It is not so much I mind having chosen a career path so vague as to rank somewhere below “illegal alien bus boy” in terms of status, but rather, I get no respect for doing it from my home that really rankles my soul.

Forget. I think people sometimes forget on the other side of any piece of written work is an actual person with a real life going on.

It’s not all fun, wayward pets, precocious children and spell-check.

Sadly, most of these “people who forget” live with me. The rest are my dearest friends.

My daughter, will tell anyone who asks that her mommy is a “colonist.” By this we can only imagine mommy vanquishes redcoats in between play dates and PTO meetings. Muskets anyone?

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When I was pregnant the husband and I both agreed he’d be the ahem, “bread winner” and I’d stay home with demon spawn. I was totally okay with this because I am awful at holding down jobs thus changing “careers” every ten seconds [can we say personal pet sitting business], and really am content writing for pennies. Pennies don’t pay no bills. Pennies don’t buy no Baby Gap Onesies [unless you get them off Ebay, but anyway...] And husband has his own successful business, and until I write a fantastical novel that makes me filthy rich I’ll just clean poo diapers and sing nursery rhymes all day.

Right. Mind you I was pregnant therefor chock full of carbs, naps, and therefore dellusional. I imagined during the two or three hour long naps my daughter would take I’d write…we’d go to the park and I’d use colorful adjectives to describe trees…we’d snuggle on the couch and I’d watch movies…and the big plus? Since husband and I both love being alone, so would our daughter. She’d find spending time in her play pen with some teether’s a fascinating experience. Are you ready to puke yet?

My daughter hates napping, she spends ten minutes in her play pen before shrieking, she doesn’t snuggle unless I kind of force her into some UFC-like move and hold her down, and we haven’t spent too much time at the park. I tried that one day, figured I’d walk her and our dog but I kept running over his paws with the stroller, and when we arrived at the entrance there was a huge mud-pit that I was too lazy exhausted to cross.

I don’t have the best time with my daughter all day. I know I should be grateful, so many people need a double income to make living comfortably happen but I have no idea what the fuck to do with her. By 1pm I’m done. I’m ready to retire. I’ve sang lame songs, fed her pureed food, let her crawl around and stopped her dozens of times from putting unmentionables into her mouth, we’ve read stories, we’ve pooped, peed, and vomited, and on occasion we’ve watched Baby Einstein. 1pm is when I look at the clock and go “holy SHIT what am I going to do all day…” I don’t drive, and so sometimes we walk to stores and I spend unnatural amounts of time looking at socks. Husband drops us off places so we can spend the day doing fun mommy-infant stuff and that’s great but I am constantly wondering if I have any email.

And here’s the catch. We found a fantastic nanny dubbed The Baby Whisperer who takes her off my hands 15 hrs a week. Do the math - that’s 3x per week for roughly 5 hours. And it helps, I’m at least 15% more sane. Some people even scowl and ask me why the fuck I’m even complaining they’d KILL for that time. But I’m a brat, I suck, what can I say? The four days she’s in my care for 24hrs I am grumpy. When she won’t nap and I’m stuck playing peek-a-boo for three hours I want to kill. When she’s cranky and is flinging herself around like a madwoman I wonder why I didn’t just get a few dogs instead of giving birth, at least they sleep through the night.

And yet I love her with such a fiery passion sometimes it freaks me out. I love to sniff her little ears, and kiss in between her toes. She makes me crack up, and we do have fun. I am proud to be her momma. I just wish she were six. If she were six we could read Little Woman and bake cookies. You know?

So for those of you working moms: Do you wish you could stay home or would you find yourself going insane? And SAHM: Do you find yourself going insane staying home…

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Today I stumbled upon The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “mom blog”, where Ms. Giarrusso, the author, contemplates the meaning of “working mother”. She writes:

Let me add that I’m aggravated by the term “working mom” because if you have children, even one, you are working. And you can’t always say “working out of the home” because I actually work in the home. Maybe we should say “employed” mom.

What I don’t understand is — why are stay at home mothers so insecure? Who cares if moms who work outside the home are called “working moms”?

While I agree that being at home full time to raise your children is a selfless and respectable choice if one has the luxury to do so. The rewards may not be as tangible as perhaps, a monetary bonus, but you must consider the value and effect your being home has on your children.

This whole, “I’m just as good as you are,” attitude is really childish. Many working moms would love to be home and not have to deal with childcare, while others, like myself, actually enjoy their careers — it’s what makes us individuals.

Of course, being at home is insanely hard work and nobody is trying to diminish that, but it is really not the responsibility of the working mother to make stay at home mothers feel adequate. Mincing words and trying to politicize the labels that go along with “working mom” is ridiculous and stems from a lack of fulfillment and self esteem in what one is doing. If a SAHM truly enjoys what she is doing and is not resenting it, she shouldn’t need strangers approval or recognition.

I mean really. How spoiled are we? We live in one of the richest nations on earth, where most SAHMs and WOHMs lifestyles would seem nothing short of gluttonous to many people around the world. It is not other people’s responsibility to make sure you feel good about yourself on top of that. If you feel under-appreciated, take it up with your family and friends. Stop blaming other people if you feel like your life is crappy.

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Sometimes it helps to put things in perspective:

Around 9:30 p.m., when most families are getting ready for bed, she escorts her two sons, aged 6 and 13, down a narrow carpeted corridor in their concrete highrise. Clad in flannel pyjamas, backpacks over their shoulders and sleeping bags and pillows in their arms, the boys wilfully, though not eagerly, accept the journey as part of their routine. They reach a doorway and, with a final hug, their mother leaves them in the care of a neighbour for the night.

Outside on the deserted rain-soaked streets near the intersection of Martin Grove Rd. and The Westway, she catches a city bus and travels north. She transfers to another bus further on, one that eventually drops her off at a condominium where she will mop hallway floors, empty garbage and scrub toilets from 11 p.m. until dawn.

