The Heart Of The Working Mother

(I wrote this in 2006.)

“How come you get to be called a mom if we never see you?”

The 5-year-old posed that question as I was tucking him into bed. Literally, my brain would not allow me to comprehend what he had asked. Literally, I heard, “Grgg arghh haggle mookum?”

“What, buddy?” I whispered, leaning in with my ear turned toward his mouth.

“How come you get to be called a mom if we never see you?”

This time, enough of it made it in to my cerebral cortex that I was able to pull back a little so I could look in his eyes and repeat, “How come I get to be called a mom if you never see me? Is that what you said?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “How come?”

So here it was. The pain of childbirth is nothing compared to the agony they put you through after their arrival. Don’t cry, I thought. Just don’t cry.

“Why do you think you never see me?” I asked, sitting down on the Spider-Man fleece blanket.

“Because you work.”

“But I see you in the morning when you get up, and we have breakfast, and I bring you to school, and then I come home and we have supper, and we play and watch TV and read and then I put you to bed,” I said. “I see you a ton.”

“Not at lunch,” he said. “I don’t ever see you at lunch.”

“We have lunch on Saturdays and Sundays.”

“You don’t pick me up at school,” he said.

Now, there are times when you try to reason with your kids and times when, if the lion is about to close its jaws around their little heads, you simply tell them what’s what. It was getting late. I was tired, he was tired, and so I opted for Plan B.

“I have to work,” I said. I kissed his forehead, turned on the blue elephant nightlight, turned out the overhead light, and left the room. “OK,” I heard him say as he rolled over and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

I guess in the life of every working mother, at some time or another, one of the kids hurls a shard of verbal glass that sticks deep in your heart. I probably said something similar to my mother, who was also a full-time journalist. In fact, when I told my mom on the phone the next day what my son had said, she sucked in her breath in what I now realize was a knowing way. “Oh, they can get you, can’t they,” she said.

When I told my boy’s pediatrician what he said, she, also a working mother (and she works much crazier hours than I do), nodded sympathetically. “Sometimes the things they say …” she sighed.

I work with lots of working mothers. I also am friends with lots of mothers who don’t have jobs outside the home. At times I wish I was one of them, and at times I’m sure they wish they were me. We all make choices, and we hope what we decide is, in the long run, the best for everyone.

My working full time is a choice my husband and I made, based on my personal wishes, my professional demands, and our goals for our family. I think it was the right choice, I hope it was the right choice, but by the glow of the blue elephant nightlight, sometimes I’ve got to wonder.