by Miriam Horn
“The kids I work with professionally in Head Start and early intervention are not in public school yet, but they will be. They’ll be sacrificed soon. Here I’ve been fighting for twenty years with Boston schools on behalf of kids that weren’t mine; how ironic that my son would end up a special-needs kid in the very schools that never provided for all the others. In the end, I thought, I’ve got to pull this one out and save him, and I’m sorry we have to leave the others behind. Ideals and vision are a lot easier in the abstract. It’s something else to sacrifice your child.
“The private school we picked is racially mixed and has the same social values we have; it’s not all blond and blue-eyed Volvos. The kids learn their way around the city and how to use public services. They use the Boston Common as their playground, check out books from the public library, go to the YMCA for gym once a week, which all helps keep the tuition down, but also expresses a certain ethic—that we’re like everybody else. They develop street smarts: This is how you cross the street; this is how you step over a drunk. That’s important to me.”
The school is also three blocks from Tim’s office, which meant that for the first time in sixteen years, Ann stepped out of the role of parent on call. If Max gets sick, Tim goes to get him. “That’s mind-blowing to me. I’ve always been the one to cancel a client because my kid fell off the swing and needed stitches. I’ve made uncountable compromises; nothing has ever looked elegant. Sometimes when I look at people like Eldie Acheson, I think I should have gone all the way one way instead of doing everything half-assed. For a time, it seemed like everywhere I turned a ’69 grad was in my face—Hillary, Jan Piercy, Janet Hill. I turned on public TV one day and there’s Alvia Wardlaw talking about a show she’d curated of African-American art. Tim came home, and I burst into tears. ‘I can’t stand it. I’m nothing. Look at all these women.’ It was hard for me to say, ‘Yes, me and my Maytag and my minivan and the dinner I threw together and my twenty-hour week of frustrating work is really good in the face of all this success and fame.’ On the other hand, my heart aches for the children I work with. I see daily evidence of how we have failed them, how careless we’ve become with our human responsibilities. My work feeds my soul. We need the money, little as it is. And Tim thinks the world of what I do. So some days it doesn’t feel like I’ve failed.”
Mothers who work are frequently accused of selfishness, and rarely more harshly than they accuse themselves. “For all the talk about doing things for community and changing the world, we are pretty self-centered people,” Betsy Griffith, a mother of two and also headmistress of Madeira School for Girls and author of a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said of herself and her classmates in Wellesley ’69. “Those of us who have thought about and invested in careers, that’s taken time away that other generations of women would have given to family.”
But the charge of selfishness made against women who work outside the home rests on a narrow notion of moral responsibility. That there are larger duties as authentic as those to one’s own family was part of the nation’s founding ideology: John Adams argued that a virtuous republic required “a positive passion for the public good … superior to all private passions.” Only in the late nineteenth century did an overriding commitment to the nuclear family come to be seen as the first of all moral obligations. With the triumph of that ideal came the repudiation of obligations to a larger brotherhood; as historian Stephanie Coontz writes, “family decency, duty and altruism became less a preparation for civic responsibility than a substitute.” The reciprocal relation between family and society broke down: A man could now be ruthless and rapacious in his public life, as long as it was on behalf of his family, and society could deny families support and leave them to fend for themselves.
The larger duties can be honored, even by the mothers of children. It is simply a diversion to turn questions about the self, and the stepping beyond the self, into a matter of whether women work or stay at home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Full-Time Moms
The women in the class whose lives most resemble their mothers’—those whose principal occupation has been child rearing—would seem to have had the most well-worn path to tread. But as the world changed around them, these women, too, have had to reconceive themselves: devising more conscious justifications, asserting the real autonomy of their choice, and struggling to find ways not to drain themselves entirely in caring for others or to burden their children with their own frustrated ambitions.
When Kathy Smith Ruckman’s first baby was still nursing, she was urged by friends to give him a bottle and get out in the world. “I finally gave in. When Rob was nine months old, I decided to take a course, because I thought I should.
“I hated doing it. Something inside me just wouldn’t let me leave my children. And I think mothers are having to cut that faucet off if they’re high-powered career women and allow other people to do for their kids. I hear women say at eight weeks, ‘I can’t wait to get back to work and out of the house.’ If that’s how they feel, they should probably get out of the house. If whatever you’re doing is making you unhappy, you’re not going to be a good parent. I wouldn’t condemn anyone for their choices. But I think such a mother misses a lot. When I see nannies pushing babies, I feel sorry for the mothers and for the kid, who needs someone who loves them all day long.”
Though her own mother had been desperately bored with maternity, Kathy knew from a young age that she wanted to devote her life to children. “There probably haven’t been too many people who wanted a baby more than me.” Like her father, she is, seemingly by nature, maternal: warm and patient, gentle and confiding. In high school, she baby-sat at every opportunity. At Wellesley she majored in developmental psychology, and as a newlywed right out of college she taught elementary school until the first of her four children was born. Then, supported by her high-earning husband, Kathy stayed home.
