Out with flex-time! In with face time!

These are the messages two of the highest profile working mothers in America are sending to the rest of us. If  Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, and Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer, have their way, women in the workplace will remake themselves in their C-Suite images which, sadly, is looking like something from the 1980′s movie Working Girl.

The funny thing about their recent messages to working women is this –  some of their sentiments sound an awful lot like what I heard as a young journalist and then as a new attorney in a large law firm decades ago.

What’s old is new again?

Whether it’s fair or not, I expect more of high-powered women leaders who also happen to be mothers when it comes to understanding what’s realistic for most women in the workforce — especially when the online community of women has rallied around them in the past, as happened when Mayer announced shortly after becoming Yahoo!’s CEO, that she was pregnant and would only be taking a couple of weeks off for maternity leave.

As for Sandberg, her new book, Lean In: Women Work and the Will to Lead, (which I read after borrowing an advance review copy) makes some good points about women needing to take charge of their careers, and not being afraid to “lean in” to the challenges of managing a professional life with family responsiblities, but it’s hard to focus on her positive points when, for most of the book, she tries really hard to portray herself as just another ordinary working mom who’s overcome the same problems the rest of us face. That’s a tough sell, as she shares anecdotes like the one about how happy she was that on a business trip with her kids she was on a private jet, and not a commercial flight, when she discovered her daughter had head lice (WHEW! Dodged a bullet on spreading those nits!).

As for Mayer, Yahoo! announced late last week that all flex-time and remote working arrangements would be rescinded, and if you want to keep your job at Yahoo!, you have to be in the office every day. Even though there is plenty of research that shows employers and employees benefit in productivity when certain flexible work arrangements are in place, in a lively Faecbook discussion, I questioned how many women must be feeling today who came to Mayer’s defense of her personal parenting/career choice when she said she was only taking two weeks off after having her baby.  Her baby, her decision.  Sure, we all knew she had a boat load of help, but whatever works for her, right?

As one friend who is been a working mother in the corporate world remarked about Mayer :

“While I do understand that this is first and foremost a business decision that Mayer has made for Yahoo!, impacts both men and women, and may be in the best long-term interests for the company, it is impossible to not also view it through a feminist lens that understands that working mothers and two-income families have been among the chief beneficiaries of flexible working arrangements. And it is a shame that we can’t incorporate these values into business success.”

Mayer, in making her corporate decision, and Sandberg, in trying to craft a new social movement by using her life as example, are both blithely ignoring the realities of life for the vast majority of working families today.

Pregnancies have complications. Babies might be easy in some senses (they are portable for a while), but kids have issues and problems and illnesses and conditions.  There are families who having double care-giving obligations — for young kids and for aging parents.  Yes, we should expect our spouses and partners to be involved in dealing with these things and all the other complications of life, but it is never as easy as it sounds. Both Mayer and Sandberg, at a time when they are trying to demonstrate their own leadership abilities,  have made their tone-deafness abundantly clear.

Mayer and Sandberg may be very well-intentioned — looking out for shareholders and encouraging women to aim for more — but the ways in which they are going about these two goals will only take us back to the time when women had to sneak out of the office if they needed to be home early (oh, wait, even Sandberg admits she did that) and bringing back that mom guilt I thought we’d all agreed wasn’t good for anybody.

Image via PhDinParenting

Robin and Jessica have provided this exclusive excerpt as part of our commemoration of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling:

Wendy Long, the 2012 Republican challenger to New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, notoriously told local news outlet Capital New York that if Roe was overturned, it was highly unlikely anyone would even notice at this point. “[I]f Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, nobody would even notice, because the states are legislating their own laws about abortion, completely independent.”

Would anyone notice? Yes, of course they would, depending on the state that they lived in and their economic means. Access to abortion will always be a reality for women in certain states like California, New York, Washington and other places that value a woman’s right to control her body. But in states like Texas, Arizona and Kansas, it’s a different story. As The Center for Reproductive Rights reported in a 2004 study “If Roe Fell,” only twenty states (at the time) would have safe, legal abortion if Roe were overturned. The other thirty states would have limited access, and twenty-one of those would likely have no access at all based on their own trigger laws or previous state court verdicts.

