it’s not a mommy war, it’s a culture war; or, happy Mother’s Day, Caitlin Flanagan!

My housekeeper didn’t show up today; she called after lunch to say that her daughter had broken her arm and she had just gotten home from the doctor and could she come tomorrow instead? How about Monday? I asked, thinking that this would be easier for her and for us. Yes, she said, Monday.

But of course this morning I had done MY half of the housework to get ready for the houskeeper to come and do the OTHER half, and because this week I wanted her to do some extra things, I had gone ahead and stripped the boys’ beds and cleaned the kitchen–you know, to make up for the extra things. So this afternoon, I had to finish what I started, because despite their protestations, the boys can’t sleep on bare mattresses tonight, and then I thought that while I was at it I could take a Clorox wipe to the fixtures in our bathroom which made me think that, really, it was the BOYS’ bathroom I ought to be wiping up and maybe spraying with Lysol before I put out clean hand towels and bath rugs. I did all that, and now my house is in some funny limbo where it’s not REALLY clean, but it SMELLS kind of clean and the bathrooms are fairly germ-free–in other words, I spent an hour doing the kind of half-assed houskeeping that led me to hire the cleaning lady in the first place.

All of which made me think that I should finally write about To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. Caitlin Flanagan has been taken to task by liberals and Democrats and feminists (and liberal Democrat feminists, which is where I put myself on the spectrum) for being classist and racist and sexist, and I agree with all these criticisms. But honestly, they weren’t what struck me the most about this book.

Flanagan writes that this book “is about the stubborn longing for an earlier way of life, and about the way that longing manifests and reasserts itself in the imagination of so many modern women. It is less a book about what we have gained than it is a book about what we have lost” (xxiii). In her exploration of “what we have lost,” Flanagan offers some really insightful observations about the cultural swing towards idealizing domesticity (the return of the BIG white wedding, the middle class adoption of the nanny, the deification of Martha Stewart); these parts of the book–the historical and sociological readings–are fascinating and spot-on. But each of these observations is followed by a story from Flangan’s own life–my personal horrific favorite being the one in which she encourages her nanny to protest the government’s treatment of domestic workers, but refuses to pay the nanny when she wants the day off to participate in a strike.

Through all of this, I kept waiting for Flanagan to make some larger connection to other cultural trends, because I think there is a clear link between this longing for Donna Reed and bans on gay marriage and abortion, and fears about sexual predators and the safety of our public schools, and our obsession with SuperNanny and plastic surgery shows–all of which evidence, to me, a longing for the kind of past that Flanagan mourns. But instead of following through and reading this in some definitive and useful way (the home–and by default the, wife and mother, who is always identified with the home–is the site of the new culture war, for example, which I think it is), she writes about how she responded to her son’s bout with stomach flu by summoning the nanny to clean up the mess. No wonder the feminists are angry.

Flanagan is dead on that what we are seeing is a nostalgia for a bygone era, but her happy claims about how she is embracing her traditional marriage don’t do anything to allay–or even identify–the fears that are causing this nostalgia. In the wake of Columbine and Elizabeth Smart and 9/11, we are all desperate for a time and place where home felt like a safe haven, and we are looking to women–to mothers–to make the world safe again. When things go wrong at home–in the house, in our schools, in our country–women are blamed. After the Columbine shootings, the media asked over and over how it was possible that the shooters’ parents–particularly their mothers–didn’t know what was going on. When Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her own bedroom, it was her mother’s fault because she was the one who brought the crazy man into the house in the first place. And most wrenching of all is the story of Laura Manning, who was badly burned in the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center and spent nearly a year in hospital recovering–a year in which, media reports emphasized over and over, her infant son learned to walk and celebrated his first birthday without her–because, see, she risked her life to go to work instead of staying home with her baby.

We live in a culture of fear and the media’s obsession with the “Mommy wars” plays on this fear by insinuating–or, really, saying right out–that women are failing their children no matter what they do. The domestic sphere has always been associated with women, while the public sphere is the province of men. When women leave the home and step into the public sphere, bad things happen. Likewise, when men settle too comfortably into the domestic, the world goes to hell. I think Flanagan is absolutely right that we are longing for a time when things were simple–but she is overlooking the reality that “simple” often meant “unjust” and “oppressive.”

