Working Women

Mitt Romney was outraged when a young woman said, “Ann Romney never worked a day in her life.”  That just shows how out of touch he is with the lives of average Americans.

Yes, raising children is hard work, but most of today’s young mothers hold down two full-time jobs.  Some women have careers – doctors, lawyers, those fashionably dressed, highly paid women we see on television.  But most jobs open to women are not glamorous and poorly paid.  Women hold jobs outside the home because the family needs the money.  They go to work 40 hours a week (or more); then they come home exhausted and put in another 40 hours being Mom.

I was a working mom.  Wally urged me to “get a job.”   Martha and Karl were only three and five when I spent two years teaching seventh grade in a junior high in Illinois.  After school, exhausted, I would sit in the baby-sitter’s kitchen, drinking tea and holding Martha on my lap, thinking, “How I wish I could spend more time with my little ones.”

We moved to Michigan.  For the next 12 years I had the luxury of being a “stay-at-home” Mom.    The children and I had happy times when I was “not working.”   We climbed the battlements of Old Fort Wayne (built as our defense against Canada – yes, Canada! – during another time of military hysteria) and laughed a puppet shows at the Detroit Art Institute.  At home we had theatricals in the basement and clothes line art shows in the backyard. . . . . And so much more. . .

David was born in Michigan.  Then we moved to Texas and, four years later, to Pennsylvania. 
Martha and David say they had “a wonderful childhood”.  Even Karl, who is angry with me for other reasons, agrees with that.  Lucky is the mother who can work full-time – at home.

We returned to Illinois when Karl was in college, Martha was in high school, but David was only in second grade.  Wally’s job was in jeopardy.  I went to work, as a typist for a temporary agency in Chicago’s Loop, to have an income “just in case.”  Instead, Wally found a better job.  He persuaded me to continue working to pay for Martha’s college. 

David became a “latch-key” child when he was only seven years old.  Martha, forced to be my teenage babysitter, told me she wished she could come home and find me there, “even if we just sit and read jokes out of the Reader’s Digest.”

Yes, being a Mom is an important job.  It is too bad that many women are in circumstances making them to do double duty by also going to work outside the home. 

Tell that to Ann Romney, who raised five boys, and who had money for nannies, maids, and any other help she needed.  Ann Romney and I agree on one thing: Motherhood is the best job in the World.  It is sad that many women can not do it full time.