Haiti: Between the Earth and the Clouds

In last Friday's NPR interview with local businessman Pierre Brisson from Petionville, (the "Upper Rockridge" of Port-au-Prince), the man described his view of the city minutes after the earthquake as if the city were "floating between the earth and the clouds".

As I listened to the interview, driving home from my son's tennis lesson, the Eucalyptus trees whizzing by on the hillsides, the freeway monotonous and smooth beneath my wheels, I recalled a small painting that hangs in the entry hall of my house. It is not a valuable painting, but I fell in love with its color and composition. It was painted by an artist of the Jacqmel School of Haitian painting which often depicts mountain scapes with Heaven meeting Earth in a gravity-less world.

I remember the day I bought this painting. I was alone and a little lonely. It was at the end of my 6-week Creole language training program in Port-Prince and shortly I would head south for the CARE job that awaited me. I was told the best person from whom to buy art was local art dealer, Issa el Saieh. Issa's shop was amazing. You walked into this cinder-block and cement room toward the front of his house after climbing up a set of stairs extending from a crumbling driveway. It was a tall, cool, and slightly dark, loft-size room - paintings hung all over the walls, were piled up in stacks, leaning in precarious angles against walls, with barely space for one to move around. I loved the smell of all that oil and acrylic- it spoke of possibility, the romance of art, the lure of beauty. Issa offered me a seat by the window and a cup of strong Haitian coffee. In his kind yet slightly grumpy way, he would help me search for paintings he knew I could afford. On this particular visit Issa helped me find the painting you see here.

Recalling Issa and my experience of Haiti brings back tears of things lost. Issa, I now learn, has been dead since 2005. A part of my past is dead too: time has passed, I've grown up and moved on to pursue other things. But the painting reminds me to stay present: it speaks of the beauty of the Haitian imagination and the depths of Haitian creativity and hope. Haitians will no doubt rise to survive this catastrophic tragedy but in the mean time, I cry for the unspeakable pain and suffering this nation once again must endure. Click here for information on donating to CARE's earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

Diana Kapp, Mommy Wars, More Voices

(I'm grateful to guest contributor Allison Farber-Cheston's enthusiastic, practical article about the benefits of women going back to work and how to get started. If you missed it, check it out here.)

Returning to the topic of transition...I already feel the future opening up, the pull of new professional work even if it's still an idea, a goal. I'm anxious, excited, and sad. I wonder about pulling together my resume, the interviews, and rejections, logistics, childcare, etc. I grieve my children's growing up and needing me less. While I am tender and respectful of these feelings, I also seek compassionate allies. I need articles that speak to this complexity of feeling, that make me feel connected, that inspire me to action.

I don't actually read San Francisco Magazine that much, but when I do it's often because Diana Kapp has a new article. She decides on a story idea then, like a bull dog/race horse, grabs it with all her might and, not unlike her penchant for extreme physical training, goes for it with blinders on, heading to the finish line. Such was the case in her recent article, "The Mother of all Recessions" (cover title: Did Stay At Home Moms Get it all Wrong?").

I was interviewed as part of Ms. Kapp's research. She said it was going to be a story about the cultural expectations of women transitioning back work whether they'd been out for a few months or a few years. For 1.5 hours I talked about my experience of choosing to stay at home and the trade-offs for marital roles, self-esteem, and personal identity. It felt great to speak and feel heard. I had no illusions that Diana's story would be a love-fest but I felt it was important to say my piece; at the very least, in honor of my feminist mother who had struggled with being an artist and a mother, as I've written about elsewhere.

Long story short, Diana Kapp's piece was published. It suggested that stay-at-home mothers weren't contributing enough to society or themselves, that perhaps the recession would finally drive us out of the paralysis (my word, not Diana Kapp's) of motherhood. People were offended and wrote in. Some people liked it. Lots of stuff about class and privilege and the responsibility of journalists to keep themselves out of the story. Yet another WHITE chapter in the "Mommy Wars". Why do I say white?

I recently read a blog post in Love Isn't Enough by Deesha Philyaw about the predominance of white women writers in the mainstream market of motherhood memoirs and why that provides women readers with a limited perspective on the issues of work and family. The article was originally published in Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, no. 40, Summer 2008. With permission from the author, the article is re-printed here:

Ain't I a Mommy?

by Deesha Philyaw

"The absence of black mommy memoirs mirrors the relative absence of black women’s voices in mainstream U.S. media discourse about motherhood in general. In particular, this discourse is concerned with how women balance the demands of family and careers, and with the decision by some college-educated women to opt out of the labor force altogether and remain at home with their children. When this discourse ceased to be polite, the explosion was dubbed “the mommy wars.”

