Last Friday was International
Women’s Day. The world celebrated, as
they do for the whole month of March, the achievements of women. The media, educational system, and political
system are pushing women to the top of the ladder. California now requires publicly traded
companies to have at least one woman on their board of directors. Hollywood is releasing film after film where
women are casted in traditionally men’s roles as superheroes and lead action
roles. Females now make up the majority of students in medical school
accounting for 50.7% of all students in 2017.
Everywhere women are being told
they can be whatever they may dream of being… but what happens when women want
to be stay-at-home moms & spouses? Is that a valued dream to have? When I was in high school, I asked my best
friend what she wanted to be as an adult.
Her response of being a mother and wife didn’t satisfy me. “No, no,” I
exclaimed, to my eternal shame, “What do you really want to be?” By and by, my attitude slowly changed. By the
time I married several years later, we decided not to wait to have children. I
spent my last semester of college sitting near the garbage can just in case I
needed to throw up yet hissing at my husband if he dared mention we were
expecting. I did everything I could do to hide my pregnancy, which I knew would
be disdained by my peers and teachers.
Despite
the wide scale social disapproval of women choosing to be stay-at-home moms,
roughly a quarter to a third of all moms choose to stay at home regardless of
educational background or income level. So why is the “Mommy Track” disparaged?
I believe that moms are perceived to be of little economic value. Full time dishwashers and cooks at
restaurants, housekeepers at hotels, and cab drivers are all generally low
paying jobs. From a monetary standpoint, moms are seemingly worth little and
their days are filled with drudgery and menial labor. On the other hand, even
the best paid employers have days where skills learned at fancy colleges are
neglected and menial tasks rule the hours.
The woman who works at the office is likely to feel unappreciated and
underpaid most days. Those who are
glorified as successful women in business, arts or public relations are a very
small minority, as are men.
Most
humans will be forgotten in 100 years.
My husband’s great-great grandfather was a congress man in the 19th
Century, but a Google search of his name will only link you to genealogical
sites. Which leads me to the one thing you will be remembered for. The only
lasting impact the vast majority of human beings will have on society are their
offspring. If you have no posterity, you
will be completely forgotten within a generation. A former boss of mine was an
ardent environmentalist who believed it immoral to have children, yet as he
aged he took great pride in his one niece.
With
children our legacy can be for good or bad. While we are our own individuals
made up of the choices we make, our choices are influenced by our circumstances
and family. We see some cultures and families where everyone values hard work
and education, where other families perpetually suck off society. Negative cycles can be difficult to break. For instance, my half-brothers were raised in
a single mother welfare home. They have
a half-brother who spent my entire childhood in a federal prison and another
half-brother who committed suicide after a life of drug use. Their mother was
raised by extended family and was left to herself as her parents were
divorced. Their grandfather lived as a
boarder in another home when he was 10 years of age. His parents were divorced. Their great-grandfather and
great-great-grandfather also came from broken homes. The trend of destruction
can continue for many generations. My half-brothers are the first in a long
line to have stable marriages. During their teenage years, they lived with us. They
credit my mother for keeping them from turning out like their half-brothers (no
relation to me).
All the
menial tasks a mother performs is not what defines a mother. Each individual
stitch in a tapestry seemingly has little importance, but taken as a whole each
stitch accumulates into a beautiful work of art. Likewise, the day to day tasks
performed by mother may seem laborious and tedious, yet each day, each act of
love and sacrifice accumulates into an infinitely valuable asset to society.
Mothers are building the character of the next generation.
Teachers
are praised for selflessly sacrificing better jobs so they can influence the
younger generations. Stay-at-home moms
should be praised for their altruism even more. Our educations system is filled
with teachers and staff who believe in the conventional wisdom of “It Takes a
Village,” yet every teacher will tell you they can tell which children are
worked with at home. If families are not intact and parents are not teaching
their children as they should, the “Village” theology may be the only theory
children are exposed to.
The
most important tasks that a stay-at-home moms perform is not changing diapers
or cooking (though that is vital), but listening, loving, teaching, hugging . .
. These tasks cannot be hired out and
are invaluable.
As the
world celebrates the achievements of women which compete with and compare with
the achievements of men, it is important to recognize the accomplishments of
women that are uniquely feminine. The small insignificant tasks moms perform or
don’t perform each day shape what our society will look like in the next
generation and have greater impact than any woman superhero will have on her
society.
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