home remedies
by bam
out of the corner of my eye, while i was typing at my keyboard, i saw the little legs come running up the walk. i heard the banging on the door. and then the wail. “mama,” he let loose, and then, like that, the tears.
the sobs began to heave. the baby finger, exhibit no. 1, held up, displayed, for me to catch a fleeting glance of the body part in question. the one that oozed with blood. the one that shook, in that way that something shakes when there is something rather out of place.
in one fell swoop he was in the door and flailed upon the floor. i groped, trying to get a closer look at the sorry little finger. hmm. i wondered, while i dashed to get a paper towel. and then cold water. and ice. the squishy little mama-saver they call the boo-boo bag.
i wiped his tears. i smoothed away the sweaty curls. i kept at the bleeding finger. tried hard to get a chance to diagnose. to see if underneath, there might be something broken.
the babysitter filled in the blanks in the story that was coming in between the sobs. something about a scooter. and a fall. smack dab, full force, on that baby finger.
never mind the not-so-breaking story i’d been tracking in the other room. never mind the sentence i left hanging, in the middle of a verb.
this very thing–the pains, the wails, the broken skin–is the reason long ago i decided i could only work from home.
i am lucky. i am blessed.
i say that not in hollow nod to those who have no choice. i feel the struggle of the woman just across the street, a single mama, who leaves the house at half past six, in her nurse’s whites, and pulls back to the curb, wiped out, at nearly 4, her gaggle of three already waiting and very much insisting on a piece of her.
it remains, in many circles, the pachyderm in the room that is tiptoed all around, in tentative baby steps. where a mama works, at home or not at home. whether she works, for pay or not for pay.
it is among the most private choices that a mama ever makes.
yet there’ve been trees felled and ink spilled by the tanker, in the national froth, still frothing, about what is right and what is wrong, in the domestic ring and the box the mama checks when asked the simple, “occupation?”
if it was true concern for women and children, if it was the personal pole-vaulted into the political, as means to put in place the underpinning of public policy that would ensure women the right to earn a decent living without worrying that their babies were left to God-knows-what or whom, or maybe even slipped a passport to rich and solid care, i wouldn’t mind the noise. i’d welcome it. but too often it is finger jabbing behind the mama’s back.
i suppose the only way to get at the nettling point is to, first, put down all the fingers, the pointing, jabbing fingers. and simply say out loud that there is no point in all the frothing.
it’s no one else’s business, is it? so why is it that how we choose to run our very personal lives becomes the fodder for so much political and playground debate?
i only know that in my house, long, long ago, when this equation rumbled to the surface, i had a baby boy who nursed and would not take a bottle. try leaving a babe like that home with sitter. see how far you get before a carrier pigeon is sent out to fetch you. for that was in the day when there was no such thing, at least in my price range, as a cell phone slipped lightly in your purse.
i made a choice that wasn’t cheap.
i gave up plenty over the years. i am no longer a player, not much of a player, anyway, at the newspaper i’ve called my home for the last quarter century. i have stood at fancy newsroom shindigs, and watched up-and-comers pass me by. because i was no longer someone who could get them where they wanted to go. i was only a mama who wrote stories, far from where they set their sights.
i have accidentally dropped a disposable diaper on a conference table, thinking the slim object i was pulling from my backpack was a reporter’s notebook. ooops. i watched the editor running that meeting roll his eyes. i heard him once tell me i knew nothing, i worked outside the tower. and that’s a quote.
but i did not give up the chance to be there when my boys bounded in the door from a bumpy day at school. and i did not give up the chance to wiggle loose the tooth that met with some resistance when it sunk into the hard-core apple. and i did not give up the chance to be the lap that sopped the tears when my little one came running in, his pinkie finger bleeding, swollen.
had it been dangling, the way i thought for a minute there it was, i would have been the one who grabbed the keys, played the ambulance driver.
i wouldn’t want it any other way.
i want the remedies the day demands to be the ones i minister right here at home.
it is delicate conversation, the heart throb of where a mama does the work she needs to do. it shouldn’t be debate.
no matter where or what you do in the course of every day, whether you mother, or work with mothers, i imagine you’ve given this some thought. i invite you to be polite, to listen in, to carry on a kitchen-table discourse on the ups, the downs, the sideways of the question: where and how for you is it best to ply the remedies that truly stir your heart? be they ones that heal the world, or the pinkie bleeding right before your eyes? i know, too, that what’s right at one point in our lives, might shift and change. it is a sad thing to me that women of my generation had so few models to look to, to learn from. and now, i ‘m told, women getting out of college look at us, the ones who’ve squirmed and wiggled, tried to do it all, and decided that we pretty much messed it up. they are choosing to get out of college, get married, start having babies. wham bam. wasn’t that the way it was half a century ago?
