NEWSWEEK ARTICLE

"Surely by now we're all sick of the mommy wars, with stay-at-home mothers and working mothers mercilessly attacking each other's career decisions as if the survival of the human race hangs in the balance."

Forgive me if I sound a little old-fashioned here. My generation are the women that first hit the glass ceiling head-on - that read Betty Friedan books - that went way beyond the 'norm' of secretarial, bank teller and grocery store clerk positions.

And yeah, we made major headway - the generation of female CEOs, middle management, and even military positions in combat positions (don't ask me if that's liberation or just stupidity, but it's equal).

We dealt with slow economics by going back to work full-time, and juggled work, housework, meals, kids and oh yeah, some of us went back to school to finish those bachelor's that we never finished because we got married.
But I've been on both sides of the fence here. I feel very fortunate that I was able to stay home until my second began pre-school - and then was still able to be back home by 2 p.m. when they got home from school (by my workday beginning at 6 a.m., but you do what you gotta do) - at least until my baby began pre-school.

After that, it was full-time - going up the ladder (at least in non-profit health!) and landing better paying positions each year. It was going back to school part-time for quite a few years - and it was overseeing homework via the phone, and having the kids make dinner, do the dishes and be ready for bed sometimes before I even could get home. It was missing a lot of school events and basketball games and asking a lot of other people to give my kids rides to where they needed to be in the hours before I got home.

So - it IS great that women have stepped up to the plate in the workplace, and proven that we should get paid the same as a man for the same job. We've proved that, with nervous breakdowns and some medication, we can handle being single-parents. We can do it.But you know what? The "survival of the human race" DOES hang in the balance. Because this is one of many reasons the family as an institution is so fragile. Mothers switched a lot of their responsibility to day-care, to after-school programs, and to the oldest latch-key kid (yeah, that's you, Harmony).

And it ended up NOT being the best option. It was okay, and it worked, but we cheated our kids out of, not quality time, but quantity time. Time to just hang - time to talk - time to spend. We were forced to inject short, carefully timed micro-managed bursts of sharing.And really, it does make a difference.

The oft-repeated "If I could back and do it all over" in this case is SOOO true. Sometimes financially it isn't possible, sometimes it isn't easy, I've done both - and being a full-time mom is, trust me, MUCH harder than a full-time job - but is IS what will make the difference the survival of the family, ergo the human family.

Trust me on this one.