To Hell With All That is well written and often funny, but it was a baffling read for me. Over and over, Flanagan seems to be on the verge of some fascinating revelation about our society–about how living in a credit-based culture means that anyone can buy class, about how nannies walk the line between members of the family and hired help, about how breast cancer threatens to rob women of their essential femininity–but she doesn’t follow through. And this, more than her politics, was what I found so disappointing.

How I Learned to Love the Mommy Wars

This review was originally published at mamazine.com.

Recently, my stay-home mom life has gotten almost unimaginably chaotic. My five-year-old son was diagnosed last spring with ADHD; subsequently, he was diagnosed with a nonverbal learning disability,which is very much like Asperger’s syndrome, which is a form of high-functioning autism. In the past month, he has gone off his ADHD medication (for medical reasons), started speech therapy every Wednesday (with a therapist who isn’t sure how to help him), and virtually stopped going to preschool (because his unmedicated behavior is so distracting to the other kids). My three-year-old has had strep throat three times since Christmas (twice in the past four weeks); if he gets it again, we will have to talk about taking his tonsils out. My husband is swamped at work; he comes home late and brings his laptop with him, and after we put the boys to bed, he works. I have virtually no daycare, because in the normal course of things, I don’t need it–after all, I am home, full time. But recently my life has been one emergency after another and I am often stuck without anyone to watch whichever child is not in need of a visit to the doctor. As a short-term solution, I am borrowing a working mom friend’s baby sitter during the hour on Wednesdays when Henry has speech therapy and Charlie needs somewhere else to go. The rest of the week, I just juggle, trying to schedule one child’s appointments when the other is in school. And somewhere in there, I am supposed to balance the checkbook and stop at the grocery and maybe pick up the house once in a while. Because this is my job.

This kind of chaos is precisely what motivated me to leave my underpaid but intellectually fulfilling teaching job to stay home with my children in the first place; after all, someone needed to be available for doctors appointments and sick days. I was an adjunct, paid by the class; my husband had a full-time job with health care and other benefits. The choice seemed simple and logical. Didn’t it make sense to have someone’s full-time job be the kids? Didn’t it make sense for that person to be me? For the most part, it has, particularly when things have started to fall apart. The other day, I was telling a friend that I had four Henry-related doctors appointments in one week, and she said, “Imagine if you were working and trying to get to all these appointments.” Yes, I said, it would be nearly impossible. Good thing I’m NOT working.

But the funny thing is this: as my day-to-day life has become almost unimaginably complicated, I have begun to daydream about returning to work. The more impossible it seems for my family to function without me at home, the more I want–well, NOT to be home.

In the midst of this domestic and personal chaos, I picked up Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families, a collection of essays edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner. Quite honestly, I didn’t expect to like the book; I was put off by the title, by the claim that mothers are choosing sides and “facing off,” by Steiner’s assertions that women are angry about their choices, regardless of what those choices might be. I don’t believe that the “Mommy wars” exist in the real world; I believe that they are nothing but rhetoric and media hype. In my experience, working mothers and stay-home mothers are, essentially, mothers, and we are able to find common ground and sympathize with each other. The friend I am borrowing the baby sitter from is an attorney with two children the same ages as mine. On Wednesdays, she goes to work and her sitter is with the kids all day. She has been happy to have Charlie come and play while I am at the speech pathologist’s with Henry. My friend has never once made me feel like I am inconveniencing her or failing my children. She has been a lifesaver in the past few weeks, practically and emotionally. I am not at “war” with this woman–which is a good thing, because she has the baby sitter.

I expected not to like Steiner’s book; instead, I was pleasantly surprised by it–in fact, I have found myself nodding and underlining and, more than once, weeping as I read. The essays themselves are powerful, moving explorations of individual choices. The authors are black and white and hispanic and middle eastern; they write about staying home and working and that crazy something in between that we call “working from home.” They range in age from their mid-20s to their mid-60s. Most write from a position of financial security and social privilege. Nearly all are writers by trade.