If “nobody would even notice,” it would only be because in many states, restrictions prior to having an abortion have become so onerous that access has become a matter of where a woman lives or how much money she has. From laws that ban abortion at different points prior to viability such as in Nebraska and Ohio, to laws that ban certain types of abortions such in Wisconsin, legislators are inserting themselves as authorities on medical best practices and turning providers into criminals. In Indiana, they are seeking ways of criminalizing women for “endangering” their pregnancies, while in Idaho, prosecutors have taken steps towards jailing women for procuring their own abortions. Washington D.C., Texas and Kansas have all found different means to use funding as a way to cut off women’s access to reproductive health services, while South Dakota, Oklahoma and Mississippi use “informed consent” and “women’s safety” as a means to deny the right to choose. Arizona simply bans everything and hopes one of the laws will eventually make it to the Supreme Court.

With 40 years of judicial precedent that has incrementally rolled back abortion access to work with and a panel of Supreme Court justices who appear more willing than ever to re-open an issue that is considered settled law, women’s reproductive rights have never been more vulnerable. And thanks to a handful of state legislators determined to make their political names and reputations by advancing legislation meant to crumble those protections offered by Roe, we may fragment into a new Confederacy of pro- and anti-women’s health states sooner than anyone could have imagined. To prevent that from happening, we need to move away from just defending a woman’s right to choose and back to an aggressive stance where we once more demand that bodily autonomy belong to all woman, regardless of their race or class.

Anti-choice activists have set the battleground in states like Nebraska, Wisconsin, Idaho, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, D.C., Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Mississippi. They have used the legislatures to create the laws that regulate abortion practically out of existence and padded the judiciary with abortion-hostile justices to control legal challenges. But by examining each individual prong in the attack on Roe it is clear that the assault is not simply on women, but on women who have the least means to fight back by themselves and for themselves. Together we can create a game plan to bring the fight back to these states and across the country as a whole in order to create an equitable health care system that offers reproductive justice for all.

Crow After Roe is available for pre-order at Amazon.

Image via iStockphoto/Gary Blakeley

I mused on my Facebook page about the bully aspect to this story. One person rightly commented that we don’t just have a gun problem in America.  We also have bullying and anger problems, ones that we’re neglecting in commentary about violence.

So why aren’t we having a national conversation about anger? Where is the call to change the bullying atmosphere not only in our schools but also in our public discourse? Those who think our gun problem is more a result of media glorification of gun violence than it is about how we regulate gun ownership, should take a quick turn around cable new shows for a glimpse of how displays of anger have become accepted and embraced as a political techniques, and how our examples of hot tempers and uncontrolled vitriol have impacted our so-called conversation.

Anger and fear over whether the government is going to take away guns.

Anger and fear in the form of political movements.

Anger and fear that invades, or precludes, governing.

Anger and fear have clearly been the motivating factors behind the so-called fiscal cliff debacle.

Google the phrase “politicians yelling at each other” and see if you have the time to sift through almost ten million hits.

Plenty of us focus on being better communicators for a living. And there are myriad online tools for that. So how have we gotten to a place where so many people believe the only way to advance their cause is to use the least effective methods — shouting, yelling, screaming with anger?

How did we become America the self-righteous?

As adults, it’s bad enough to have to sift through the screaming rhetoric to find the actual takeaways. But by allowing ourselves to give in to the “he or she who shouts the loudest and longest wins” approach and when bullying and name-calling pass for political analysis, we have to ask — “What lessons are we giving our kids?”

Does anyone think that watching Capitol Hill teaches our children anything other than the idea that no one should ever give in, and that it’s productive to call the others names, yell louder, not back down, and that compromise is for the weak?

We are surrounded by anger just as much as we are surrounded by guns.  As we have seen time and time again, those don’t make a winning combination.

Anger can become all-consuming. As a kid, I got angry a lot. As a teenager, I realized one day it didn’t feel good to be angry all the time, and tried to figure out ways to better deal with situations that made me mad. I’m glad I didn’t grow up in today’s online world, because the anger and bullying are overwhelming, just as they are becoming overwhelming in the world as it’s presented to us as news.

There’s apparently so much anger among adolescents that it has its own diagnosis — Intermittent Explosive Disorder, “a syndrome characterized by persistent uncontrollable anger attacks not accounted for by other disorders.” Sounds like Capitol Hill might need a support group for that.

