The phone rang. Barbara Reisman`s nightmare was on the line.
”It was the school nurse,” Reisman recalled. ”She said my daughter had seriously injured her foot, and she had to see a doctor right away.”
The news was bad enough. But to make matters worse, Reisman was in her office in Manhattan, and her 9-year-old daughter was an hour away, near the family`s home in Montclair, N.J.
Welcome to the complicated new world of Mom, the Commuter.
To an earlier generation of suburban parents, this worst-case scenario would have been unthinkable, for they lived in communities designed with a sharp geographic division between the sexes: Mom stayed home and took care of the children, and Dad boarded the train or got into the car and went to work in the city.
But a great many suburban women with children are working, and a lot of them are commuting to offices far from home.
They leave behind a maze of car-pooling arrangements and appointments and contingency plans for their children, to keep their busy lives running smoothly and to take care of them in an emergency.
Some commuting mothers say their lives are not so different from the lives of working mothers anywhere, with the constant pressures to schedule, juggle and oversee the daily details of homes and families.
But others, even those who are overjoyed to have given up small apartments and expensive private schools in the city for spacious homes and public schools in the suburbs, complain that there is a definite difference, the distance factor.
Working a great distance from home, and being dependent on trains or buses that do not always run frequently, can add all sorts of complications, big and small, to a parent`s life.
The distance factor also reduces time spent at home with the family, and it leaves little room for error when arrangements on the home front break down.
When Reisman, who is executive director of the Child Care Action Campaign, a national advocacy organization, learned of her daughter Leah`s foot injury, she called her husband, Eric Scherzer.
Scherzer, director of research for a labor union in New Jersey, was unable to take Leah to the doctor because he had to teach a class in Manhattan.
The solution: Scherzer drove Leah, who was in pain and stretched out on the back seat, into Manhattan, and Reisman met the car at 7th Avenue and 29th Street. Scherzer got out and took a cab to his class, and Reisman drove Leah back to New Jersey, just in time for her appointment with an orthopedist.
Reisman said that while she was pleased that her family had moved to Montclair from Manhattan, ”there are moments when I think I`d be better off if I had a job closer to home.”
She is not alone. Researchers say that some women find the combination of commuting and raising children, especially when the family has more than one child, so stressful and time-consuming that they eventually look for alternatives, such as part-time work or jobs nearer home.
”There are women who have started businesses at home because they got a call, `Your child is hurt,` and there was so much anxiety in trying to get home that they said, `Forget this,` ” said Kathleen Christensen, a professor of environmental psychology at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
”Many more women than men make job decisions based on accessibility to home,” said Christensen, who conducted a federally financed survey of 14,000 women working at home in New York, San Francisco and Chicago in 1985.
Commuting tended to be much more problematical for mothers than it was for fathers because, she said, ”women are still primarily responsible for the practical and logistical and emotional organization of the home and family:
How many fathers` daytime calendars have play dates and dentists`
appointments?”
Lynn Gaudioso, vice president of business development for the Pfizer Consumer Products Group, would agree. Gaudioso, who lives in New Rochelle, N.Y., said she took a day off from work at the start of the school year to meet her 5-year-old daughter`s teachers and to learn the names of the bus driver and everyone else she deals with during the day.
”If you ask my husband who the bus monitor is, he will look at you like you have three heads.”
Barbara Katz Rothman, a sociology professor at the City University, said the difficulties of commuting mothers underscored inherent design deficiencies of the suburbs.
”Suburbs were set up as the workplace of women, and as a place for men to come back to for their leisure time,” she said. ”Suburbs were never an ideal setting for women, for you need a car to go anywhere, and it`s very time-consuming. Now that women are also doing men`s work, the impossibility of suburban life becomes very obvious.”
Still, many women say that on balance, the commuting life is worth the effort. They piece together a host of support systems to keep their home and family functioning in their absence.
While these solutions are highly individualistic, they often are based on two common elements: a full-time housekeeper who drives and a network of devoted, generous friends who do not work.
”A live-in nanny who drives is essential,” said Donna Sapolin, editor of arts and collecting for Metropolitan Home Magazine. Sapolin, who lives in Chappaqua, N.Y., has two boys, 9 and 2.
”My 9-year-old has no friends in walking distance, so he has to be chauffeured to all play dates,” said Sapolin, who is married to Gary Sapolin, a photographer. ”The nanny is my surrogate.”
Sapolin also relies on friends in her community.
”There are plenty of mothers at home, and I depend on them, although I hate to admit it,” she said. ”When they take their children to the zoo or on other outings, they take mine along. This allows my children to have activities I don`t have time for, or would have to cram into a weekend.”
For Gaudioso, of New Rochelle, there was only one solution.
”I hired a wife,” said Gaudioso, who is married to Errol Hankin, a hospital administrator.
”My live-in housekeeper is more than a housekeeper and baby sitter: She takes care of me. She does my errands and makes play dates for my daughter. When I come home at night, I mainly spend time with my daughter. That is how I cope.”
Even when the support system at home works well, commuting mothers say they have to make a determined effort at night and on the weekend to be involved in their communities and their children`s schools, and to repay the kindnesses of neighbors.
”My live-in baby sitter doesn`t drive, so I rely on other parents, and I try to return the favor on the weekend,” said Wendy Schuman, executive editor of Parents magazine, who has a daughter, 16, and a son, 8.
Schuman, who lives in Upper Montclair, N.J., says that when her son has Little League practice at 5 p.m., another parent takes him, and either she or her husband, Kenneth, who runs a real-estate development company, drives the children home.
She also volunteers to make telephone calls for her son`s school in the evening.
Sapolin spends much of the weekend in her car, chauffeuring her 9-year-old and his friends.
”There is no down time for me on weekends,” she said.
On the other hand, she said, the weekday commute is something of a respite: ”I have time to read. It is more down time than I would ever have at home.”
Reisman observed that commuting mothers who were new in a community had an especially tough time.
”You have to figure out how to do your share, how to pay your dues,”
she said.
At that, she stopped herself and looked at her watch.
”I have to leave in five minutes,” she said hurriedly. ”If I`m not on the next train, there is not another one for a long time.”
