WaPo runs an excellent essay in today's Style section on a favorite grinding axe of mine: how women take the insecurities and pressures they face in child-rearing out on each other. She's chugging along and I'm nodding in agreement when she calls for mutual respect and gratitude between the working moms and at-home moms, choosing to ignore her little throw-away remark about birth control and then: Whoa! She brings me up short with the real reason she feels forced to work. It's not family financial need or personal satisfaction at all, but mistrust of her husband:
What puzzles me is that despite the fact that I've crafted a pretty ideal work/family situation, at times I'm still envious of the trust stay-at-home moms seem to have in their husbands and in life, a breezy Carol Brady confidence that they will always be taken care of. Some days I'd kill for a dose of their faith that neither my husband nor life will leave me stranded, destitute, unable to protect myself and my children without the independence conferred by a job and paycheck of my own.
Not to mock her, because clearly that is a real fear and probably it's at the heart of what concerns many moms caught in the middle between work and home--so in that sense bless her for saying it; but I wonder what her husband thinks when he reads that? And I wonder to what extent that refusal to take a risk and trust --the perpetual living in a state of self-defense against your spouse-- sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy with respect to the relationship? As a matter of principle, I never quite allow myself to trust my husband (or him me); so we never achieve the intimacy upon which marriage depends; so our relationship stagnates; so he leaves me: good thing I kept my job.
Which is not my diatribe against work outside the home. Many women have real contributions to make in their various fields, and as JP the Great taught, we need "the feminine genius" in the workplace, above all in an increasingly technological age. Moreover, while the gender feminists and the traditionalists are busy duking it out over which one-size-fits-all template to impose on us, in the meanwhile most families find creative ways to achieve what they need to. It wasn't policy wonks who came up with flex-time, job-sharing, telecommuting, etc. It was real families and real employers finding a way to make things work. But if the reason you insist on two incomes and separate accounts is not really need, but to protect yourself from your own spouse, isn't that keeping your water wings on in the deep end?