The genesis of the mommy wars can be traced back to the “cult of true womanhood” (also known as the “cult of domesticity”), the 19th-century view that delicate white women bore the sole responsibility for housekeeping and childcare, and were to be placed on pedestals at home and kept out of the public sphere. By contrast, since 1619 when the first slaves arrived on the shores of what is now the United States, most black mothers have had no choice but to work. Instead of being placed on pedestals, black women watched as our babies were placed on auction blocks. And yet, we pressed on through the most dehumanizing conditions, working on the plantations, and caring for the children who remained.

Speaking at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth reportedly asked the assembly of white men and women where her pedestal was. Over the objections of the white women’s-rights advocates who sought to silence her that day, Truth spoke of the brutality she endured in slavery and wondered aloud why she didn’t receive preferential treatment as a member of the fairer sex—asking, famously, “Ain’t I a woman?”

Shortly after Emancipation, most rural black women attempted to adopt the cult of true womanhood, tending to home and hearth with the blessing of their husbands. But this experiment was short-lived, as white politicians and plantation owners sought to rebuild the cotton economy in the post–Civil War era. With the 1865 enactment of the federal Black Codes (a precursor to Jim Crow segregation laws), the labor of newly freed slaves was once again controlled by white people through exploitative sharecropping arrangements. As a result, black mothers and their children were forced back into the fields.

Less than a century later, when World War II moved record numbers of married white women into the labor force to take the place of their deployed husbands, the cult of true womanhood mostly died in practice. It left in its wake decades of public and private debate over whether women—white women—can be good mothers while also pursuing successful careers.

The current mommy wars resurrect this hand-wringing for a new century. Profit-seeking magazines, book publishers, and talk shows capitalize on the guilt and fears expressed by some working mothers, and on the “Should I go back to work?” doubts of some at-home mothers. From Dr. Phil to the New York Times, the media shamelessly pit the two camps against each other, fueling the flames of their anxieties. Never mind that after a year or so of maternity leave, most women return to work, and 75 percent of mothers with school-age children work—most doing so because they have to. Never mind that most at-home mothers aren’t interested in bashing their working counterparts.

Magazine articles begat inflammatory books begat appearances on tv morning shows. In 2004, Caitlin Flanagan turned a New Yorker article into a book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, in which she—a wealthy, white, self-described antifeminist who once employed a nanny and a maid and has never changed her own sheets or cleaned her own house—had the nerve to write, “Women have a deeply felt emotional connection to housekeeping,” and therefore, should stay at home. In the other corner was Linda R. Hirshman’s Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which also began life as a magazine article (“Homeward Bound,” published in the American Prospect). Released in 2006, this book speaks mainly to affluent, highly educated women, essentially arguing that the only worthwhile life for them is one driven by professional ambition. By staying at home, a woman is creating her own glass ceiling and harming society as a whole, says Hirshman. The book was re-released last year in paperback with the kinder, gentler title Get to Work…And Get a Life, Before It’s Too Late.

Last year saw the release of Leslie Bennetts’s The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, which, like Get to Work, predicts doom and gloom for educated women who opt to stay home with their children rather than stay in the office. Bennetts warns of long-term loss of income and retirement funds, difficulty reentering the workforce after a long absence, and the risky venture of total financial dependence on men.

While these book-length volleys in the mommy wars tended not to be bestsellers, they still managed to capture the attention of media outlets hungry for ratings, magazine sales, and website hits. Despite selling only about 4,000 copies (as of April 2007), Hirshman’s book landed her on The View and Good Morning America. Flanagan’s book only sold 5,000 copies more than Hirshman’s, but she got to hawk it on The Colbert Report and whine about her critics in an essay for Time.

The abundance of ink and airtime devoted to a vocal minority of women promotes the idea that this minority’s experience is somehow universal. Low-income and working-class women, black women, and other women of color don’t see their mothering experiences and concerns reflected in the mommy media machine, and we get the cultural message loud and clear: Affluent white women are the only mothers who really matter. Further, media overexposure of these women bolsters the perception of them as self-absorbed brewers of tempests in teapots.