I do believe there needs to be  a sea change in how we think about guns and how they’re sold and regulated. Not to mention bullets. But looking at the almost daily occurrences of violence should make us just as concerned about helping our kids learn as early as possible how to manage their anger and anxiety in more productive ways. Obviously, most of us who go through anxious times aren’t going to go on a shooting rampage. But we live in a society where anger and obstructionism are portrayed as the norm, and that fomenting public anxiety is the preferred political tool for making any argument. It’s time to look at that leadership dynamic, and not just movies and video games, to figure out why and how we’ve created an America where anger is our default reaction, rather than a last resort.

Image via iStockphoto/Carl Swahn

I know you might be tired of all the 2012 hoopla, but we took the opportunity to discuss not the outcome of the race, but how women can use the tools of online media, and their already established influence, to help make change locally  as well as nationally!

Plus, we talked about how women from all political perspectives, especially those who are included in my book Mothers of Intention: How Women and Social Media are Revolutionizing Politics in America (now available for your Kindle!) can help move the conversation beyond whether we can “have it all” to doing what we can with the voices and influence we’ve established online!

I hope you’ll take a listen and let me know what you think you can do change things in your community!

Some day, politicians and campaigns will get wise and realize that mothers, especially those online, are way too savvy to fall for their tricks of pandering every few years and trying to put us into those now infamous binders!

This is a topic I explored in my book, Mothers of Intention: How Women and Social Media are Revolutionizing Politics in America.  It’s an Amazon best-seller and is just out in E-book form in time for a nice, quick read before Election Day.

Interested? Here’s an excerpt to get you started!

Mothers are political.  If you don’t think that’s true, think again.

When children become part of our lives, we’re committed to making the world a better place for them as they grow up. But we live in a culture where mothers are often undervalued and overlooked. So many people assume that once we have children, thoughts of anything unrelated to the care and feeding of kids flees our minds, our political thoughts and goals dismissed.  As a result, it’s often difficult for women with children to be considered serious political actors. In the age of the “mommy wars,” mothers’ opinions frequently are viewed as somehow less worthy of consideration than those so-called experts, or even of women who don’t self-identify as mothers.

The good news for mothers is this — the advent of the online world of the blogosphere and social media is changing that forever.

A commonly shared story among women is that when we become mothers, people stop listening to us at cocktail parties. Even if we were the neighborhood’s most interesting girls in our pre-motherhood days, with lives full of personal and professional accomplishments who made the best small talk in town,  many of us discovered that when we brought up the topic of our children, we’d get tuned out by those who assumed we’d chat about nothing bu potty training, pre-school and playgrounds. Often people make the assumption that with the birth or adoption of a child, interesting things get sucked from women’s brains, replaced only by the mundane. I didn’t believe it until I lived it and clearly remember my thought bubble the first time it happened — “You really think I’m less smart or interesting now that I’m a mother?!”

When there is an interest in the voices of women and mothers in the political world, it has largely been when politicians or special interest groups see a particular version of motherhood as a way to frame their own perspectives, rather than engaging in actual discussion or exploring the unique view that mothers bring to the spectrum of political issues.

Politicians wonder — What do the soccer moms want? What are those security moms focused on? In the 2010 mid-term elections, we were talked in terms of being Wal-mart moms and “weary working women.” Elected officials, pollsters, and campaign representatives continue to present neatly packaged talking points aimed at the latest stereotype of motherhood and serve them up as their way to win our votes (and our dollars). But our male-heavy political and media worlds remain, for the most part, distinctly indifferent to actually hearing what women in general, and mothers in particular, have to say about the world they want and how they want to shape it.

Ready to read more? Head on over to get the e-book, or drop me a note if you’d like to purchase a signed copy of Mothers of Intention (I have a few hanging around here somewhere!)

U.S. Rep. Todd Akin says his Senate opponent Claire McCaskill was much more “ladylike” last time she ran for office.

A Mitt Romney supporter recently told NPR that Michelle Obama isn’t a good First Lady because she’s not “ladylike” enough.

The last time someone told me I wasn’t being ladylike, it was one of my parents reminding me as a pre-teen that if you’re wearing a skirt, you can’t sit like you’re wearing shorts — ’cause that’s not “ladylike.”

Some synonyms for “ladylike” are motherly, cultured, genteel. When someone uses the word in a political context, they’re usually suggesting that there is something wrong with that woman’s behavior. But why should we be surprised in this political climate that there are those throwing around that kind of “Leave it to Beaver” language? It’s totally in keeping Akin’s “legitimate rape” world view that hearkens back to the 1950s, both in style and substance.

