Before I get to what’s wrong here, I do want to point out what Matt Walsh got right. I could die happy if I never again had to hear either of these phrases:
What do you DO all day?
and
I would be SO BORED!
I’ve heard them before. A lot. And yes, it does make me feel small. Unappreciated. Undervalued. It makes me think those people either didn’t put in much effort when they were home or like they think I lie on the sofa eating bonbons and watching The View (gross; as if) because I have nothing better to do with my time. Yes, I do want desperately to tell every single person who has ever said those things to me to go fuck off. I don’t (usually), but I’d like to.
You know what’s just as bad, though?
Telling women that they’re not spending enough time with their kids. Telling women that being a WifeMommy is the most important thing she’ll ever do. Telling women they need husbands and children to be happy, fulfilled, and productive. Telling professional women that they are so expendable that no one will miss them at work if they leave.
Here are some of the things Matt Walsh got wrong:
1. Staying home is super hard work.
Unless your spouse thinks it’s the at-home parent’s job to do 100% of the housework, yard work, and childcare–24/7–there are definitely moments of down time. When my kids were tiny, nap time was my best friend. That’s not to say parenting and chores aren’t hard, just that it’s not some endless parade of labor. Matt Walsh did comment that there’s some down time, as there is in many other jobs. However, he also spend a fair number of paragraphs ranting about how “hard” staying home is. Parenting and caring for the household do involve a lot of work, but there’s no need to go overboard and act like I’m doing heavy construction all day.
2. Parenting isn’t a “job.”
I need to vent for a moment about “words mean things.” I could write an entire blog post–maybe even a series–on this craptastic view. Words have the meaning we attach to them–not some platonic ideal meaning. We use the word “job” in all sorts of ways. “I have a job to do!” doesn’t necessarily mean for pay. “That’s not my job!” doesn’t have anything to do with getting paid either. So stop insisting that stay-at-home moms do not have a “job” to do. We do. So do moms who work outside the home. So do dads. It’s just another way to make sure we separate people into the categories where we think they belong. It’s another way to disparage both at-home parents and work-outside-the-home parents.
3. At-home moms belong on a pedestal.
We are not special. We are not better. I’m not interested in being elevated above anyone else. It puts me in some untouchable place where I can’t have a shitty day when I don’t even have the energy to take a shower and I feed my child Ritz crackers and string cheese for lunch so I don’t have to cook. Up on that pedestal is a magical fairy land where sick moms push through the pain to make sure that the laundry is done and the house sparkles and the kids look like glossies in a magazine. In that land, the awesome craft project on page 9 of Family Fun always turns out just like the picture, and I sew my kids’ Halloween costumes by hand. I don’t know about other stay-at-home moms, but I sure as hell don’t live in that place.
4. Moms are irreplaceable.
Well, okay, we’re not easily replaced. But working outside the home is not the same thing as having a mother die or abandon her family. What a horrid comparison. I know lots and lots of women who have paid, outside-the-home jobs. They are amazing moms! They haven’t been “replaced” by anyone. The other problem here is that it erases stay-at-home dads. Please, tell me again how only mommy can take care of the kids. I think I must have forgotten that daddies are just glorified babysitters. Never mind families that have two daddies. Or is this the universe where one of them must be pretending to be “the girl” in that relationship?
5. Someone, somewhere, has said it’s “ideal” for moms to spend less time with their kids.
I have never heard even one person say this. Sure, I’ve heard the aforementioned comments about being home. But no one has suggested that the world would be a better place if women just got off their asses and went to the office for a few hours a day.
My biggest problem with the whole post can be summed up with this quote:
Yes, she is just a mother. Which is sort of like looking at the sky and saying, “hey, it’s just the sun.”
What is implied here is that mothers, like the sun, are the center of everything. A woman’s value becomes tied to her status as WifeMommy, the person around whom the entire family solar system revolves. It ignores real women and real life in favor of an ideal, an image of the perfect family. Central to this view is the belief that a true family looks a lot like a 1950s television show. If WifeMommy is the Sun, then there isn’t any room for stay-at-home dads or same-sex couples or single parents or couples without children or unpartnered people without children or grandparents raising their grandkids. Those family situations and structures fall outside the boundaries of what is good and right, and we can therefore justify denying help, care, or solutions when the need arises.
It’s time we stopped trying to make a case for a return to a rose-tinted view of a by-gone era. This is the way individuals and families live in 2013. It’s like going out in the rain without an umbrella and demanding that it stop raining because you’re getting wet. Are there issues that can come up because of the changes in family structure? Sure. Not because those changes are bad but because they are different. “Different” doesn’t require fixing; it requires new strategies. Instead of arguing over who’s more deserving of a pedestal, let’s sit down together and figure out how we can do this thing called life together.
thank you for saying this! i’m often uncomfortable on either side of the fence, whether i draw a paycheck or not, i matter. it’s hard to even find language that is not pre-loaded with the inferences of abandonment and greed. if you work ‘outside’ the home, it sounds like you left it. if you ‘choose’ to stay at home, you’ve suddenly become virtuous and unselfish. polarizing ourselves doesn’t help.
It’s no wonder that some working women react to the elevation of virtuous stay-at-home parenting by disparaging it. I think if we stop treating at-home motherhood as the pinnacle of existence, women who work will feel a lot less defensive. Maybe then healing can begin.