“My sons, they always say, `Please stay with us.’ But I can’t,” she says with a mix of sadness and regret. “I have to leave. I have to work.”

As I read the cover story of today’s Toronto Star, I am even more conscious than usual of the spaciousness of my home, the computer on my lap while my husband plays on the xBox in the basement, my little girl surrounded by a heap of electronic toys.

Too often those of my economic class defend the differences by saying, “I worked hard to get where I am.” I defy any one of them to tell me that they work as hard as Puvaneswaran:

For her labour, Puvaneswaran earns no more than $1,150 in an entire month, often less. The rent for her small one-bedroom apartment is $849.

Puvaneswaran, who is paid $8.50 an hour, borrows money from friends to get by. She has relatives who sometimes send clothes from England. She rations food during the week ???��??? one glass of milk for each boy at morning and one at night. She won’t allow herself any. After 3 p.m., she lets her sons have some fruit, a banana or apple.

Their main meal of the day alternates between rice (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) and pasta (Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays). On Sunday afternoons, they look forward to a hearty meal at the Hindu temple where they worship. In short, she pays a hefty price to live in the country’s largest and richest city.

So why ???��??? 13 years after settling in Canada ???��??? does a hard-working mother still live in poverty? How many more years will she be expected to live and work like this?

Last week I posted about how the mother’s movement rhetoric too often surrounds the lifestyle choices of affluent women who can afford to decide whether or not to work. Sometimes it helps to have a good stiff kick in the pants to remind us what “tough choices” really look like. I have volunteered with children who live in similar circumstances; anyone who says that a middle- or upper-class child in daycare is suffering for the lack of a full-time mother has never seen what real suffering looks like.

There are hundreds of thousands of children in Canada whose parents were two or three jobs each and who still can barely afford to eat, never mind amass large quantities of battery-hogging toys. I hate to move the conversation beyond their suffering, since that alone should be enough to motivate people to work for change; but human nature being what it is, I’ll point out that the children who grow up in these homes, chronically undernourished, understimulated, with no enrichment opportunities, will not grow up to meet their full potential and will not be able to contribute to our society as productive and engaged citizens (and honestly, why should they?). This will damage the world our children will grow up to live and work and make families in, making it less secure, less peaceful, less just.

Besides supporting the local food bank (which is necessary, but also conveniently lets government off the hook for changing the systems that keep people in such deprived circumstances), I also support a variety of organizations committed to ending poverty in Canada, among them the National Anti-Poverty Organization–itself always struggling to make ends meet, ironically.

If you know of and support a similar organization where you live, please leave the name in the comments below. Maybe someone who reads it will be motivated to take some of their own affluence and put it to a constructive use.

If you or your family are currently benefiting from the work of a particular organization, please also feel free to plug them in the comments section. Oftentimes the most helpful and forward-thinking groups don’t receive the attention they deserve in mainstream circles.

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At least once every two weeks, I revisit the family budget and try to figure out a way to scale my hours back to part time. I’ve done this since returning to work after maternity leave twenty months ago. That makes forty budget sessions, minimum, and every one is the same: if I reduce my hours, we go in the red. The difference in cost between part-time and full-time child care is so slight that a reduction in hourly earnings would not be met with a reduction in costs, and the result would be a monthly budget deficit that could only be eliminated if we cancelled the cable, the phone, the cell phones, the internet, all disposable income and reduced our monthly grocery bill by about $100. And that would be, mind you, with me working part-time. If I were to stay home, we would have to sell the house and rent an apartment instead.

So I’ll admit to feeling a tad fed up with the constant media flood of stories about women who actually have the choice of whether or not to work. The women I know who work, work because they have to–they are the sole or main breadwinner in their families, or without their income their families wouldn’t eat. Most of the women I know who don’t work for pay, don’t because the money they could earn wouldn’t cover the cost of childcare. Yet newspapers and magazines seem entirely preoccupied with stories about the five percent of women whose husbands earn enough money that they can realistically decide for themselves whether or not they want to work.

Or, as this wonderful article from today’s Toronto Star put it, “The average woman gets up and goes to work. She doesn’t have time to wring her hands about it.”

The result? Policy proposals that come out of these discussions tend to be in the interests of those who can afford to trade less income for more family time.

While flex-time, shorter work weeks and more part-time options are often cited as family-friendly solutions for working parents, the just-released 2006 Ask A Working Woman Survey by the giant U.S. labour federation, AFL-CIO, shows different priorities. Top concerns among the 25,000 respondents included inadequate pay rates that don’t keep up with cost of living, lack of retirement security and inadequate benefits.

The biannual survey has consistently shown women would rather have the opportunity to work overtime than reduce work hours. In 2006, 38 per cent said their earnings comprise all or almost all their family income; 75 per cent said their earnings comprise half or more than half.

You might think that after thirty years of the same criticisms–that the problems of upper-middle class women are not actually representative of the problems of women as a whole, and that real feminism explores solutions that work for women who are among the working poor or just-plain-poor and not only the rich–that we might see some change. Instead, the media remains consistently fixated on the so-called “plight” of women with options and ignores the struggles of women without. Or, as Sandra Tsing Loh put it, afflufemza: “wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism.”

And you know that if this is true for me–a university-educated woman with a comfortable middle-class income and an employer who technically offers options such as part-time work and flex-time, but who can’t afford to use them not because my income pays for fancy vacations or nice cars but because it pays for the groceries–then how true must this be for the majority of women, who are not university-educated and who don’t have comfortable middle-class incomes?

Today, the wealthiest 20% of North Americans own approximately 80% of the resources. They also seem to get about 80% of the air-time. It’s a crying shame.

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