Embracing Harriet
By Christine Parsons

“But what do at-home mothers actually do?” —She Works/He Works: How Two-Income Families are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off

DANVILLE,CALIFORNIA—As I perused the library shelves, She Works/He Works dared me to slide it into my non-employed, at-home-mom hands. I resisted. Pundits with masseuses and headache management specialists might be able to handle the fiery arguments a book like that can open up. But I’m a full-time nurturer off our adolescents, armed only with two Advils and a half-wrapped piece of sugarless gum buried in my purse.

 

My seventh-grader, Michelle, interrupted this one-person debate, juggling Renaissance books for her research project. “Mom, I’m ready. Can we go?” I nodded. And on impulse I grabbed the get-a-job-girl book. I’d read it in short doses, take deep breaths, not get sucked in. The librarian scanned Michelangelo, Bellini, and da Vinci, each swipe sending a high-pitched beep into the air. Last swipe, the feminist manifesto: beep.

 

Michelle set up shop at the kitchen table. I read from the counter a few steps away, in between chopping garlic and onions for the spaghetti.

 

The two full-time working-mom authors thanked the National Institutes of Mental Health for the $1 million grant that allowed them to study 300 full-time working couples (60 percent with children) over a four-year period. After three interviews with each member of this homogeneous group, the researchers concluded that stay-at-home-moms simply no longer exist.

 

The onions burned. Wow, I’m extinct. Dial telephones, albino squirrels, and me.

 

My breathing quickened. I slapped pureed tomatoes and basil into the pot and scanned Chapter Two: “Ozzie and Harriet Are Dead.” The authors explained that as a single-income couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson represented “fear of change” and an unhealthy “brand of family values” and a threat to “government policies that will help, not hinder, working families.” In real life, the Nelson clan did work, for 14 years, under studio lights and a tight production budget. After the show ended, Rick Nelson found cocaine, left his wife and kids and died in a plane crash.

 

I plopped steaming pasta into six bowls. I bet Harriet missed her scripted life, where she stayed home and Rick stayed swell right through puberty.

 

Three days later, family members fled whenever I entered a room with The Book.  stomped about, cantankerous from study after study debunking the mom-is-best myth, reassessing my life between loads of laundry. Maybe the make-a-buck, say-yes-to-daycare philosophy made sense. Why fritter away years on the fruit of my womb when some minimum-wage chick could do it for me just fine? “Why are you still reading that?” asked my husband, leaving me for his la-de-da doctor job. “You know it makes you feel lousy.” Ignoring him, I squinted at the chapter facing me on the ledge over the sink. “Did you know that at-home-moms are depressed and die sooner than women with paying jobs?” I asked, icicles drip-

 

 

ping from my words. “I’d like to see the so-called study that tidbit came from,” answered Mr. Scientific.

 

Sighing, I trudged down the hall to the dresser next to our bed. In the top drawer, under T-shirts and sweatpants, I pulled out a letter my daughter had propped on my pillow a few years ago:

Dear Mom,

 

I wanted to say why I love you. It’s because you are always willing to help me if I get stuck....You always make people feel at home if they’re sleeping over or coming over to play. You don’t make impolite comments about what I like or dislike. You understand a person’s feelings.... But most of all, you love me like I love you.

 

Love, Michelle

 

I returned the anti-mothering tome immediately. Free at last.

 

On my way out the library door I spotted Home by Choice: Raising Emotionally Secure Children in an Insecure World, by Brenda Hunter. I’m not endangered after all. Turns out 41 percent of America’s children under the age of15 are still cared for by their mothers at home.

 

And Dr. Hunter poses the important question She Works/He Works didn’t dare ask: “What truly matters in life? The love and affection that rolls across the generations through our children, or how much money we leave behind?” Here’s to mothering.

 

Christine Parsons writes for TAE when she’s not scrubbing oatmeal out of dishpans.