The Invisible Women

I felt incredible frustration when I read BlueMilk’s post on Mother’s Not Making the Best Role Models.Not towards the author, just the issue. I feel angry that the work I do (and believe me, it IS work) is by it’s very nature, nearly invisible. I know that what I do is important, but I wish that I didn’t feel the very real need to defend my life choices to a world that pays lip service to the idea of motherhood but undervalues and demeans the tasks related to the nurturing of children.

We pay day-care workers next to nothing, teachers have near impossible tasks and measly salaries, and stay-at-home-mothers? Pshaw. They may as well be swept under the rug. It is so bloody irritating to be expected to value my work for what it is, without expecting appreciation from the society in which we live. It’s unfair. It’s wrong. We were all children. Most of us are parents. Someone has to supervise and care for the youngest members of our society. They can’t be boxed up until they’re old enough to work at real jobs where they can contribute financially. Somehow, real value has to be attributed to the job of caring for children.

I just don’t know how to make that happen.

And it makes me mad.

By staying at home to raise my girls, I’m being a bad role model for them. It’s a no-win situation. I should have stayed at my job as a physician, and hired another person woman to care for them, because caring for them myself would be giving them the wrong message. Which implies that they have less value than my patients, and that the woman caring for them has less value than me. We will not be an egalitarian society until raising children is considered a real job, and given the respect it deserves.