Anti-Climacus

LINK: Sara Butler has some interesting thoughts on how the stay-at-home/working mom dichotomy is sometimes more complicated than that:

"The other big problem with all this is the assumption that there is a bright line between mothers who work and mothers who stay at home. Many, many mothers are somewhere in between. My mom, for example, is in many ways the quintessential stay-at-home mom; she even homeschooled us kids for many years. But actually, for years, my mom has worked one day a week. She clearly doesn’t fit either of our ideas of working moms: either the privileged professional mom with a nanny or the struggling mom working at Wal-Mart. But my mom is far from alone.

I really think that this kind of flexible, part-time work is, or at least should be, the future of the working mom. I very much hope to be able to be an at-home mom, at least when my kids are small, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be working at the same time. Despite what we’ve been told, there is, dare I say it, a third way here. Of course, it’s really only possible to get away with part time work when there’s a second income in the family, but the frequent absence of a father’s income is often only briefly noted in both conservative and liberal takes on this issue, as is the idea that fathers could make their working schedules more flexible in order to be at home with the kids more."