For the most part, the writers in this collection refuse to engage with the more inflammatory “Mommy wars” rhetoric; they are thoughtful about their own choices, and take full responsibility for their perceptions of other women. In “I Hate Everybody,” Leslie Lehr writes honestly and compellingly about how she is “infuriated by the world’s double standard when it comes to motherhood and work.” She has hated, at various times, working mothers, stay-home mothers, her husband, herself, and a car salesman. Throughout her essay, though, Lehr–like most of the other writers in this anthology–owns her point of view; she does not blame other women for her angst, but instead illustrates how we use other women as a mirror to measure our own choices.

What surprised me the most, though, was how this book made me reconsider my own position in this conversation. While I don’t believe that women fall easily into categories of “working” and “stay-at-home,”I assumed that the essays by women like myself–educated women who explicitly chose family over career–would make the most sense to me. Instead, the most disappointing essays in the collection were actually those written by stay-home mothers, who employ the aggressive Mommy wars rhetoric to defend their choices, or assert their superiority as mothers. Catherine Clifford claims that “when a child isn’t mothered by her mother, something precious and irreplaceable is lost to both of them;” Iris Krasnow blithely confirms that women who chose to have children “have a fundamental commitment to spend a lot of time with them.” These stay-home moms romanticize life with children in a way that is completely unfamiliar to me just now, in the chaos that is my home. Unlike the working women in this collection, the stay-home moms fall back on the “moral high ground” rhetoric: children need their mothers, childhood is short, the best moments are the ones that can’t be scheduled. I don’t believe that mothers are, universally, the best caregivers, nor do I believe that complete devotion to my children and their needs will make me a successful mother. In fact, I have learned recently that complete immersion in my children’s lives makes me a cranky mother, one who is not really enjoying her children’s childhood.

As I was reading this book and putting out fires at home, I had the chance to speak with Leslie Morgan Steiner. And I will be honest again: just as I did not expect to like this book, I did not expect to find much common ground with Steiner, who defines herself as a working mother: “I have to work,” Steiner writes in her introduction. “I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t.” Her experience, her subject position, was so completely different from mine. What could we possibly have in common? Quite a lot, as it turned out. Steiner is eloquent about her vision for this book; she talks about how “no one is in the business of trying to make moms feel good about ourselves.” We rarely tell each other that we are good mothers, Steiner says. She told me an interesting story, about a friend who suffered from postpartum depression. Her friend, Steiner says, couldn’t get any help, but years later, when the same woman had a heart attack, help was everywhere, despite the fact that the heart attack was a fairly straightforward, manageable medical condition, unlike PPD. Motherhood, Steiner says, is a “social demotion,” but it is one that comes with high expectations: we live in a culture that tells mothers that unless we are doing our very best all the time, we are failing our children. The real Mommy wars, according to Steiner, are not between individual groups of women but between mothers and the culture at large, which teaches us that the only way to be a good mother is to always strive to be the best mother. Unfortunately, there are no good measures of what makes a good mother, and so we internalize this struggle and measure ourselves–and our choices–against other women.

Unfortunately, we live in a media-based culture; we look to the media for advice about what to wear and who to vote for and how to discipline our children. And right now, the media is obsessed with the pretend “Mommy wars.” We are force-fed images of Diane Sawyer asking stay-home moms to tell working moms what they are “missing” by not being home with their children. We are confronted, over and over, with the worst case scenarios, carefully staged for TV audiences. The most insightful moment in Mommy Wars comes in an essay by Veronica Chambers. Chambers, who did not have children at the time she wrote the essay, describes herself as a “mole,” spying on working mothers and stay-home mothers in order to learn what she can about being a mother herself. She finds herself, at different moments, agreeing with both sides; she also finds herself, at other moments, startled by what she hears from both sides. “I understand that knowledge is power and women share these stories to feel connected,” she writes. “But I am beginning to think that there’s a part of this journey to motherhood that I want to make alone, without the weight and worry of so many other women’s experiences. How will spying on other mothers help me when I don’t know where my own journey will take me? . . . I watch the mommy wars and I can only imagine the worst because it’s the worst that leaps out at me in the stories I hear and the books I read.”

I think Chambers is dead on: when the media tells, over and over, the story of how one mother is better than another because she works or because she doesn’t, it gets us nowhere; it is the worst kind of story we can hear about what it means to be a mother. Mommy Wars is, fortunately, not full of the worst, at least not in a stay-home-moms versus working moms kind of way. Instead, it is a thoughtful, if often unsettling, look at the choices women make and the repercussions of those choices.