SORAYA CHEMALY
fOR ME, HAVING CHILDREN WAS LIKE being run over by a small, fast locomotive. I had, by virtue of giving birth to a singleton and then twins, three babies under the age of three. To say my husband and I were not prepared and had no idea what we were doing would be the understatement of the century. While I knew that becoming a mother would change my life, I did not know how much.
Now, let me say this: I love my children and love being a mother. But what I really wasn’t ready for was the avalanche of manic mothering norms that pervaded my life as a result. From the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep (note that I did not say, go to bed) I was doing something, and someone, somewhere was an expert in why I was doing it wrong. Bottles or breast. Work or no work. Co-sleep or no sleep. Too much stimulation. Not enough stimulation. Mozart on. Mozart off. Clean floor. Dirty floor. Pets or no pets. Shots or no shots. Too much holding. Not enough holding. Nanny. No nanny. Day care. No day care. Bonding. No Bonding. Diapers. No diapers.
Being became a prolonged exercise in inadequacy, undertaken in a haze of sleep deprivation, cortisol and adrenaline. And that was just the mothering bit. I was also working. Outside of the home, which means for money. Deadlines, conference calls in bathrooms, meetings, overdue reports. And married. Thank God my husband loved me unconditionally and had a sense of humor. I fast became the quintessential not-only-can-you-have-it-all-but-also-you-must-have-it-all mother. Otherwise, what kind of woman were you?
When my children started school, however, opportunities for hyper-mothering exploded. After years of entertaining, and caring for toddlers and organizing various play dates, childcare, and schedules, I foolishly thought that school meant I would have more time. Instead, it introduced a new and unforeseen pressure: volunteering. I genuinely didn’t know what I was doing with children in school. I’d never had children in school, so when it came to anything related to this new experience, I, mom-in-headlights, just did it. I showed up for every event, I solicited auction items, I sorted books for book fairs, I made class play costumes, I baked, I “sewed,” and I showed up and showed up and showed up.
Until the Incident of the Corn Husk Dolls.
The Incident of the Corn Husk Dolls is what sent me over the edge, and for that I will be eternally grateful. Are you familiar with corn husk dolls? I wasn’t either. They’re a toy that little children in Colonial America used to make and play with. One year, I agreed to staff an activity table at our school’s “Colonial Day”—an event where children, dressed in full costume, pretend to spend the day in Colonial America. A) I did not realize that not only the children, but also the parents (read, 99 percent mothers) dressed in colonial garb on that day. For no particular reason, I draw a personal line at reenacting. B) I also did not know that I was expected to buy an obscene amount of corn, husk it, and lay the husks out to dry on my nonexistent lawn so that the children could make “real” dolls, you know, “authentic dolls.” I countered that, in an effort to be authentic, we should all then drink the colonial equivalent of beer all day, but this didn’t work. After several panic-stricken phone calls and emails about corn husks from Colonial Day Committee Members, I ordered, for the ridiculously low cost of $30, 3,000 corn husks and delivered them to the school with a note that no other woman should have to think about this for several years.
And I never volunteered again.
Of course, the problem was of my own making. I said yes to everything because saying no made me feel an amorphous maternal guilt. Socialization does, after all, have its purposes. Playdate? Yes! Meeting at noon? Yes! Homemade Playdough? Yes! Fundraiser? Yes! Can you finish this project by Wednesday? Yes! Toddler ice skating? Yes! Soccer? Yes! Business trip? Yes! Homemade meals? Yes! Book fair? Yes! As the children got older and school and activities set in, I found myself driving the equivalent of the distance between Washington, D.C. and Chicago twice a week. I woke up one day and my hands were numb. Then my arms. It took six weeks and a slew of medical tests for doctors to tell me what I already knew—no, I did not have brain cancer. I had children and was tired. I spent years grappling with the expectation that I would just do—mother, work, food, volunteer, more mothering, more work, more food, more volunteering. And that there was no compensation other than the idea that somewhere, somehow, there would be a tacit seal of “good mother” approval.
I felt like a skirted flip book stick figure that someone else had drawn and that they were maniacally flipping. But I had done this to myself. I had totally internalized, in my state of early motherhood somatization, everything society threw at me about how to be. However, I wasn’t doing it by myself. Everywhere I looked, women I knew were frantic, tired, engaged in contrived activities, exhausted by vigilance and maternal frenzy. What I saw around me, especially in schools, were women—talented, energetic, and smart—creating often largely inefficient activities either to compensate for workplace systems that made it as hard as possible and financially irrational for them to work or to complement the absences that these systems required once they’d become mothers. Whether they were stay-at-home moms, working part-time or full time, the pressures were the same and were magnified by volunteer culture. The cherry on top was that everyone believed this was all about individual “choices.”
Now, I know that many women enjoy volunteer work and that volunteering is a kindness without which much that is good in the world would not happen. This is not to denigrate the truly valuable work that volunteers do. The problem is not volunteering per se. It’s the nature of our volunteer culture, particularly in the way it is enmeshed with mothering. Volunteering is a highly gendered activity. It is both fed by and perpetuates our country’s sex-segregated workforce and persistent wage gap.
