I’ve been talking mommy wars on this blog since I started it. I obviously didn’t start the debate, but I had hoped that by starting my blog I could add productive and (sometimes) funny conversation to it. So when my friend Jean posted a link to my Facebook wall about this widely-read post by Glennon Melton on the topic I had to read, and of course, chime in. And then Monica chimed in and we all had a “we hate the old mommy wars debate party” and called it a night. Yes, our lives are THAT exciting.

I REALLY don’t care that much about the mommy wars anymore. I really don’t care if the SAHMs hate me or if I’m stuck on a phone call dealing with a client crisis during my son’s mommy and me class (who, me?) or about the moms that go to the office every day and have nannies or day cares or a fairy godmother taking care of their kids. I don’t care.

But what got me to actually writing a blog post 5+ years after I wrote my first one on the topic is that I am getting a bit irked with the theme of blog posts that trend towards teaching invaluable lessons to their daughters and how as either a stay-at-home mom or working mom or if we’re debating our choices, that we should be professional and productive because we are trying to raise our daughters to be strong women.

I’m all for raising strong women and the best daughters in the world, but when I look and think back over the years about this tired topic the conversation always trends towards the mother/ daughter dynamic.

What, then, for the moms of boys?

Because as a mom, working or not working, I’m trying to raise my sons to be all that you all with daughters are trying to as well. And let me tell you, the working/ non-working debate certainly shapes a young man as it would a young woman.

There are plenty of times where my eldest complains because I can’t pick him up from school, or I have to drop him early to head to a meeting and “he doesn’t get enough alone time with me.” I sometimes think those times make him stronger even though I feel badly that I couldn’t go chaperone the class field trip or volunteer for lunchroom duty for the umpteenth time. When he’s older and his brother is older, they’re going to see the ugly debate too and it could shape the kind of women they meet, date and potentially marry. Because I’ll be damned if he marries a sanctimommy hoe bag. Just saying.

The working mom debate is not a female-only issue.

My sons see in me the possibilities that they too, could implement in their lives down the line. That the definition of woman and wife and mother don’t have to be black and white, just as Glennon’s daughter doesn’t have to grow up in some antiquated mold of soccer mom vs. corporate mom.

I’d just like to say that moms of boys have just as much at stake in the debate.

(BTW – This whole conversation also says nothing of the husbands who are often off working their tails off just so moms like me can enjoy flexibility and some stay-at-home-ness. I know the guilt of missing events and the like wrack my husband constantly, but we’ve made our choices for now.)

Women are constantly trying to get out from behind a man’s success be it in the business world or beyond, but what about when the great success of the family is the woman?

That’s why I loved this piece in yesterday’s New York Times about Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the soon-to-be chair of the Democratic National Committee. She not only kicks butt as a Congresswoman, but also as a mother. And she gives due credit to where much of it is clearly due — to her husband. Wasserman says in the article:

“I promote that you don’t have to choose between work and family.” But, she adds, “I married a great guy.”

He’s apparently so great that he doesn’t even need hired help around the house when she’s off in Washington working. Unreal!

It’s refreshing when I read accounts of women who are uber-successful in their professional life cop to the fact that they have a husband at home bearing the weight of child care or personal responsibilities. I keep thinking all those awesome working moms I meet are somehow making it all happen on their own (FWIW Design Mom says Ben Blair does his half – love it!).

So a big thanks to Ms. Schultz for being so forthcoming to all us curious bystanders about how she gets it done.

Kim Clijsters is my new-ish hero. It’s not the first time I’ve written about her on this blog before. The first time I mentioned her was when New York Times author Selena Roberts took her to task for “opting out” of tennis at the young age of 23.

I bet Roberts is eating her words now.

Clijsters just won her FOURTH Grand Slam last weekend — the Australian Open — in Melbourne last weekend. She won her second — the U.S. Open — after taking the last 2.5 years off to birth and raise her daughter. And won another U.S. Open last year.

How’s that for opting back in? I hope my re-entry into the workforce is one-bazillionth as successful.

And what did she credit for her stirring “comeback” to tennis?

Why, the maturity she feels she has now that she’s a mother. I heard her say that on TV too.

It’s scary to opt-out of the workforce for whatever reason – injury, age, kids, whatever. And it’s equally as scary to opt back in not knowing what challenges might lie ahead. But I get what Clijsters is feeling. In some ways, taking the time off (if you’re lucky enough to be able to do so) only to go back in gives you the drive and insights you might not have had otherwise.

I’m a firm believer that having children has only helped my career, not hindered it. I may not have won any Opens, but knowing I have those little (and one big) dudes to come home to every night makes me feel like a champion.

