On Working Mothers
Words by: Whitney Roberts Logan | Music by: Abby Yemm
Image credit: Whitney Roberts Logan
Hi, Nellies! Our latest guest writer in this space is Whitney Roberts Logan. In this piece, Whitney writes about being a working mother. Whitney is a psychotherapist in KC, a children’s book author, and host of The Hidden World podcast.
In order to understand the plight of the working mother, I believe we need to talk about working fathers. I’ll start by telling my own story.
Shortly before I got pregnant with my first child - a daughter - my husband took a new job. This new job offered him an opportunity to work in a role and an industry he’d always dreamed about. The catch? He would be required to travel four days a week. Every week. Indefinitely.
The optimism I’d assumed about our future as equal parents and equal professionals vanished.
My husband told me that if I asked him not to take the job, he wouldn’t. But I couldn’t do that. It was a dream job for him, and I didn’t want to risk his resentment — even if this resentment was something he never spoke aloud. What I didn’t realize when I said, ‘Of course you should take the job,’ was that I was trading his burden of resentment for mine.
About a year and half after this fateful conversation, our daughter was born. For one week, my husband helped me care for our tiny colicky baby. And then — poof — he was gone.
He was gone during the day, during the ‘witching hour,’ and during the 400 knee bends I did to put our daughter to sleep each night. He wasn’t there for the middle of the night feeds and diaper changes or for early morning wake up cries. He missed the doctor visits and lactation support groups and vaccine-induced infant fevers.
Over those first 12 weeks of motherhood, it dawned on me that I was not going to be able to do the work I loved in the way I used to do it. The work I had spent nine years training to do, the work for which I had amassed student loan debt I needed to repay, and the work that felt more like a soul-calling than a necessity of capitalism for me.
The balancing act of caring for our tiny daughter and caring for my professional life was mine, and mine alone.
My husband was concerned about the weighted burden I was carrying and tried to support me in the limited ways he could. But it wasn’t an option for him to say to his superiors, ‘Look, my wife and I just had a child and it feels morally and emotionally wrong to not be home more often.’
For a man to say something like that at work would almost certainly guarantee an end to his rising career star. And that outcome felt too consequential to both of us. We relied on my husband’s income to keep a roof over our heads and food on our table. If anyone was going to sacrifice their professional ambitions, it would need to be me.
Here is the thing I want to highlight about our situation: our problem was not simply a personal problem, but a systemic one. My husband and I arrived here because our society is structured in a way that often guarantees a similar outcome.
My husband and I have the same level of education. We are equally skilled and accomplished in our professional fields, but he makes much more money than I do. There are three main reasons for this:
1) He works in a traditionally male industry. Male-dominated professions are notorious for higher income levels.
2) He never had to take a significant amount of time off from work to raise our babies, so he was able to pursue advancement and take risks in the years it often matters the most. Consequently, men are more often promoted to managerial and directorial roles.
3) He is able to work over 40 hours a week every week because I give him the time to do this. I work part-time with countless interruptions for our children’s appointments and activities, snow days and sick days, parent-teacher conferences, spring breaks, winter breaks, and summer breaks. I know that this is one of the excuses companies are able to whisper about when they justify compensating men with higher salaries than women for the same job.
Working fathers are expected to not let their children interfere with their professional responsibilities. When this happens, the family responsibilities have nowhere else to fall than onto the shoulders of mothers.
A couple of weeks ago, I brought my daughter to her first Girl Scouts meeting in a park near her elementary school. While talking to a group of mothers who were there (notably absent was a single father), two of them revealed that they had quit their jobs this year due to the impossible demands of parenting in a pandemic. They couldn’t work and manage e-learning, social-emotional needs, meals, snacks, activities, laundry, discipline, and meaningful employment.
In 2020, two million women left the workforce. At least some of those women left to take care of children that fathers could not.
The problem for many working mothers is the problem of working fathers. The demands of mothering while working - and working while mothering - wouldn’t be so difficult to manage if working fathers were holding up their half with equal urgency.
Until our society starts rewarding fathers for involvement in child-rearing, then this will continue to be a lonely burden for mothers to shoulder alone ... together.
An Abby Yemm playlist for you…
A playlist created by Abby Yemm
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