Thankfully, there have been some more temperate voices in the wilderness of all this judgment about motherhood and work. Though still mommy-centric, books like Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety and The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels do not shove women into boxes labeled “stay-at-home” and “working,” respecting the fact that many mothers move in and out of full- and part-time employment throughout their lifetimes.

Two anthologies, The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage and Mommy Wars, also steer clear of the finger-pointing. The former includes essays by at least two women of color, though neither appears in the book’s “Mommy Maddest” section. Black writers Veronica Chambers, Lonnae O’Neal Parker, and Sydney Trent contribute to Mommy Wars, a collection that explicitly seeks to bridge the gap between alleged “warring factions.” And yet Random House subtitled it, over the editor’s objections, with the mommy wars-ian descriptor Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families.

That black mothers were not among the combatants on the fake battlefield of the mommy wars is not coincidental. This simply wasn’t our fight. In her book Having It All: Black Women and Success, Veronica Chambers notes, “Guilt just isn’t a currency in our lives the way it is in the lives of white women.” Further, as economist Julianne Malveaux observed in USA Today, “Some African-American women want to yawn at the angst about shouldering multiple burdens and juggling multiple roles. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt so long ago that I recycled it.” Since the 1940s, black women have outnumbered white women in the labor force. According to some reports, the black middle class owes its existence to black women’s presence in the workplace.

After Emancipation, those black women fortunate enough to pursue higher education took advantage of the professional opportunities available to them. Many of these middle-class, college-educated women embodied the “lifting as we climb” motto coined by the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. The NACW and other organizations in the black women’s club movement served on the front lines of the antilynching crusade, advocated for workers’ rights, and sought to improve the quality of life for their impoverished brothers and sisters.

Fast forward to the present day and this “we’re all in this together” legacy lives on. Professional black mothers can generally count on other black women they know to cheer them on as they advance in their careers, and they in turn may lend a financial hand to extended family members who need it. Mocha Moms, a support group for at-home mothers of color with more than 120 chapters nationwide, lobbies for quality childcare for low-income working women. Instead of deriding working mothers, the organization makes this statement on its website: “We support the choices our members are making…but respect every parent’s right to make different decisions.”

I asked one Mocha Mom I know, Jennifer, what she thought about mommy memoirs and the mommy wars. She responded, “Historically, we’ve had to take care of our kids and their kids,” referring to black women’s roles during slavery and as domestic workers in white households after slavery and throughout the ’50s and ’60s. “Now we only have to take care of our kids, and we just don’t have the same level of angst as white women do. Definitely not enough to write a whole book about it.”

Jennifer, a married mother of two with an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a law degree from Columbia, adds, “I struggle with the daily demands of mothering. But I also remember that I’m standing on the shoulders of my great-great-grandmothers who were enslaved, beaten, raped, and they pulled through and made it. My existence is proof of their survival, their victory and perseverance. So how can I have a meltdown because my kid is having a tantrum when I’m trying to cook? Of course our grown-up needs have to be met, too, but still. We do what we have to do.”

Of course, black mothers are not endless founts of strength. Nor do we live charmed, guilt-free lives. Some black at-home mothers are asked by family and friends to justify the decision to “waste” their educations. Professional black mothers may have to forego material comforts and greater financial security in exchange for more flexibility and time at home with their kids. But all this struggling and striving happens in the context of our history. If a black mother’s household income is such that she can afford to stay at home with her kids or opt to pursue a career full-time instead—either way, we’ve arrived at a profound historical moment. Either way, she is living a life her foremothers could only dream about.

So if black women haven’t beaten down publishers’ doors with manuscripts about mothering or about pulling second shifts, it’s probably because this is what we’ve always done, without fanfare and without the luxury of “what about the children?” pearl-clutching. Perhaps because many of us are only a generation or two removed from poverty, we can’t in good conscience write unconcerned screeds that ignore the hard realities for poor women and children. Maybe we look at our girlfriends—working women who aren’t mothers—and are reminded that it’s not all about the mommies. Maybe we realize that mommy-centrism lets employers and policy-makers off the hook with regard to family-friendly workplace changes that would allow mothers and fathers to work more flexible hours without sacrificing their careers in the process.

This is not to say that black women never sweat the career-family stuff, nor is it to say we aren’t writing about motherhood at all these days. However, the number of such books is woefully small, and the results are not as shrill or as navel-gazing as the typical mommy book tends to be.