Remember the six month itch I had a couple years back? Well, it’s back, but it’s for real this time and it could be called the My Baby’s Going to Be One Soon and I’m Starting to Freak Out About Having a Career Again Itch.

Or, as I’ll refer it to, The Limbo Rock. (Also, that’s a lot shorter).

I’m in limbo here, people.

I’m craving work. Like real, paid work. Yet, I don’t want to give up some of the flexibility I have by being home with my children.

I’m so torn. Many of my friends whose kids are older tell me to cherish my baby. And so I’m doing that. But they are also the ones who’ve managed to carve nice, flexible careers. And, they somehow managed to do it when their children were young.

So I feel like now’s the time. The baby is almost a year. (I know this isn’t “old,” but it’s not like newborn madness.) I have that ITCH. I want to do more.

But I want the cuddles when I want them. I want to be able to pick up my son from school and his activities. I want to be there for bedtime.

Do I give that up for a taste of an office? A meeting? A *gasp* paycheck?

I’m partly sure I do.

But, there’s the part of me that is worried once I get under that limbo stick I’ll fail and fall down.

I’m doing the Limbo Rock.

This is one of my favorite posts by my good friend Wired Momma. What the h is wrong with being a typical wife? According to her, nada. I think she nails it when she talks about how it’s easy to be a wife when we choose to leave our careers on our own terms. For those of us lucky enough to have a choice of whether or not we want to work, when we can exit when we please, it’s rather easy to embrace a typical wifely role. We have the freedom to be a wife/ mom on our own terms.

But then, it’s easy to forget that some of us out there don’t have this choice or struggle with the choice.

And, it’s also easy to forget sometimes that for us to be happy being a wife means that someone else has had to give up something.

The husband. The husband who makes it all possible for the “happy housewife” to exist.

But why would the media ever want to cover that angle?

When Kathryn Bigelow smashed through Hollywood’s glass ceiling at this month’s Oscars, she took with her years of women directors being pigeon-holed and typecast as directing “chick flicks.” As Manhola Dargis points out in her savvy article yesterday on the topic, Bigelow told Hollywood what’s what and silenced the critics. Yes, there will always be the Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephrons and Drew Barrymores who will direct lighter fair, but Ms. Bigelow showed all of us that no matter what Hollywood thinks or reports about female directors, there’s now room in the club for women to direct more “manly” type films, if you will. 

Flash to another section of the NY Times yesterday and you’ll find another outlet of the media doing just what Hollywood did to female directors up until this year - typecasting mommy bloggers as doing anything and everything to promote their blogs and make money. The article is snarky and sassy and makes it seem that all we’re out here doing is shilling for baby wipes at the expense of taking care of our kids.

The”mommy blogger“ behemoths have rightly stated their opinions online and I care not to rehash the debate of who said what, if you’ve chosen to work at home or at an office or out of your car or whatever. I just wanted to point out that even if it took 82 freaking years (can you even imagine blogging that long?), Ms. Bigelow rose above the “chick flick” female director fray and did something powerful and magical with her movie.

And we have to remember that we can too. The media can write its sensational headlines and try to pit mom vs. mom, blogger vs. blogger (or both), but as long as we write about what we believe in and do what we like with our sites, no one can mess. Eventually we will break through the clutter and be seen for more than the dirty diapers we journal about on occasion.

I just hope I’m alive to see it.

Son: “Mommy, why did such and such (name witheld) leave our class earlier this year?”

Me: “Well, she quit.”

Son: “What’s quitting?”

Me: “Hmmm… (realizing I probably shouldn’t use that term loosely around an almost four-year-old.) It’s when you decide not to do something anymore. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. Like, remember I used to work? Remember I showed you my office downtown? But then I quit my job to stay home.”

Son: “Yeah… you quit because you wanted to be a mommy. And be around kids.”

Me: “Yeah, something like that.”

If only it were so cut and dry, right?

Two prominent bloggers have attacked the issue I wrote about last week again this week. I think we’re all saying the same thing although since I don’t consider myself a WAHM because I don’t feel my pithy freelancing really counts as that, I can’t vouch for all the attacks on the WOHM vs. WAHM. I still think it it’s all silly and hope one day we can just put the freaking labels away and stop writing about this and share a laugh about how hard it is to be a mom in general over a cocktail. I’ll take a momtini extra dry.

The end.

I think I forgot to mention in my last post that, uhm, last week I was offered a full-time job. That’s right. A chance to strip off the lululemon, a reason to dry my hair every day (although that is debatable) and most importantly make me some money.

Of course I turned it down instantly.

