Ann Romney and Me

By Livia Gershon

I’m a part-time working mother who’s spent a lot of time figuring out how to arrange my job and family life around each other. And for the past nine months, I’ve been interviewing my neighbors for this blog, having conversations that often turned to how families keep their lives in balance. So, when I read about the kerfuffle over Ann Romney and Hilary Rosen, I thought — well, honestly, I didn’t think about it that much. I got sick of reading about the mommy wars well before my first child was born, and besides, the way Ann Romney lives her life seems so far removed from my world that I certainly don’t experience any discussion of her choices as a reflection on mine. 

But all the talk about the issue eventually started to get to me, mostly because of something that gets repeated again and again: that, as Forbes contributor Samantha Ettus writes, “most moms have to work” and “choice is for a privileged few.” The trouble with that is that it’s not true. A quick glance at census data shows that mothers are more likely to be working if they’re highly educated and have high household incomes. And it’s not just poor mothers on public assistance driving those statistics. Among married couples with kids under 18, the percentage of mothers who aren’t in the workforce tracks right along with income, from 23 percent in households making $100,000 or more to around 74 percent for those making $25,000 or less.

The causality here is a little tricky. Obviously, a husband and wife making $30,000 each will drop into a very different income bracket if the wife leaves the labor force. But the point is, mothers who aren’t doing paid work are way more likely to be renting an apartment on my block than hanging out with Ann Romney at the country club. And the challenges that the majority of mothers face have less to do with catty name-calling than with the hardships created by the policies championed by Romney’s friends.

Working-class mothers think about a lot of the same things as wealthy ones when they decide whether to stay home or not — balancing time with their children against the money they could earn and the chance to have an independent working life. Like many upper-class women, Keyla Ortiz, a 22-year-old single mother who lives in a public housing project near my house, is delaying a much-desired career to spend time with her kids. In her case, the path she hopes for isn’t making partner at a firm but getting her GED and then training to become a cop; but the basic issue is still the same: she doesn’t want to leave her three-month-old to go to work.  On the other hand, another mother in my neighborhood works two jobs and takes classes at night, not just for the money but because she enjoys it. Like a lot of mothers at the top end of the economy, she thinks having a variety of experiences to share with her kids gives them a better chance for success. Besides, she said, “I like being busy.”

But there are some things middle- and working-class mothers have to worry about when they chose their choices that just don’t come up for the rich. Most obviously, there’s the threat of extreme economic repercussions. Lance Carle is an electrician whose daughter goes to our neighborhood school. Years ago, he and his wife decided that she would be a stay-at home mom. But after the recession hit, Lance’s employer started cutting back his hours, and his wife found she couldn’t get back into the workforce. They ended up with their house foreclosed.

Meanwhile, working has its own set of economic challenges, like wondering if a job will pay enough to cover before- and after-school care for the kids. One construction worker I talked to on the playground said he and his wife did the numbers and decided she might as well stick to just working a few hours a week as a school lunch monitor.

“It’s tough for her to go back to a regular job,” he said. “It would cost as much as she would make.”

Navigating work-family balance without a boatload of money to spend on a nanny tends to be a job for more than just one person. That’s something I know particularly well, first hand. Here’s what balance means for my family: I work part time, mostly from home. My husband teaches middle school, spending his vacations with the kids. One day a week, my in-laws watch the kids at their house. And once a week my mother drives three hours from a different state, watches the kids for two days, staying overnight, and then drives three hours back.

With college educations, years of work experience and a little money in the bank, my husband and I are relatively privileged. We could probably either work full-time jobs and send our kids to daycare or have one of us stay home for a couple of years. But either of those choices would be really expensive relative to our income, so we’re extremely grateful for the extended-family support we get.

Most working-class parents have it tougher than we do, but the lengths multiple people go to for our kids isn’t particularly unusual. Which points to how unreasonable it is to even talk about mommy wars. For the most part, the dads I’ve talked to craft their schedules around their children, too. The mother who I said works two jobs and takes classes? She can do that because she splits custody equally with her ex.

Like my husband and me, lots of parents depend on their own parents — and siblings too —  to help out with child care. A mother and father in my neighborhood work full-time hours at sales and retail jobs but can’t afford child care, so they pay the dad’s sister a little money to watch their year-old twins when they’re both at work. In turn, they babysit a nephew when his mom is working. One single father who lives near me has deliberately built a network of friends he can depend on to swap child care duties, and another has maintained a cordial relationship with his ex, who watches their daughter when he’s at work. A single mother depends on her 14-year-old son to care for his 6-year-old brother after school, even though she’d rather let him spend time with his friends.

“I try to explain to him it’s just me and you,” she said. “It’s just the three of us.”

Basically, the life balance decisions of really rich mothers (and fathers) involve balancing their love for their children, their desire for interesting work and sharp career skills, and the limited numbers of hours in a day. The decisions middle- and working-class parents make involve all that, plus worrying about keeping their kids in a safe place during the day and giving them food and clothes and a place to sleep. 

So, with all due respect to Ann Romney and the many challenges she’s faced in her life, Romney and parents like her don’t have more choices than the rest of us. They have easier choices. And she isn’t on the other side of the mommy wars from the majority of the country’s parents. She’s on the other side of the class war.