It was an unusual choice for a woman of her generation: Less than 10 percent of her classmates have been full-time moms. But it satisfied Kathy’s heart’s desire and, she believes, also provided the best life for her children. It also became the platform on which she stands; though of all in her class Kathy would seem to have most turned away from the political and toward the personal, even she warmed to the role of being a public advocate for the choice of full-time devotion to one’s children. “I am acutely aware that my lifestyle is a luxury, and becoming increasingly so in our economy,” she wrote to me not long after we first met. “But unless I’d been forced by financial circumstances, I could never have left my kids with someone who didn’t care that much about them. It may be right for the parents, but I don’t believe it’s right for the kids. People don’t recognize how hard it is to be a parent, how much time it takes—not scheduled time, not just all the driving them around, but being there at the moment when they need you. Kids are not regular; they get sick at odd times, and have crises. It’s a mistake to think they just need custodial care. It’s all the little things that add up. Doing it all, as so many of my classmates do, means a frenetic life that leaves no room for quiet, for spiritual renewal. I believe that the most stable arrangement for children is a family with two parents, with one of them giving the kids lots of time and attention.”
Kathy’s work as a tutor at several Washington-area private schools only deepened her conviction that children whose parents both work are deprived. “I can see for the parents that public recognition would make you feel like somebody, feel important. But if you’re in a career getting so much attention, you get increasingly absorbed in yourself. And parenting is 99 percent giving. The kids that I tutor are far from poor, but they are needy. I recently did a workshop on learning disabilities; they presented research showing that kids have noticeable deficits compared to a few decades ago. They’re not reading or talking; they’re in front of TV and computer screens or with nannies who don’t speak English, and so even affluent kids are coming into school language-deprived. I’ve seen it as a
tutor. Tutoring is popular because parents need you to do what they don’t have time to do; they need you to be a surrogate parent. But people don’t respect it. I hate more than anything the question at cocktail parties: ‘So what do you do?’ I answer: ‘I am a mother to my children,’ and get blank stares, from women and men. Look what we pay day-care workers and teachers. The whole business of being with children is undervalued; there’s a sense that anyone can raise kids, that there are more important things to do.”
Kathy’s husband, Roger, has had a nearly all-consuming professional life. Absorbed first in training as a pediatric cardiologist and later with the dual demands of academics and medical practice, he has always worked long hours and come home exhausted. Kathy moved her growing family eight times in ten years for his career. Never in one place long enough to make friends, she felt isolated and often alone with all the responsibilities of children and home. She wouldn’t hire household help, believing, somewhat ironically, that it would be a degrading job for whomever she hired. “It always felt like paying someone to clean my house would be like saying, ‘I’m more valuable than you. You do this dirty work, and I’ll go do something more important.’ So it all fell to me: I would vacuum, iron Roger’s shirts, fix whatever was broken, make the meals, clean up, deal with the babies. When we were first married I came home one day and Roger was vacuuming and I burst into tears. It was as if he was saying I couldn’t handle it.
“Then, I realized it wasn’t fair. I’d read Betty Friedan and I thought, ‘These are his kids, too.’ But by then it was too late. It turns out it’s impossible to change someone. I went into marriage thinking I could tinker with Roger’s personality; instead, I had to keep readjusting my expectations. Like his father, Roger came home from work expecting to relax. He’d been taught by his mother that kids were not his business. She told me, over and over, that the children should be in bed before he got home so he wouldn’t be bothered by them. Of course, Roger married someone very different from his mother; I could see what Hillary was in for with Virginia Kelley. My mother-in-law is very old-fashioned and formal. Coming from such different backgrounds, Roger’s and my values often clashed. Roger wanted the kids to conform to what his family believed. But because he abdicated, my values got transferred more loudly. We live casually. At her house, every meal is served on good china. At my house, I still use the unbreakable Corelle.”
Kathy’s life is hardly spartan: Her house in the rich suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, is huge; her kids are at private schools; she has the requisite car phone in her four-wheel-drive van. But she is determinedly neither gorgeous nor grand. Her home has a generic quality, pastel and orderly, with a few folksy touches like painted ducks on wooden panels winging across one wall. For dinner she serves frozen breaded chicken and string beans and nonfat, artificially sweetened ice cream. She offers sardonic commentary on some of her classmates’ “perfect coiffures” and expensive clothes. “The thing I hate most about being a woman is being judged by your appearance. I am not interested in makeovers or in decorating the perfect home.”