I’m sure admitting that has got to be every career coach’s worst nightmare. The job was interesting, it actually paid me money, and would have been a good fit. A good fit, had I not been five months pregnant and in no mental condition to take on a full-time job. Seriously, the next time someone asks me for career advice I’m just going to laugh in their face. Apparently the only thing I’m good at these days is avoiding any type of work commitment.

That being said, sometimes I do have a regret about my decision. But only when I think about the potential money I could have been making. One thing I miss about not working is not having my “own” money. The kind where a certain someone doesn’t care if I come home with that new pair of lululemon pants. Of course when I worked all of my “own” money was sort of fake because I enevitably had to have my husband bail me out at tax time due to a lack of me understanding anything about that “withholding” column, or whatever. But it was easier to get away with it.

Or maybe it was because the economy was better.

Whatever the case, the money would never be worth me leaving my envious and rather comfortable position of staying at home, but it did make me pause.

For about half a second. My old lululemon pants are just as cute as the new ones I’ve seen.

Just when I think the mommy wars debate has died down, a popular, and somewhat controversial site has to go and dredge it all up again. In a recent Momversation webisode, some of the most formidable bloggers tackle the (why won’t it ever die?) headline “Are You a Stressed Working Mom?”

I rarely watch this type of online chattering, but when Y tweeted about the resurrection of a common mommy wars debate I had to tune in.

I’d say the episode doesn’t really deal with the stresses of working motherhood so much as it becomes a platform for the women to talk about why they work, how they can’t be SAHM (uhm, because apparently in the video all we do is play with trains for five hours a day), and the ins and outs of freelancing/ working from home. Included in the discussion is everyone’s favorite former work/ life balance guru Lisa Belkin of the New York Times who now authors the parenting blog, Motherlode, for the paper. There’s some discussion of the “freelance” career path and not becoming the next CEO, but overall, the conversation never reaches into those deep, dark depths of working motherhood like tearing yourself away from your kids to go to work when they are screaming, and guilt we all feel when we have to choose work over our children.

And this is where the debate began to rage.

Temporarily Me and Miss Zoot reacted strongly about the video. You can read the posts for yourselves, but at the core of the argument is that even if moms work, there are discernable differences between all the types of working moms and those who work outside of their house in an office have it harder (edited to add: Miss Zoot did not intend her post to read that way, and I totally see her point, now). (To the Momversation episode’s credit, Daphne, of Cool Mom is actually honest about what the internet’s version of working motherhood is: freelancing and blogging from home is not really all that stressful of an occupation.)

I’ve talked about all this before.  Are you listening, internet? The mommy wars is old news.

Too bad it never dies. That’s because the choices we make as mothers are bound to conflict not only each other, but ourselves. It could be working or not, breastfeeding or not, feeding your kids organic foods or not- just about everything we do as mothers includes a choice we have to make that is inevitably going to piss someone off.

Unfortunately, though, many moms and dads don’t have a choice about whether or not they have to work.  Those who don’t have a choice cannot help but feel anger towards moms who work at home living out their dream of writing, designing web sites, whatever.  Likewise, the moms who work at home at “real” jobs, or doing these freelancing jobs think their situation is tough and that they have the stresses of all working moms as well.

Those of us like me who are just SAHM, well, we just suck all over the internet, don’t we. Because we just sit on our asses and eat bon bons all day long.

I’ve been around all the blocks possible with regards to working. I’ve worked at an office. I’ve worked at home. I’ve worked out of state. I’ve “freelanced.” I’ve not worked at all.

And guess what? None of it is easy and all of it is, well, gasp. WORK.

So I understand all sides of the debate. I understand those moms who are stressed out because they have to go to the office, but their kids have the flu and day care won’t take them so they are scrambling for child care. I get that. I get those moms who slow down their career path to keep themselves in the mix because they can’t stay home all day. I get those moms who work a ton even though they work from a virtual office at their house. I also get those moms who don’t want to work at all, but who freak out because their kids cry all day and they didn’t make it to the dry cleaners on time.

But what I don’t get? I don’t get why time after time, year after year, this “us” vs. “them” debate in the working mom world rears its ugly head. Yeah, the Momversation episode was totally slanted to a certain working mom demographic. But maybe that was its point. To show a sample of what’s out there. Because we all know “real” working moms just don’t have the time to film a five-minute internet show. (Just kidding, but you don’t, right?)

I know that no matter what anyone labels me, thinks, sneers at or is jealous of, that I’m glad I had the ability to make the career decisions I did. I don’t care if the WAHM or WOHM next door thinks I’m crazy because I enjoy playing with pretend airplanes ad nauseum.  Because I made a choice, and it was my choice, and I’ll be damned if anyone is going to make me feel bad about it.