent said they did.
But according to a recent Parents magazine survey, 56 percent of at-home mothers would have a career if given a second chance, while 21 percent of off- to-work mothers would opt to stay at home.
It`s a moral split, too, says Anita Shreve, author of ”Remaking Motherhood” (Fawcett, $7.95):
”At-home mothers feel they have right on their side” and so feel not only free but also morally obligated to steer off-to-work mothers down the correct path.
Off-to-work mothers, however, believe that a career is a way to achieve equality, self-worth and meaning in life.
It`s 10 a.m. on a sunny Wednesday, and the weekly play group has convened.
Six moms chase toddlers through the playground at Serra Park in Sunnyvale, Calif., scooping them up when they venture precariously close to the swings, snagging them before they wander out of sight. Except for one woman who works two days a week, all are strictly stay-at-home moms. They are convinced that it simply is wrong for women to pursue careers while rearing children.
”I just resent them being called `women who do it all` because they don`t do it all,” says Kelly Behnke, a former kindergarten teacher.
”After I started teaching, I became a real advocate for staying home. I could always spot a 40-hour-a-week day-care child, and I wanted to avoid that at all costs.”
Those children were ”the troublemakers” and demanded constant attention and approval, she says.
Her friend, Marianne Bruner, a former speech therapist, agrees:
”I worry about my son living in a world with children who weren`t raised at home.”
The words are harsh and spoken seriously. Author Shreve is hardly surprised:
”Again and again, I saw the resentment. They didn`t believe working mothers could do everything, and it was very threatening to think a woman could hold down a job and still raise a good, happy, normal child.”
In case it is not apparent, Shreve is an expert for the other side. In her book, Shreve cites dozens of studies showing that children of off-to-work mothers are more independent and have more egalitarian sex-role attitudes, more self-confidence, better social adjustment. But those studies don`t cut it with this group.
”Those are copout excuses,” Bruner says. ”My parents were always there for me, and I`m a secure, confident person because of that.”
It`s 5:30 p.m., and parents are zipping into the lot at Primary Plus day care center in Saratoga, Calif., to pick up their children.
Ilona Mueller, of Los Gatos, Calif., has two children to pick up: a 4-year-old and a 21-month-old. She works three days a week as an accountant. Just try suggesting that her kids would be better off with a full-time, at-home mom.
”If I was home all day, all I`d do is talk to them and watch Phil and Oprah-just think of what a blithering idiot I`d be,” she says. ”I work mostly for my mental health. You have to have something in your life besides your kids.”
Purnima Maulik, 30, of San Jose, is a full-time program analyst and mother of a 9-month-old, Sonali. The two are heading home after a long day;
both look tired.
”We just bought a house; we just had a baby,” she says. ”I considered not going back, but financially, I didn`t really have a choice.”
Whether it is a matter of paying the mortgage and buying groceries or finding fulfillment and career aspirations, more mothers are choosing to work. In 1960, 19 percent of married women with children younger than 6 were in the labor force. In 1987, as more families came to depend on two incomes, the number was 57 percent. And by the turn of the century, the figure is expected to increase to 75 percent.
Pamela Eakins, a sociologist with the Institution for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, says women are experimenting now.
”Our culture does not have a prescribed role for young women who are working and having families,” Eakins says. ”And yes, people are defensive about which way they go.”
But that defensiveness comes from insecurity, she says.
”Whenever the two kinds of moms get together, there`s a checking out of the home-grown kids and the day-care kids-who`s walking, who`s talking, who`s this, who`s that,” says Gretchen Gould, 31, of Cupertino, Calif.
She worked as a computer analyst until the day her daughter, Elizabeth, was born. Six weeks later she went back to work. But after two months, ”I felt torn doing both, and the job just didn`t compare with being with her.”
Back at home, she has found herself being pushed to go back to work by friends and family. She worries that she has fallen behind new developments in the computer industry and is second-guessing her decision: ”Maybe I`m being too clingy.”
Off-to-work moms, like Mueller, waver, too: ”Sometimes, I think the `50s look great. I used to laugh at them, but there was no pressure to work, and that seems good.”
The problem each mother faces-finding new ways to live with new demands-is part of a broader, agonizing process of creating new values for society at-large, Eakins, of Stanford, says.
”Mothers today are caught in a period of tremendous flux and change in which each woman is a role model for others to follow,” Eakins says. No wonder everyone is confused.
And sometimes, women don`t expect to find themselves on one side of the issue. Like many women graduating from college during the last 10 years, Bruner naturally figured she would juggle her career and family.
”I got my master`s degree; I went to all those seminars on dress for success; and here I am,” Bruner says, wiping playground dirt from a baggy pair of shorts.
”All along I thought career would be No. 1. It`s the whole `80s thing-you`re going to manage both. But nobody`s going to treat your child the way you would. Teach him your values. Offer him that consistency.”
Now that she has discovered that, she feels obligated to spread the word. After some friends recently had a little girl and the mother returned to work, Bruner and her husband spoke to them about their decision: ”Why, why, why would she pursue her career?” they asked.
The mother fell silent.
”I think they felt like they were being attacked,” Bruner says.
Getting told flatout that they`re doing wrong by their children is a common experience for off-to-work mothers.
Says Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, an associate professor of engineering at Stanford and the mother of two children, ages 4 and 6: ”It doesn`t bother me too much. Well, sometimes it does get to me.”
When her first child was very young, Pate-Cornell wanted to join a neighborhood play group in which children spent afternoons at a different house each day. During her afternoons, her housekeeper would have been host to the group.
She was turned down.
”They said we only have four chairs, and with your son there will be five children,” she says. ”I was angry on one hand and thought, `Okay, okay, I`ll just shrug it off` on the other.”
Pate-Cornell went back to work three days after having each child. She has a live-in housekeeper who helps care for the children while she works. She had her children while she was working toward tenure. She published six papers while expecting the second child.
”People at work said it was crazy (to have children),” she recalls.
”It was considered a reckless move, professionally. But I wanted to be a mother.”
Many women say they are forced to come back to work shortly after having a child because choosing to stay home would mean giving up hard-fought ground professionally.
Women take a significant risk when they drop out of the work force. There are no federal laws protecting their jobs after parental leaves of absence;
although a 1978 federal law requires treating pregnancy like any other disability, this affects only those companies that offer disability benefits. In California, a state law requires employers to give mothers four months of parental leave. The law does not guarantee that a job will be waiting if mothers decide to take more time.
The law seems to underline the dilemma that Jane Collier, an anthropology professor at Stanford, points out: It is nearly impossible for a woman to have financial security and take care of her children herself.
A woman with a job may have to leave her children at day care, but she knows she always will be able to provide for them. An at-home mother may be there for her children 24 hours a day, but how will she pay the bills if she finds herself on her own?
”They have much more in common than they think,” Collier says. ”They are both in an untenable situation.”