Said navel-gazing was what motivated Washington Post reporter Lonnae O’Neal Parker to write her first book. In 2002, Parker penned an article for the Post called “The Donna Reed Syndrome” about her decision—reached when she fell asleep in her driveway one night after covering an event for work—to take a yearlong break from her job in order “to have gleaming hardwood floors and to hang out with the kids.” Parker recalls, “I wrote about what that year meant to me, and how at the end of it, I returned to who I was—a reporter. I returned to my career…with a better set of tools in place to give myself more rest and a greater ability to do what I do.”

Among the responses to that piece was a letter from a woman who wrote: “I suppose you think I’m pathetic. I have stayed at home since the birth of my son three years ago.” Parker was floored. “As if what I wrote was an indictment of her! The total obliviousness to black women’s history, and that it had always included work, was just galling.”

The encounter led Parker to write I’m Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work, a book that combines memoir with the stuff good U.S. history texts should be made of. In it, Parker presents her personal experiences as a mother, wife, and professional woman, as well as the larger historical legacy of black women and work. Of the mommy wars, she writes: “Understand, it’s not that I think that black women have all the answers—only that we have struggled with the questions longer and that sometimes our tool sets are more expansive. I am clear that in all cultures there are other committed women who deeply believe they must stand on one or another side of a work-family divide and agitate in order to create a better world for their children. And really, I can dig it. I’m actually quite grateful that I can skim some of their best parts off the top. But these women must never, ever try to give me any of their excess baggage.”

Parker approached three publishing houses about her book. Two immediately “got it” and, of the two, Parker ultimately chose Amistad because the head of that HarperCollins imprint was living a life parallel to hers: a black woman and mother who recognized the book’s cultural touchstones. “Both houses were enthusiastic about the book, but there was a layer of translation that I didn’t have to do with [the Amistad head].”

Black women readers embraced I’m Every Woman, hungry for a perspective different from that found in the usual mommy-book fare. And, as Parker had hoped, some white women “tired of the echo chamber” are now teaching the book in university classrooms. “This isn’t just about the mommy wars,” Parker says. “It’s…necessary to hear other voices. It’s human, it’s sisterly, it’s progressive.”

Going Back to Work: Why and How to Make the Transition

Guest Blog for Anna Edmondson

By Allison Cheston, Career Advisor

One of the things women frequently approach me about is the idea of going back to work and how to get started. I am always very encouraging, because I strongly believe that everyone should work, regardless of financial circumstances.

Why do I argue that people should work? Because if you read the studies about happiness you will understand how critical it is to continually reach and attain specific goals. It is the reaching, followed by the pleasure of achievement, which enables human beings to feel most fulfilled. And this cycle needs to continue throughout ones life. Work is a place where you can create and meet challenges regularly; (ideally) growth is built into the culture.

If you are a well-educated woman living in a major city, the pressure to return to work can range from subtle to intense--especially if you left work to stay home with children and they are now in school full-time. You have noticed that more women work than not, and regardless of whether you have pressure to make money, you may feel you are not fulfilling your potential.

Another turning point for women is when their kids are about to leave for college. They may be questioning their identities, wondering what their next phase will be. If work seems like the best option, the hurdle is that they haven’t held a job in 15-20 years, which makes the process of planning a job search even more daunting. But I’m happy to say there is light at the end of the tunnel.

First of all, the world of work has changed dramatically in 15 years, and many worthwhile positions can be configured for part-time work or telecommuting. Secondly, women returning to work can make ideal, and cost-effective, employees. They are highly-educated, excellent at multitasking and frequently decline insurance since they already hold coverage. Motivated women returning to the workforce typically work more efficiently and command lower salaries than those who have maintained their careers. Employers already know this, and despite the dismal job market, if you work hard to identify the right role and organization, you may be able to create an ideal work schedule that provides the right amount of challenge and growth opportunity. But you need to be strategic about it.

So how do you go about writing a resume, for example, if you’ve been out of work a long time? Think hard about the kinds of things you’ve been doing while you’ve been out, which have built your skill-set. Many women do volunteer work, which can make you attractive to non-profit organizations or companies that need event planning or sales experience. List everything you’ve done, and identify the skills you’ve added with each activity.

Now is the time to conduct your research to identify the roles and companies that would benefit from your skills and expertise. Use job boards to identify titles and companies, but don’t spend time applying for specific positions; this is not a good use of your time.