But those who are threatened by women who don’t adhere to a “popular girls devote themselves to pleasant conversation” era would get an earful from some of my favorite “ladies” on Facebook:

“That term makes me cringe. ‘Act more ladylike’ was a popular criticism thrown at those of us growing up in the 60s and 70s.”

“Patriarchal ‘stay in your place’ bullshit.”

“This makes me want to act very unladylike and smack someone.”

“If standing up for women makes me less ladylike, then so be it.”

“Michelle Obama is a beautiful, intelligent and extremely ladylike first lady. What silliness.”

So while I cross my legs at the ankle and sip my tea with my pinky fingers perfectly poised, I’m reminded that these comments by Akin and a Romney supporter aren’t isolate episodes of a couple of people stuck in a bygone era. Much of the underlying tone about women in this election year smacks of sending us back to a June Cleaver-like time, where women “knew their place.” And that political attitude isn’t going to change until we vote people with that mindset out of office and elect those who accept that fact that women are full participants in 21st century life, not apron-wearing, baby-carrying , embroidered handkerchief-carrying helpmates who nod politely when their husbands speak.

Akin also claimed that McCaskill is more of a “wild cat” these days.  I shudder to think about what he’d call Sarah Silverman.

Image via iStockPhoto/RetroAtelier

Sh*tty moms unite!

That’s the new message giving mothers a good, collective laugh these days. And I confess, I have absolutely NOTHING against so-called “sh*tty moms.” I have plenty of sh*tty motherhood moments that I could regale you with and I can certainly laugh about plenty of them. But when we live in world that loves to label and marginalize mothers to suit their own purposes — soccer moms, Wal-mart moms, not having it all moms, Tiger moms, Chardonnay in sippy cup drinking moms, mamma grizzlies — should we really be celebrating our inner sh*tty moms in a crucial election year?

Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us, is the latest “hey, let’s compare how bad we all are at parenting and laugh about it!” book, the kind that usually makes us feel better that our houses don’t look like something out of Architectural Digest, that sometimes we actually let our children eat at McDonald’s and that we’ll never live up to the parenting advice the real experts make us feel guilty about.

But with a major election on the line in a few weeks, and so many campaigns and politicos reminding us that suburban moms are the ones that they want, adding “sh*tty mom” as the new shorthand for our demographic doesn’t exactly invite power players to treat women like the influencers they’ve become. Every now and then mothers get a glimmer of hope — remember all that mom love at the political nominating conventions? It was pretty short lived. Even as countless convention speakers were gushing about women who happen to mothers, others were implicitly suggesting that it’s sh*tty mom behavior to run for office if you’ve got young kids at home, but apparently not sh*tty political dad conduct.

So I can’t embrace the sh*tty mom way of life, at least until after this election. Because if I succumbed to my inner sh*tty mom now, I’d have to stop caring about where the presidential candidates stand on issues like women’s health, education and fair pay. I’d have to ignore the nauseous feelings I have about how the next four years are going to impact the life of my tween daughter.  And I’d have to forget about the possibility of Paul Ryan becoming president if Mitt Romney is elected and something happens to him before 2016.

We’ve only got about six weeks to go before Election Day 2012 — when we’re going to decide whether we want to keep a president who might not be perfect but who’s trying to keep women’s reproductive health safe or whether we want the guy whose presidency would throw a monkey wrench into things that impact our daughters — like whether they can get birth control and whether we, as parents, have to explain things to them like vaginal probes, forcible rape and wire hangars.

At least for the next six weeks, I’m putting out a call for us to put our secret lives of being sh*tty moms on hold and focus on our inner Mothers of Intention.

I know that sounds a little scary, especially if even uttering the word “politics” sends chills down your spine. But there will be plenty of time to be a sh*tty mom again after November 6. So let’s all unite as non-sh*tty moms for a few more weeks and keep our focus on what’s at stake for our kids and families. After that, we can revisit our inner crappy moms, because we’ll all be ready for a good laugh then.

I’ll bring the Chardonnay.

I’m sure you’re feeling warmly welcomed to this corner of the world now that you’ve announced your Google departure and your new gig as the CEO at floundering Yahoo! And you shared more good news by letting the world know via Twitter that you’re having a baby! But guess what? With those few social media characters,  you officially, but perhaps unwittingly, entered the world of pop culture scrutiny of mothers!

