Today Julia and I were part of a shoot for the department store giant Sears. Happy with the day, we took the subway home and nosily gazed at all the people coming from work. “Work” has been a hot topic for us these days since I have been working a lot from home lately.

Since Manhattan weather is not the easiest on us these days, we – our nanny, Julia and I – are all cozy in our UES apartment until I announce: “OK, gotta go work now.” I give Julia a kiss, then close my door. How hard is it not to react to crying if Julia doesn’t want to get dressed, bumps her head or spills her cereal? Harder than resisting a chocolate bar in front of my nose – and I’m a chocoholic! But of course she cries louder knowing I’m in that room hearing all that’s going on. So I come out, peek through the door: her wailing stops right away. We play peekaboo. And then it comes over her tiny  lips: “Mommy, I want to be all day with you!” Now as flattering as that is, it’s ringing my guilt alarm bell really loudly, so what to do?

Since we have the absolute super ueber loving nanny and Julia loves her too, I know it’s more than just wanting to be with me. This is where a wise grandma’s advise comes in: “Tell her, that we all want to work and give something back to the world. She will too.”

Reasoning with a three year old? Of course! It works: Julia listens when I tell her in the evening that I love that she wants me to stay with her all day every day, but that I have work to do and one day she will too. I explain that she already works – creating her own art, painting and drawing or helping me cooking or playing with her dolls. “You know that time when you are by yourself playing, I need that too and that’s my work.” She seems to understand.

As if reading my thoughts, Julia and her nanny come home with books from the library. The one Julia wants to read over and over again is a book about work. It tells the story of different animal characters going off to work – as police guard, as a chef, as a Doctor, as a fireman… She looks through it for the last two days and today she says: One day I want to be a Doctor. Now that’s a train of thought! Something I said must have been comprehensible to her and since then I can close the door to my room for work smoothly again.

Further still – going home on the subway from our shoot today Julia dreamily looks at people coming and going on the train: “We too worked today, mommy” and she flashes a proud smile.

“What else?” Chloe and I look at each other. Our three-year-olds are happily pressing their noses against the window of the café, where we are sitting for a coffee. We were both in a similar situation: She had taken a break from her job in advertising to be home with her son the first two and a half years. After a quick career switch, she was now ready to get a teaching job. I had been a model but with a degree in communications also working in media, looking to get back to work full time. But we found ourselves struggling to make sense in a Manhattan world of recession, no employment in site. What else is there to do than to look for jobs and cutting down expenses? Not much, except to keep the peace at home. 

Which gave us time to rethink our values. It seemed right to us, that we hadn’t taken or gone back to jobs after giving birth that required long hours every day and almost no time to raise a happy baby. But now that our little ones started preschool and it was harder than ever to get back to work as a mother, was it fair to leave it financially all up to our husbands?

I started to doubt: Did I do the right thing concentrating on child, not career?
The answer for me is “yes, but!” I just wished the work of a mother, raising children was not this undervalued in our society. Being from Germany where paid maternity and paternity leave is possible (in cases for up to two years without losing your job), the American reality hit me and my friends with children hard. (And Manhattan is normally always the exception.) In addition to a missing parental leave “motherhood is the single biggest risk factor for poverty in old age” (Ann Crittenden, 2005 in “The Motherhood Manifesto”): Mothers are not eligible to receive social security credits (unlike nannies). So we are working for free even though the job of raising our next generation in a responsible way is the most important job, Chloe and I have to remind ourselves.
But concerning the state of motherhood in our country, check out these facts that make it hard for us to really have no doubt about this.
According to www.momsrising.org:
“A full quarter of US families with children less than six years old live in poverty”.

“Fourteen million children are unsupervised after school. 40,000 of these are kindergartners due to a lack of affordable afterschool programs.”

“In a Harvard study of over 170 countries, the U.S. was one of only four nations without any form of paid leave for new mothers. (The others were Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea.).” You can check out the full Harvard/McGill report here: http://www.mcgill.ca/files/ihsp/WFEIFinal2007.pdf

My conversation over coffee with Chloe made even more sense looking at these facts, also provided by momsrising.org:

“Women without children make 90 cents to a man’s dollar, but mothers make just 73 cents, and single mothers make even less — about 60 cents to a man’s dollar.”

“Mothers are 79% less likely to be hired than equally qualified non-mothers.”

“A recent study found that mothers were offered $11,000 lower starting pay than non-mothers with the same resume for highly paid jobs, while fathers were offered $6,000 more in starting pay.”
“Of the twenty most competitive economies in the world, the U.S. is the only one that does not require employers to provide paid sick days.”

Far from counting Chloe’s and my family living in poverty, all these stats explain why so many mothers and children are! How can a woman raise a child and work often two jobs to pay the bills? A lot of women plain out have to. Who suffers, are the children along with them.
Nine million of those children are btw not health insured, according to momsrising.org. Reading this, I happen to remember listening to a mother or caregiver talking to a friend waiting in line at a local branch of a bank.
She: So it’s weekend and Tanya is running a very high fever. I bundle her up and take her to the emergency room.
Her friend: So what did they do?
She: They checked her, told me this happens some times, gave her some Tylenol and send me home with a 275 dollar bill!
Her friend: No way! That’s a lot of money!
She: Yeah, next time I’m not taking her to the emergency room anymore.
Listening to this conversation makes me shiver. Imagine parents or caregivers feeling intimidated by medical costs, consequently not taking necessary steps in more serious cases than a “normal” fever.
Everyone can help mothers and fathers by pushing family friendly policies like a paid parental leave and an affordable healthcare for everyone. A good source to start and read up about this is the “Motherhood Manifesto” that one can order at www.momsrising.org.