Ms. Blair’s crime: Being a working mom
My friend was supposed to bring red and green gumdrops to her son’s third-grade class. The gumdrops had been on her list, along with buying Christmas cards (no family picture this year), finding a place to board the dog, meeting with regional sales reps and sending an e-mail to the boss updating the Reynolds account.
After dashing from Safeway to Albertson’s one morning, the school’s receptionist told my friend she would try to deliver the candies, but wouldn’t it have been simpler to have sent the treats in with the student, like the other (read: nonworking) mothers did?
My friend apologized like a ragged servant while picturing herself grinding the receptionist’s face into the front counter.
I laughed as she told the story, having lived it myself, and I thought about poor Cherie Blair. The wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair is being crucified in the London press for the crime of being a working mother. She employed an ex-con to facilitate her purchase of some investment property. Cynics figured she was using this character, the boyfriend of a friend, to make a quick buck.
Do they really believe she had time to draw plans for such a scheme? The woman doesn’t have time to draw a bath. She has three teenagers plus a toddler.
She works full time as a lawyer and is married to a man who probably isn’t scheduling the kids’ violin lessons or planning party menus.
Cherie Blair finally had to hold a press conference last week. She said she didn’t do the necessary research on the guy’s background. He offered to help and she grabbed it. She pleaded guilty to not being Superwoman.
“The reality of my daily life is that I’m juggling a lot of balls in the air,” she said. “Some of you must experience that.”
Her sister working mothers surely smiled in sympathy. Being a working mother is like being a double agent. You try to keep each of your two lives from suspecting your loyalty to the other. So you sneak away after everyone’s in bed to send e-mails you didn’t get to at work. You sneak into an empty office at work to book Desert Dave for your kid’s birthday party.
Blair’s predicament has nudged the topic of working mothers back into the public discourse at the same time Allison Pearson’s bitterly funny novel about working mothers is topping best-seller lists from the United States to Finland to Korea. The book, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” (Knopf, 2002) has touched a universal chord because it points up once again the myth, and price, of having it all.
“The commentators who turned on Cherie for using motherhood as an excuse missed the point,” Pearson wrote last week in the Sunday Times of London. “She wasn’t letting women down: She was telling the truth about their daily lives. Not whining, not self-pitying, just brutally honest.”
When Bush adviser Karen Hughes and Cheney adviser Mary Matalin decided they could no longer reconcile their demanding jobs with motherhood, skeptics insisted there must be something they weren’t telling. As with most working mothers, I imagine there was a lot they weren’t telling, such as singing “Lemon Tree” to a teething baby from 1 to 4 a.m., scraping spit-up off a blazer and speeding to a breakfast meeting wearing two different shoes.
We don’t talk honestly very often about the impossibility of the juggling act because, to do so, women would have to admit how often they fall short, men would have to take more responsibilities at home and bosses would have to stop looking at parenthood as an affliction to be overcome.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of this newspaper or send her e-mail at [email protected].)