It’s also time to activate your network, if you haven’t already done so, using sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Write a punchy profile that describes what you can do for organizations and reach out to those in your network asking for specific help.

Create a functional resume, which highlights your skills, and add a section featuring your unpaid work experience. Be ready with a brief, unapologetic story about your time off, and move on to what you can do for an employer. Have business cards ready with your name, address, phone and email address, and a couple of terms describing what you do.

When you do find an organization and position that seems right, be upfront about what you can do for them and what would be the ideal situation for you. Present your case in business terms, and don’t be afraid to negotiate—employers respect that. If you need help with negotiation, here’s a wonderful book.

If you don’t want to hire a career advisor on your own, gather a group of likeminded women and hire a coach to moderate your weekly discussions. You can help and motivate each other as you navigate the new world of work.

For more information, you can reach me at www.allisoncheston.com.

We need practice promoting ourselves

What I need is a nice, succinct schtick, my own, 3-line set of ad copy. A friend came over for dinner last night. She doesn't have kids. She has an important job with food policy advocacy and like all of us, her various life quandries. Toward the end of the evening, sitting together in my living room with my son on the couch across from us, this friend asked me about my own personal ambitions. It took a couple of tries. The first time, my son interrupted and wanted to share an anecdote about a new soup recipe he'd recently discovered. My friend asked me the same question again. I asked my son to either listen respectfully, or go hang out in his room. He decided to stay.

The second time I was able to describe my growing focus in communications for progressive causes, that I wanted to work part-time. "That's great!" she said. She reassured me that she'd keep me in mind if she heard of anything. "But," I said, "raising the kids is still the priority with one entering high school next year..." my voice drifted off, betraying the unresolved conflict I still felt about home and work.

At this my friend said, "So what do you actually do all day, what are you doing tomorrow for example?" She seemed genuinely curious if a bit nonplussed. I forgave her. I had a huge mental list for the next day, nothing do with the Afghan crisis or health-care reform, but practical things: food shopping, high school research, chores, email, carpooling, writing, scheduling. Perhaps because she wasn't a mom and her work didn't involve kids in any way, because she was who she was, I found myself going blank, shutting down, unable to explain myself in an orderly fashion as if I had to ask myself the same question, "What do I do all day?"

One reason I struggle with these situations is because I take myself too seriously. (I can see you all nodding your heads in agreement). Perhaps I don't get out enough, mingle at enough parties to hone my wit and wax ironic about being a mom in the 21st century. But it's more than that.

To get my shtick I need practice. All stay-at-home women transitioning back to work need to practice talking about themselves, to promote themselves, to balance the 'talk' about who we want to become with who we are now, in honest, hopefully funny, positive language. It takes a lot of stumbling. It's easy to avoid. But I call on all of us to try this as often as we can; to stumble through, to treat our listeners with compassion, to let ourselves be teased, as we slowly and importantly, define who we are in the best of terms.

Children and their questions!

I was driving my 11-year-old son to practice recently when he asked me,"Mom, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grow up and did you become any of those things?"

In those fleeting seconds, all I could think about was that I absolutely couldn't remember a thing about what I wanted to be. Among my siblings I was the least able to remember the past. I was the kind of kid who was bursting with an outward-focused energy, the one who always wanted to play outside and throw the ball with my dad or jump into a pile of leaves and be where the action was. I would go and go and go until I was exhausted, then at night collapse into bed, to my father 'Papi's' make believe stories about Pajama Jack and Willow Tree. As a child I didn't reflect much, but if I did, it was more of the daydreaming variety where I'd lapse into fast-changing, emotional reveries of landscapes and colors and images of people doing things.

But what did I want to become?

At first I must have wanted to become some version of my parents. Who they were and what they did were complicated and mysterious. Papi was some sort of lawyer-ish person who, from an elegant office in downtown D.C. helped people in really poor countries buy houses for themselves. And twice a year for two or or three weeks he would travel half-way across the world, to Botswana or Bangladesh and other places. His post-trip slideshows of baboons-in-the-savannah, squatter settlements, and street-lepers were like reading a National Geographic magazine- his job seemed really cool and exotic but a little too abstract.

My mom's job was even harder to make sense of. She was clearly not going to an office anywhere. As a 70's feminist, she never said her main job was raising her children. She called herself an artist and when she wasn't taking care of the 4 of us (the kids, and my dad), she was up in her studio making pen-and-ink illustrations for magazines and someone's company logo. And she was writing essays. But this "career" of hers seemed to make her feel lonely and restless. I definitely did NOT want to become THAT. However, I was in awe of her talents and spent many hours trying to draw horse's heads and making little home-made blank books with construction paper and a stapler.