Women volunteer more than men. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in March 2012, there was even an uptick in volunteering marked by a gender gap. Women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four, with at least one child, are the most likely to volunteer. These same women also tend to be college graduates.1
The most frequent anecdotal explanation I hear is, “The men have to work and be the breadwinners.” What about single women?
Talk about an outdated idea whose time has long passed. While the nature of work and family has rapidly changed in the past forty years, volunteering has not. More than half of the labor force is women, and women are now the breadwinners in 40 percent of households. Men have not taken up the volunteering slack, and volunteering, for many women, is part of being a Good Mother.
Good Mothers fill schools and other organizations that benefit hugely from their unpaid labor. Many schools would come to a grinding halt if it were not for a largely female cadre of unpaid, talented workers. Mothers staff various offices, raise massive amounts of money, organize events, chair committees, run field trips, function as accountants, and substitute for teachers. They should be compensated for their work.
Every time they aren’t, or volunteer cultures are dominated in gross disproportion by women, they perpetuate a system whereby women’s work is invisible and unpaid.
At one point, a friend of mine—by virtue of having once been a senior expert in the finance securities sector, was asked to organize potluck dinner finances because she was “good with numbers.” As an artist (I was a painter—of canvases, not walls), I was asked to paint stage sets and furniture because I was so “good with paint.” Somehow, both she and I and millions of other women are expected to step up and provide hundreds of hours of work for free and that idea is compounded by the idea that that’s what certain Good Mothers do.
School cultures are a microcosm of our economy. This donated “maternal labor” credit that gets applied to school budgets substantively contributes to an already unconscionable lifetime wage gap and sex segregation by devaluing all of our work. The same way that school budgets don’t take this workforce into account, our Gross Domestic Product doesn’t take the work women do as mothers (and a slim few men as fathers) and homemakers into account either. It is, technically, “leisure time.” It’s called “nonmarket household production” and it is just “too hard” to measure. Imagine that. Somehow we measure all kinds of other things just fine. If we valued women’s work at home and as volunteers, we’d have to reconsider the biases inherent to our workforce and the decisions that go into women’s and men’s “choices” regarding work, childcare, and flexibility. We’d have to think about the fact that women are made financially vulnerable by these systems in ways that men are not.
The scenarios I’m describing are usually associated with problems of affluent, mainly white women who, for the most part, can afford to not work full time. However, as a USA Today analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics study explained, “Women of all ages, educational levels, and races volunteer more than men with the same demographic characteristics. Men volunteered at a rate 6.4 percentage points lower. And their participation was almost unchanged from the year before.”2
Volunteer cultures illustrate problems that pervasively affect all women to varying and more extreme degrees. Most women are not in this category of staying at home and donating their time. Many feel the conflict, stress, and pressure of not being able to participate actively in volunteer cultures that become, in essence, daddy-subsidized hierarchies of women who can donate their time. I think the result is often a subtle race and class divide in school communities. On the other hand, I also understand the complexity of what it means to be an African American mother in this country who can volunteer, what that represents in historical terms and how different this experience can be for women of color. However, I believe that systems whereby women’s labor is so massively discounted do us all a disservice and warrant greater discussion.
So, after three years trying to figure this out, I reread my worn Marilyn Waring bible, If Women Counted, and when next asked to sit on a school committee made up entirely of well-intentioned and hardworking women, I explained, with a smile, that I thought the spouses of these women should do it instead. Everyone laughed because it was such an absurd suggestion. Then I explained that their unpaid work bummed me out and went through my reasoning. I received uncomfortable blank stares, and a few wry smiles, but no one really asked me again.
Last Spring, my husband and I attended a school event where parents were asked to come see their children perform and eat lunch with them. I sat at a table with eight men and one other woman. Ten mothers staffed two buffet tables where kids lined up with plates, eager to eat. When lunch was served, one of the men at my table, in contravention of the request that children be allowed to eat first, got up to get his lunch. When he was asked to wait by a mother routing children toward the tables, he loudly, pointedly, and rudely proclaimed, “Some of us have work to get back to.” The truth is, he only said out loud what many people still think. That’s what complementary roles for men and women means, after all.
He eventually got to the buffet tables. A literal assembly line of mothers served him his lunch. My daughters, quietly absorbing as children do, life lessons from their environments and the behavior of the adults in them, understood exactly why I was not one of them.
I explained what I was doing and why to my children, who could not care less if I painted stage sets, or bought cupcakes instead of made them. Equally important, I learned to say no to anything I could not or would not or did not want to do, and I did so unapologetically. No excuses, no explanation. It’s a too-late-in-life-acquired skill that I now happily apply to everything. A friend calls it, all caps, my UNAPOLOGETIC NO. I am always civil, but when asked if I would spend six hours sorting books or decorating tables, I smile and say, “No, thanks,” and leave it at that. Among the other things I’ve learned as a mother, is that women continue to explain way too much.
1 “Volunteering in the United States 2012,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 23 Feb. 2013, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm
2 Brian Tumulty, “Women are the Driving Force Between Higher Volunteerism Rate”, USA Today, March 3, 2012, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-03-12/women-are-driving-force-between-higher-volunteerism-rate/53500042/1