mommy and me

so according to salary.com:

If paid, Stay at Home Moms would earn $134,121 annually (up from 2005's salary of $131,471). Working Moms would earn $85,876 annually for the "mom job" portion of their work, in addition to their actual "work job" salary.

We found the job titles that best matched a mom's definition of her work to be (in order of hours spent per week): housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, CEO, and psychologist. New job titles that made the list in 2006 include psychologist, laundry machine operator, and computer operator. The job title of nurse fell out of the top 10 this year.

Their suggestion is to (no joke) create a "mom paycheck." Come on now!

Every year around Mother's Day someone does a similar thing, calculating what a "stay-at-home-mom" would be paid. I just think it's SO not the point.

I'm a bit obsessed with this issue. I can't get enough of it. I feel pressures on both sides. I know that it meant a lot to me to come home and have my mom there, and that much of our important bonding was done then. I knew I could call her to pick me up when I was sick, or that she'd melt brie cheese on crackers or sprinkle cinnamon on apple slices when I got home, and that I knew that she would be there. (For the record, she sometimes worked part-time during my childhood.) I know that I want that with my children. I also know that perhaps I could have benefitted from a female role model who had lots of drive, and that I would want my daughters to grow up with a role model like that.. but without missing out on the other stuff. I'm not like The Dinosaur, I don't have a No Nannies Edict. I think it's something that every woman really has to decide for herself. Like dating high school boys, "It's a personal choice that every woman has got to make for herself!"

I think the tragedy of it is how it's polarized in the media, how "stay-at-homes" and "working-moms" are pitted against eachother in "The Mommy Wars" (especially since the divisions are rarely so clearly cut, and many SAHM's do some sort of paid work as well). There's a really fabulous book by Miriam Peskowitz, who is just incredibly smart, called "The Truth Behind The Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes A Good Mother?" It's really readable (though she generally writes more academic texts), and it's really wonderful and smart and funny and a bit heartbreaking too, because it has been followed by books that continue to perpetuate the war-like status, e.g. "Mommy Wars: Stay-at-home and Career Moms Face Off on Their CHoices, Their Lives, Their Families." Now tell me how a book like THAT is helpful.

From amazon.com's description of Miriam's book:

The media, from Dr. Phil to the New York Times Magazine, is adamant that there is no love lost between working parents and those who stay home with their children, each fighting an ideological and economic war based on what they think is best for their children. Yet in reality, as Miriam Peskowitz powerfully discloses, parents don't want to fight one another at all; they simply want more options. Moreover, the very sides in this debate don't exist: one third of all mothers work part-time, falling into the vast abyss between full-time careerist and at-home mommy. How does the corporate climate in America force women to claim either a career or a family at any given time? Are the choices women are making—to either adjust careers, "carousel" in and out of the workplace, or quit altogether—really choices at all? And how do we expand the definition of productive worker to include an engaged parent? These questions and more are answered and explored in this moving and convincing treatise on the new-century collision between work and mothering.