In answer to my son's question, I told him that in fact I did, for a while, want to be like my dad and help poor people in other countries and I did in fact become a city planner and live and work in countries to help poor people. If we'd had more time I might have told my son I had sort of wanted to and eventually did become something of a writer. I threw something in about doing what you like and are good at and not to focus on the money too much (this to a child who wants to become a millionaire and environmental engineer).

The question I have to ask myself is: what happened to the little girl who was too busy living and jumping in the leaves, the little girl who couldn't get enough out of the day, who needed people and action so much of the time, that she had no time to think about 'becoming'? This is who I'm in search of, that raw, curious part of myself that embraces life with such joy, passion, and inexhaustible energy that the labels and ideas of who I'm supposed to be become irrelevant.

Don't Believe Everything You Think

The title of this post is from a bumper sticker on my neighbor's car. I love it! I only wish I could actually do that. My last post ("Is it Racist to Be a White Stay-at-Home Mom?) got some strong feedback so I'm going to keep the topic on the table here a bit longer. One working friend commented how much she'd LOVE to be able to quit her job and stay home with her kids but she has no choice. She had a hard time relating to my discontent. Her point was also that we're all muddling through the best we can so what's the point of fretting over other people's opinions of us?

Another person said she felt that race has nothing to do with whether or how one chooses to stay home and raise their kids other than the gender and socio-economic factors that determine our ability to choose. On reflection it's clear I worry about stereotypes I think other people are projecting onto me (kid-centric, shopaholic, snobbish & uptight, controlling). More than likely it's I who is projecting stereotypes/attitudes onto other people, making assumptions about their points of view (hostility, envy, distrust). I'm one of those white people who might as well carry a sign on my chest that says "Beware! Guilt-Ridden White Person".

And back to the privilege issue (for "white privilege" includes economic privilege). Yes, it's a privilege to stay home and raise the kids. I'm searching for an acceptance of myself in a role I never expected to have for this long. Now that I've been out of the workplace for over 10 years I'm starting all over again as I gear up to find a new role. I've always done what other people (parents, teachers, experts) suggest I do. Now it's is up to me to choose and it is scary and confusing but somehow authentic. That in itself is a feminist act, choosing one's own next steps beyond the carpool.

Is it Racist to be a White, Stay-at-Home-Mother?

You know what bugs me? In some ways I am comfortable where I am, staying at home raising the kids. Maybe about 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time when doing or thinking about the never-ending list of domestic drudgery I carry this existential cocktail of shame, confusion & doubt that the "world out there" in my American cultural context of smart, successful friends, judges me for choosing motherhood over career. Maybe it's that I feel guilty for having the privilege of being able to stay home. Am I scared that I reflect a stereotype of white racial privilege, the sort of liberal, well-educated version of the white housewife on TV commercials happily selling Swiffer and Dove?

Maybe so. I abhor the stereotype of the white, well-kept housewife (doing the dishes in pearls) because deep down, I'm scared to admit that maybe I really am that woman. Why does it terrify me? Because the idea of that stereotype conveys

- subservience to men
- passive material comfort
- relinquishing financial power
- relinquishing greater ambitions in deference to others
- passive acceptance of white, male-dominant culture

So is my choice to stay at home as a white woman a racist act to some degree? Perhaps, depending how I choose to talk about and live that life and with what people.

On the other hand, what's wrong with nurturing? Raising kids these days you have to practically have a PhD in Childhood Development. It's complicated and you have to upgrade your thinking about as often as your laptop. There's a noble, ironic justice in that. And what of all the women out there who don't have higher degrees and simply choose to raise their kids with honorable common sense? What of the women out there who do NOT have the freedom to choose and have to go to work and would give their souls to stay home and raise their kids but can't for the life of them, figure out how, financially? None of it is fair. None is clear cut.

But what is true and fair is that I can live the stereotype and tweek it to some degree. I can play the game and change the rules. Do the dishes and go hear an interesting talk. Make dinner and participate in Diversity Expert Carmen Van Kerckhove's discussions on Race and Expressing One's Authenticity.

None of it is perfect, nor clear-cut, but it's a step forward toward living a more authentic life.