The Ballad of the Working Mother

Once, during a job interview, the men interviewing me asked if there was anything I wanted to add. From somewhere came the courage to be blunt. "I have school-age children," I said. "When they are sick, I stay home with them." Nonetheless, I was offered the job.

For several years I worked in a county agency with about 30 other people, most of us working mothers. Summers were the hardest. We were at work and the kids were running loose doing God knows what. Several times a day, a child or teen would call and say, "Can I talk to my mom?" We learned the voices of each other's kids. We dropped what we were doing to find the right moms for them. They called about broken eggs and broken legs and brushes with the police. We were all relieved when school started again in the fall.

Fortunately, my salary usually covered the basics, but extra things were hard sometimes. One year, I lost my job. I quickly took another, but at a much lower salary. My son was a talented soccer player, and I could no longer afford the fee for him to play. Some of the men who managed the league were noble enough to take care of the fee for me. They hatched their plan to keep my son on the team in such a way that my pride allowed me to accept their generosity. And they didn't do it for the kudos; to this day, I don't know who actually paid.

For almost three decades I have been a working mother, managing to support my family in a society that routinely underpays women, undervalues child care and ties family health-care access to employment level. There are millions like me. Yet we are practically invisible.

I have been blessed with a 1-year-old granddaughter. I don't doubt that she too will one day be a working mom, like her mother and her grandmother before her. I wish for her success, and a career that thrills her heart. I wish her wage equity. I wish her adequate family health benefits. It's essential that working mothers have better tools and more support for coping with the responsibilities of supporting a family.

But I have to be realistic. I do not see mothers being relieved of bread-winning to concentrate on child-rearing any time soon. So what can we do? Plan as if for a marathon. Pace ourselves. Drink plenty of fluids and try to get enough rest. Notice the flowers. And hand off a water bottle to another working mother as she runs by.

Olcott lives in Homer, N.Y.

© 2006