But I have seen (and been) a child who did that.

Oh, and great as always. :)

This is why I want to talk about choices, about more options, about possibilities not currently possible. Including, if someone wants or needs to work full-time away from their young children, how else can we meet their children’s needs? There are so many ways, from close-by nurseries to stable, loving child care to grandparents to alloparents to things that haven’t even occurred to me. And it’s not just women’s responsibility to find those options or be labeled a “bad mother”; it’s also society’s responsibility to make those choices available, or truly earn the label “bad society”.

It is only the limitations and oppressions of kyriarchy that tell us we can have one OR the other, women’s autonomy OR babies’ attachment. Which is why we have to imagine options outside the status quo; which is why I wrote the next post.

once again, you (and lyla) hit the nail on the head.

with regard to this issue, i often wonder about the marginalization of “secondary” caregivers as well–more often than not, the parent who didn’t give birth to the child (if it is a biological child). this can often mean fathers, but i’ve recently seen examples in my own life of two-mother families where the mother who bore the child and is nursing is somehow seen as the “real” mother or more of a parent.

i understand and respect the importance of the mother-baby relationship as it pertains to biologically appropriate parenting (e.g., in general, it is the biological mother who breastfeeds the child), but i often wonder whether this relationship is sometimes used/aggrandized in order to perpetuate a more abstract, patriarchal interpretation of the role of “mother” (as you outlined so well above). i also wonder where this interpretation leaves other parents (or more importantly, children’s relationships with them). (see: attachment parenting does not equal attachment mothering).

as for the work/stay home thing…well, we’ve all got to make an honest living somehow. but i think this issue goes far beyond mothers and children, and we must dig a lot deeper for the answers to much broader questions–for example, why is it now the norm in our society that in order to make a living, a working person must be alienated from his/her home life to one extent or another? this is true not only for parents, but for any working adults in any kind of living situation. for most people, time spent at work also means time not spent at home–in one’s home community, applying one’s self to valuable domestic pursuits (growing or cooking food, household maintenance, nurturing relationships with one’s housemates or neighbors, caring for children if there are any). some would say we can trace this convention back to the industrial revolution, when former farm workers left their homesteads to work in the factories all day. i think that this, in part, has led to our current set of cultural assumptions:

1. someone in the household must do paid work in order to make a living
2. in order to work, we must leave home and go to a workplace
3. ideally, infants should not be separated from their mothers for extended periods of time
4. infants/children do not belong in the workplace
5. “staying home” as a caregiver means making an infant/child the center of one’s undivided attention
6. therefore, mothers must stay home and not to go work OR they must be separated from their infants in order to work (which apparently, according to some folks, will make the child a “huddled heap of despair.”)
7. therefore, non-mother parents are the only ones who can go to work, so they must go to work and not stay home.

if i look at those assumptions for a while, i feel like really there are only two that hold water on a very basic level: (1) and (3). the others, to varying degrees, are products of the society we live in. each of us has a different amount of privilege and resources and circumstance that allows us to go against societal norms if we are so inclined: some families are able to get by on one parent’s full-time income, or two or more parents’ part-time income. some people are able to telecommute or operate a home-based business. some (very few, indeed) have an out-of-the-home workplace that supports the presence of infants and children, and so on.

but the reality is, the majority of us have none of these options available (which is why, among other reasons, i don’t think it’s very realistic or progressive to expect women to all want to quit their jobs and wholeheartedly embrace “mother-child communion”).

And yes, every family is different. Every family deserves to have options that work for them. But what about PAY? Some of us need our whole salary, and our whole attention to do our job.

I also think the ‘attachment parent’ types should give us some slack. I’m sick of reading that my baby is going to grow up with attachment disorders just because I have to work. I do everything I can to make sure she is happy and healthy… can that ever be enough?