The deafening chorus of those who are both cheering and booing the fact that Mayer is with child as she takes on the corporate tech world brings us back to the work/life discussion we never get enough of — that any high-profile woman who’s pregnant or who has young children is still something of a curiosity worthy of criticism.

In the round of interviews Mayer has given about her move, she’s said that her baby won’t slow her down!  Sounds like her plan is to pop out the kid, take a few weeks leave, and be back to work quicker than you can say, “Give me that damn epidural!”

But Mayer, who’s looking very well-rested and nicely coiffed at the moment, will soon find out what it means to have those ‘when was the last time I slept‘ bags under her eyes and that putting your hair in a ponytail is the motherhood equivalent of primping to go out.

I’m guessing that she thinks she can have the elusive “all.” I’m not a mind reader, but I thought the same thing. So did my younger cousin who has been open about her disillusionment over being told by so many people she trusted that she could manage full-time motherhood and a full-time profession, only to learn the hard way that having it all is really a state of mind, not a physical possibility.

Some rumors are circulating that Mayer’s pregnancy is a non-issue — not because she’s qualified for the job, but  because she’s being set up to take the fall off the glass cliff. Regardless of which version is true, I have a little advice from Mayer, as someone who’s been down the “all-having” road and, at least for the moment, has lived to tell the tale:

1. Be honest with yourself about the possibility that your thinking might change once your new baby boy arrives this fall. There are plenty of us (raising hand here!) who thought we’d give birth to or adopt a child, be home for a few weeks, and head back to that power office while the nanny took care of things. That’s how my generation, and yours, were both raised. It seemed like a total non-issue. But then once that little person is in your life, you start to think — hey, I waited a long time to be a mother. Why would I outsource caring for the one person who means to most to me in the world?  Just sayin’.

2. You’ll never get those days back. There will be plenty of time to burn the midnight oil and assuage disgruntled shareholders down the road. I’m not saying quit and do the so-called “opt out” thing. But do you really have to broadcast to the world that you’ll be working during those few weeks of leave you say you’re taking? Please don’t tell me you plan to be texting a few last work notes in the labor and delivery room.

3. The view of the world is different in your 30s than in your 50s. I know I’m the first to say that 50 is the new 30. But on the announcement of your new gig, I’m remembering where I was when I was 37 — trying to get pregnant, weighing my parenting and professional options from a job with a pretty nice title and a window office. I thought I knew what I wanted, what I’d do and what kind of mother I wanted to be. And maybe you know yourself better than I did then. But as things have progressed and I’m now the mom of a soon-to-be seventh-grader, I see things much differently. Just allow for that possibility.

4. Don’t get fooled by the fancy title. You might be CEO in name, but if things are as in flux as they seem to be at Yahoo!, you might not want to buy too many new business cards. Don’t put all your eggs in that one professional basket or sacrifice yourself or your first motherhood moments for what seems like the golden professional opportunity of a lifetime. There are plenty of stories of others who’ve come before you in the executive world who found out too late that someone was already plotting to make you their sacrifice. Make sure you save the moments you will want to remember as a person, not a chief executive officer.

5. Don’t listen to Sheryl Sandberg. Yes, you might physically be able to be at home at 5:30 p.m. every day, but you’ll be getting no sleep. Not for a long time if you’re managing an infant and the rigors of trying to save a desperate company. As for Anne-Marie Slaughter’s arguments, your “all-having” will in some ways be easier when your son is an infant, but let’s talk in 12 or 13 years about how things shift when you have teens, and how they are able to suck all your attention and focus, and you realize that all the worrying you did when they were toddlers was nothing compared to your fears about cyber-bullying, sexting, drinking, tricky social issues and so much more.

6. Don’t listen to me. I know I’ve just given you all this advice, but don’t listen to me or other critics. Don’t listen to anything but your inner voice.  If working through your maternity leave makes you feel energized and seems like the right path for you, go for it. But just promise me you’ll listen to that voice and take heed of what your inner self is telling you to do when it comes to being a professional and a working mother. Because we’re all tired of having the debate over how women should manage their lives and their parenting.

Be a leader in having your own “all.”