So good! Thanks Amy!
Thanks! You’re very kind. 🙂
They should’ve captioned that photo: “A Day In the Life a a Housewife When the War Is Not In Her Country”. Sorry. I know that’s not the issue in your post. But I thought it should be said. And I’m having that kind of day in which I need to say it.
Ha! Truth. I’m willing to bet that’s not the experience of housewives in Poland during the same war. Also, I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it looked in most of England at that time, either (which is where the photo is from). They suffered quite a bit during WW2.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s what the lives of women in the countries where we’re making war today look like, either.
I guess the tie-in here is that women’s lives, whether they’re wives or not, and whether they’re mothers or not, don’t always involve the kinds of choices people assume. If you’re not fitting the image, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not trying hard enough or that you don’t care about what you’re doing and the impact it will make. Whether you’re raising kids or not, both staying home and going out to work for a paycheck can be things done out of necessity, not just by choice. And what your life looks like when you do either of those things also depends on more than your personal choices. In addition, this whole discussion leaves out women who work part-time or from home, two things that involve their own challenges.
In the end, if we ask ourselves how many women’s lives, throughout history and the world, have looked like the image we see in the picture above, the answer has to be, “not many.”
Your last line says it all. Almost no one’s life looks like a glossy in a magazine or a television sitcom family. I’m pretty sure there a lots of places in the world where women wish they had the kinds of choices we have here. It would be nice if we could make better use of our time than celebrating one thing while simultaneously (or by way of) trashing the other.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why people care about someone else’s work/non-work situation. You are right on!
I know, right? I’m sick of judgy people telling others what they should do. If we’re so worried that kids are losing out because mom’s not home, then instead of attacking those moms, why not help the kids? If we think women are “bored” staying home, why not ask those bored moms to meet up for lunch? Geesh. It’s not as hard as it sounds to just live and let live.
I would rather celebrate that woman have more choice today than in generations past, rather than point out who is doing what. I like what I saw as Matt’s intentions in his post, but I agree with your post as to the specific wording that was included or left out.
I think celebrating our choices sounds like a pretty good thing to do. 🙂
I really appreciated Matt Walsh’s post and found it affirming to how I feel about my role as a stay at home mom. So far I’m still adjusting to it all. But I appreciated hearing a different perspective. Thanks for pointing these out.
I think that was part of what rubbed me the wrong way. I think his intentions were good–to affirm the choice to stay home. But it came across as somehow honoring motherhood as the center, and that’s just not true for all women any more than it’s true for all men that fatherhood is the center. I want to find ways to build up all women. I think moms, whether SAH or WOH, will be better off in general if they feel loved, valued, and respected.
Loved this!!!
Want to read that series on “Words have the meaning we attach to them–not some platonic ideal meaning.” I totally believe exactly that and this is the best description of it I have ever heard.
Thanks. I’ve been wanting to write that post/series for AGES. It’s been driving me up the wall with the “words mean things.” My husband emailed me a great article on how that’s a platonic ideal. There was a lot of dense stuff about word use and what we say vs. what we mean. I understand when it comes to using words that harm, but as a general principle for speech and writing, it sucks.
It’s really says that we have a long way to go when we have to continually validate a woman’s CHOICES. Whatever a woman decides to do should be validated and supported. I don’t have kids but I see that it is a tough decision to stay at home or go to work (particularly with a new baby). Why do we make it more tough for women to make their own decisions?
Absolutely! That makes me think that there must be ways that I, as a stay-at-home mom, can better help my friends who work. I know my work-outside-the-home friends have certainly been supportive of me when I’ve needed help.
This is a fantastic response!! I know that Matt Walsh’s post made a lot of stay-at-home-moms feel pretty good, but it also made working mom’s feel pretty crappy. I don’t know how he can claim it wasn’t fueling the mommy wars. Your response is wonderful and one that I would hope we can all agree with!
Thanks! 🙂
When we first read this post, we were highly insulted by it. (For clarification, yes, there are five of us making up the Five Drunk Rednecks – 3 men and two women.) Some of the reasons others already stated, but we had two main points of contention:
1. Elevating stay-at-home-Moms to a pedestal diminishes the importance of the Dad in the home. Read enough of Matt Walsh and you realize that Dad is nothing more than the ATM machine of the house that Mom serves to keep the money flowing.
2. The adulating praise heaped on stay-at-home-Moms implies Moms who need to return to work or choose to return to work after the baby has grown up some aren’t as good of Moms as their stay-at-home counterparts.
We’re old enough to have seen what happened to some of the women, including our own Moms and Grand Moms, from the older generation, who truly believed their place was at home raising us kids. When Dad or Granddad passed on, all of a sudden their comfortable golden years became a struggle to make ends meet when the household income was cut in half – and more with the Great Recession of 2008. Mom nor Grand Mom had a pension of their own or recent job skills to return to work at something other than at or near minimum wage jobs.
Our message to stay-at-home Moms: Great if you and your husband jointly decided being a stay-at-home Mom is what is best for your family, but, hopefully you planned for the unexpected tragedy (death, permanent disability) or unforeseen events (job layoff, divorce) and how the loss of some or all of your husband’s income would affect you and you’re children, if they aren’t already adults on their own.