She is also adamantly not “the Phyllis Schlafly” of the class. “I’m not so unselfish that I’ve become nothing but my kids and husband. On Sundays, my sister makes meals for the whole week and freezes them; when she had her babies, each time before she went into the hospital, she spent weeks stocking the freezer. My kids can order pizza. I will not be a slave to them. I guess I’m in the middle on feminism and traditional roles. I feel like I’ve taken the best from both, rejecting housewifery while hanging on to what I consider important roles for women: time with my kids, involvement with schools and church and community. I think it’s a mistake to turn women into men. If anything, I’d like to see women and men both find a balance, so that career success does not equal having others raise your children.”
That her husband failed to find that balance has been for Kathy disappointing. “I think Roger’s choice to go into academic medicine was a big mistake. It’s terribly competitive; that’s where the egos go, and it means not only practicing medicine but also doing teaching and research. When our kids were little, he was simply never home.”
That absence turned out to have serious consequences. “When our daughter Karen was two, she was missing all her milestones. She was tiny, the size of a one-year-old, and just barely able to walk. And she was not getting any real help. At birth, her doctors had misdiagnosed the problem as a minor heart defect that would correct itself. I knew they had to be wrong; I was seeing this child really struggling. But they didn’t look at her as a kid; they looked at her as a bunch of test results. Finally, they did open-heart surgery and discovered the defect was major. Here Roger was training in pediatric cardiology and his own daughter’s heart problems were being overlooked. Because he wasn’t home, he wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, or maybe he didn’t have the emotional energy to pay attention. It’s not just him, of course—it’s all of medicine. When I was delivering my fourth baby, they told me to go home; they said I was not in labor. They wouldn’t listen to me even though I had given birth three times; then the baby was born within minutes. The doctors demonstrated that same deafness with Karen; I knew she was sick, but I was made to feel that I was a nervous mother, that I should go away.
“Off and on, I’ve been angry about my husband’s absorption in his career. But he’s now seeing what he has lost by not being involved with the kids. I got the better end of the deal. I don’t envy him, and I would not wish his life on my children.”
Roger is a tall, soft-spoken, somewhat awkward and formal man—formal even with his children. He believes his family arrangement has been close to ideal. “I would have liked to have done more, but there were lots of demands on my time. If you judge it in terms of my work environment, where there’s virtually no flexibility, I’ve done everything I could to be supportive of my family. I also believe it’s best that children be with their mother; there’s a special attachment there. Men are just not as nurturing by nature. A mother’s consistent nurturing gives children self-confidence, stimulation, trust, an ability to share intimate feelings.
“Kathy could have chosen any profession but valued the welfare of our kids, which I greatly admire. Our kids understand the hardships on both sides, the pressures on the sole breadwinner, the courage required of a woman to stay home in terms of her peer relations. Though I think even Kathy’s Wellesley classmates may finally be coming to grips with limits, understanding that if you’re trying to be at the top of your profession, a strong marriage and kids may not be doable.”
“My kids probably haven’t seen my work as being as important as Roger’s,” says Kathy. “Though it frustrates them that he comes home too tired to give, they know a doctor is what people respect. When my oldest son, Rob, changed majors at college, giving up his chance at medical school, his brother Jonathan, said, ‘Well, what’s he going to do if he’s not a doctor, be a garbageman?’ Somehow, the message had come through that those were the only choices. I want my kids to know that there are other choices, like being a teacher, which is wonderful if terribly undervalued. I don’t think that serving the community even requires a profession or public life. For most of my married life, I have served the community as a volunteer. The more that kind of parental involvement dries up, the more schools are collapsing.
“I have demanded that my kids not put me down as a woman. They respect that I gave much and that it was a sacrifice in some ways, that I could have done other things. Life involves making choices where something goes by the wayside. What I got from them is unbelievable; they’re wonderful people. But who knows what I could have done? I never experienced that other world—my few years teaching hadn’t brought accolades or even much intellectual stimulation—so I’ve never really known what I missed.”
Denied her own wish to study music as a girl, Kathy has raised, as she likes to say, a string quartet. All four of her children are accomplished musicians; they have played for U.S. presidents and won national awa
rds. When she was not carpooling or tutoring or conducting the handbell choir at her Presbyterian church, Kathy spent her time scheduling violin lessons and arranging for accompanists and preparing recitals, including one in her living room for my benefit. “It’s, of course, the obvious thing to see my kids as somehow fulfilling my thwarted desires, to think that I’ve foisted my life on them. But that would be a terrible burden. When the fourth came along, I thought, What if he has a tin ear? By then it was clearly a family identity. If he had been miserable in music, I would have accepted that. I don’t want to be one of those skating parents. I tried not to say, ‘Everything you do is a reflection on me.’ That was said over and over to me and was really damaging. But our family is not a democracy. Adults too often abdicate their responsibility to set limits and insist on what’s best for kids. My kids did not see an R-rated movie till they were seventeen.” (She also had a lightning reflex, her kids report: If there was any nudity in a PG movie, her hands went right over their eyes.) “When Jonathan told me he didn’t want to stay at music camp, a democratic mom would have taken him home. I insisted he stay.