 Image via Gawker.com

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thank you, Melissa Harris-Perry and all the great producers and staff there for having me back! I can’t wait for the next discussion! I’m also enjoying the new hashtag #allhaving! It hits just the right tone in the discussion.

Anne-Marie Slaughter meet Sheryl Sandberg. No, that’s not them in the photo, but the latest working mom discussion makes me wonder how long it’s going to be until we’re all at each other like these two lades.

Not so long ago, Facebook exec Sandberg announced to all working mothers in America than if she can have it all, then so can they! It’s easy-peasy — just leave work at 5 p.m., take some paperwork along home with you and VOILA! — more time with the kids and you can stay on top of your profession.

Except that Sandberg missed one little point — that about 99.9999% of working women in our country don’t have the luxury or job security to just pack up at 5 p.m. and make a show of breezing out of the office. If they did, lots of them would find themselves out of work or, at the very least, on the wrong end of the promotion list. As for ths vast majority of moms who don’t have offices? They risk losing their jobs even if they want to take off an hour from work to take a sick child to the doctor.

Even a Princeton professor and former Obama administration official knows there’s no way to manage the situation American working women face and she’s written about that in The Atlantic. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article is an excellent one — except for the title, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” — the title sends the wrong message because because last time I checked, no one ever promised that anyone could have the infamous “all” — the ability to have a satisfying, full-time career and the chance to be a mother who is around for all of our kids’ childhood benchmarks, as well as their needs.

To say that Slaughter is an accomplished professional woman is a massive understatement. But as her children got older, she learned something that many of us already knew — there will be times when your children’s needs trump any parent’s professional ambitions. Slaughter hasn’t abandoned her working life, but she talks about choices she’s made that fly in the face of cultural expectations that real professionals will choose job over family — the “having it all” conundrum.

I’ve thought many of the same things as Slaughter. We are both “women of a certain age,” raised to believe that, thanks to the women who paved the way for our generation, that we’d be able to be committed professionals, as well as a hands-on mothers who could “have it all” in both of those fulfilling roles with no problem.

Not surprisingly, that turned out to be a fantasy. I had to reassess at some point, because the needs of my daughter changed and those needs were challenging at times. Like Slaughter, I became a mother later in life as a result of spending time pursuing my education and career. I thought if I survived the baby and toddler years, I could figure out how to find my way back to professional fulfillment, knowing that the heavy lifting of motherhood was done.

But adolescence is tough and it just might be more important to take a step off the professional track when our children are in that phase of life than when they are toddlers, and that can throw a real monkey wrench into a professional career. Slaughter writes about the worries she had about her middle school son while she was attending a high-profile professional engagement as one of the moments that prompted her to take a small step back in order to create a life that would allow her to focus more on the needs of her children.

I gave up the world of crazy billable hours and nice-sounding titles to work as a writer from a home office so I could have the flexibility to do the “mom thing” partly because of my internal struggle about wanting to be a mother, especially since I didn’t become one until after I turned 40, as well as wanting to keep and nurture the professional identity I’d spent the better part of two decades nurturing.

I know there are many people who say that my decision makes me a traitor to the sisterhood, but in the end it was a good one for everyone in my household, especially our daughter, who had a challenging few years with night terrors and attachment issues that required a lot of attention. As we head into the teen years, I can see that some of those issues may be coming up again. And it will take a completely different approach and amount of time to work through them with a seventh grader than it did with a preschooler.

While this is a discussion worth having, the one question we rarely debate is about whether or not men have it all. Do they want it all? Do they care? And how do we create a society where the questions about tackling the issues of parenting are ones that are shared equally by mothers and fathers? I know that my husband, the guy I affectionately call “Mr. PunditMom” doesn’t have the same expectations of where and when he’s supposed to be at work vs. doing the dad thing. And he doesn’t struggle with it. There’s no question that parenting is a team sport. And my husband has definitely done his share of all sorts of parenting duties. But someone needs to stay in a job with insurance benefits and that has a salary to pay the bills. And, yes, that could have been me if I’d stayed on the professional path and he’d been the one to step off. But we made a decision that worked for us, without me realizing that there would be a whole lot of judgment going on in the world of moms and the media.

I’m just glad I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t take it to heart (much) anymore when others share their disappointment over how my personal life decisions impact the feminist movement and the advancement of all women.

Image via iStockPhoto/Marco Cariglia