Right on, sister. Whoops, showing my age there. Having made the same decision as you, to work at home, my outcomes are similar. Not a player. An amended career. Not everyone has the option of working at home and since I did, I consider it a blessing. And I’m not sorry, not one teeny bit, for the reasons you say. And it has put me in a bit of a pickle, being a newly single mom who must now make a very decent living. But I want to be there to dress, or kiss, the finger. At least usually. The other decisions – to be home without outside work, or to keep on working as you did before kids – make sense to me, too. And let’s face it, often it’s a matter of which one we need to do because of our circumstances. A few things I noticed when I became a mother at 39 fourteen years ago and they are antithetical observations: That mothers can be very polarized. To nurse or not? Solids at six months or later? Work or not or partly? Sleep training or child-led rhythms? And the snottiness that could exist between moms, the defensiveness. As if lives depended on being right. As if being right meant being a good mother. As if being right would soothe our own childhood wounds. As if there was a right. The most intense story of the kind I heard was from a helpful friend who said that she and another friend almost came to fisticuffs one day about the merits of cloth vs. disposables.The other thing I observed when my first was a baby was how much we needed each other. In a flight of fancy one day as I was feeling very grateful after a friend got me through a dicey kid thing, I wondered whether a dad, a pediatrician, or another mother was the most critical support in my life at the time. Other mothers came out in front of pediatrician for me. How could I do this, I wondered, without people who could assure me that a bad time would end, or what would be next, or offer a suggestion when I couldn’t find my way. Sort of like your essay yesterday to which this feels like an extension, it works if you tell the truth, about what it’s really like, about your fears. Otherwise you’re two women screaming about diapers. So true, what you said, about points in our lives and the potential shifts. This is a compelling topic you’ve written about today. And why do we judge – the drive must be enormous – when there seems to be so much more to be gained from collaborating?
My children came later in my marriage and career … the first one in my 30’s and the second in my 40’s. I tried going back to work part-time after the first child, but gave that up when I arrived at work every day in tear-soaked blouses (the tears were mine, not the baby’s). I knew it wasn’t for me. I knew it would be hard financially, but somehow we made it, sometimes with no more than five bucks to live on until payday. One day when my eldest daughter was in kindergarten, I asked her if she’d rather have a new car or me at home. She chose the latter and I knew that I had made the right decision, even though everyone around us was buying new homes, driving spankin’ new cars and going on luxurious vacations. The choice was right for our family at the time.I know many women don’t have the luxury of having a choice to stay home. My sisters didn’t … their circumstances demanded they work. My heart is full of admiration and respect for them for doing what their livlihood required, loving and caring for their children all the while. What amazing women.
Ah, I too am at home. When the choice presented itself, we looked at the dollars. At the end of the year, we said, we’ll probably come out about $5000 richer, and someone else will be there for the first steps and last hours of gradeschool. We decided we could live without the money. We were lucky. No longer employed, volunteering has become a full time job.Except.I dread the day my teen-aged daughter will say to someone,”When I grow up the last thing I want to do is be at home like HER. I’m going to have a real job.”It’s quite an except.And I have it on good authority, from a therapist who works with teens, that these words are oft said.So what do we do about that, ladies?
I said it! I didn’t just say it as a rebellious teen, either! I said it all through my entire childhood, the notion seethed as an undercurrent in all my thoughts as I watched those inane tv ads for Palmolive (“you’re soaking in it!”), Wisk (“you’ve tried scrubbing them, soaking them, and still–those filthy rings…RIng around the collar! Ring around the collar!”), and some household deodorizer spray whose name, oddly, I cannot now recall (“Fried fish last night? I thought George gave up cigars…!”), and on and on and on. My girlfriends and I made fun of my mom behind her back, and of any mother, who drove a wood-sided station wagon. I couldn’t imagine anything more dead-end, stultifying, and ludicrous than having conversations about ring around the collar and dish detergent. Despite what I knew of my own mother, who never spoke nor acted like tv advertisement moms, somehow those messages were burly enough to stand up and obscure the reality of her life, her life with us, her life as her own person, busy with many responsibilities in many spheres. And all the while I was receiving messages from my culture that, as I have referred to here before, I could, and should, be anything, just anything, how about an astronaut (that great brass ring for girls of the seventies)? Frankly it’s a wonder I ever got married and had children.But I did, and now I’m a mom at home. I don’t even work from home. I’m a mom at home who pretty much chucked her academic career for kids and home, because despite what I was promised as a lass, I can’t do everything, I can’t even do very much. I’ll never go back to the scholar thing (threw my half-done dissertation away years ago), and I do worry that my children–both my daughter and my son–will think I’m a loser on account of it. But for now–they’re preadolescent, and see absurdly little television so they don’t know about all the inane things stay-at-home-moms are supposed to concern themselves with day after drudge-filled day in tv land–they are thrilled I’m around the house. It’s not that I’m that nice, or particularly fun. It’s pretty much just that I’m there.And despite what I thought I knew when I was 10, or 13, or 17, I’m glad, really glad, that my mom was at home too.The funny thing about the mother working out of home vs. mother working in the home conversation is that for so many people it’s a grass is greener on the other side of the fence thing. The at-homers I know always feel haunted by this sense of maybe-I’m-really-just-pathetic. The out-of-homers I know seem to regard my life a little wistfully, like, how simple it would be if only I could do that. The fact is, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, we do what we must, what’s best and what’s possible for ourselves, our children, our households. All of us. We never stop giving and doing for others and literally working ourselves sick.Only Occasionally, your daughter will probably say those things, may already be. She won’t truly understand your choices till she’s got a little one at home herself. And then whatever she decides, you can be assured that she will respect the choices you made, for she will know then that you acted according to your best lights, and that is all any of us can aspire to.