Working Mom, Interrupted

The fragmentation of woman, or, a personal inventory of work and children

When I was 20 years old and pregnant with my first child, I was “laid off” after announcing my pregnancy. In getting laid off while pregnant, I learned what it meant to be seen as a liability, and that being a fertile young woman makes one a liability to some. At the time in my state of Missouri, if a company had less than 10 employees, it was legal to dismiss them due to pregnancy. I was immediately replaced.

In the early months of that pregnancy, I had been working as a veterinary tech at a clinic a block away from my parent’s house, where I lived at the time. I walked to work, I loved working with animals and I enjoyed my coworkers. I also shelved books at the local library, a job I had had since high school. In addition to these things, I took my prerequisite classes for nursing school at the local community college. I had to utilize unemployment to make up the difference when the veterinarian I worked for let me go. In this pregnancy, I learned that becoming a mother whilst simultaneously trying to work and go to class meant that I would always have one half of myself enmeshed in one facet of my life while the other would be enmeshed in a different facet. I also learned that the facets are not equal in weight or significance, yet the expectations and demands of those facets somehow were perceived by others as equal.

After giving birth, I almost immediately resumed going to class and continued working at the library. I got into a 21-month nursing program in St. Louis. I started that program when my daughter was 13 months old. I had lecture and labs, and then clinical, almost daily. I still worked at the library and also got a second job working for the WIC office, providing lactation counseling for other mothers who also received WIC benefits like I had. It was a “peer” counseling program, as I was their peer—similar poverty levels, similar desire to nurse our babies. In this position, I learned that many of us are mothering on a shoestring.

I graduated nursing school, moved myself and my daughter in with my now-husband, and passed my boards. I got my first nursing position working on a combination unit which treated med-surg patients, oncology patients, and palliative/respite care patients. I worked night shift, 7p-7a, three nights a week. My days were full of a combination of fitful sleep in which I could hear the monitors from work alarming in my head and forcing myself to stay awake to care for my daughter.

Portrait of a Nurse from the Red Cross, 1914-1915 (Oil on Canvas), by Gabriel Emile Niscolet

Here, I learned that “work-life balance” is a made up phrase meant to pacify people by making them believe that it is actually possible. I was not balanced, I was crumbling. I was a dreary-eyed, crabby shell of myself who struggled to stay awake on my drive home, once driving over the median on the highway exit (the only thing that was hurt was a wheel, thankfully). I was not the best version of “mom”, despite my good intentions. I was too tired, too overwhelmed, too enveloped in the care of others at almost all times. I cared for the sick at work, for my child at home, and got a couple hours of sleep in between if I was lucky.

I was “promoted” to charge nurse within a year, managing a 70+ bed unit with decently sick, often complicated patients that was staffed primarily with new grad nurses. I cried a lot, I learned a lot, I made wonderful friends. I had to carry two phones, a pager and something called a “vocera” around my neck, which is essentially a phone that you can use hands-free so that you can answer call lights or a call from a coworker while your hands are busy drawing blood or cleaning up an incontinent patient, among other things. I was responsible for assigning patients to my coworkers and making patient assignments for day shift, fixing every issue that came up, going to codes, coordinating with the ER and the ICU, and often I also took on patients of my own so as not to over-assign my nurses. We also often did not have a secretary at the time so I took on those tasks as well. Sometimes I was what we call a “sitter” for patients who are a threat to either themselves or others. I got a whole extra $1 per hour for my troubles.

I got physically assaulted at this job by patients, I was urinated on on purpose by a very angry older man, I was sexually harassed, was forcibly kissed once and also called a “whore”. I also took care of remarkable people. I will always remember some of them and their stories, their kindness, their humor, their families. Sometimes, I witnessed people die. I counted their last breaths, and prepared them for funeral homes to come pick them up. Once, I sat with a younger man who was an alcoholic with severe jaundice that was actively dying from pancreatic and liver cancer while he begged his mother to come visit him before he passed. No one ever came.

Nursing is a hard job. It is physical, it comes with some amount of danger, it is emotionally and mentally draining. Working nights amplifies the stress. Nursing is also a female-dominated field, of course. Many of us are mothers, and all things considered, it isn’t the worst job to have as a mom. Working alternative schedules allows for some amount of sanity. It pays fairly well and has a decent social reputation. All this said, the profession of nursing requires much of the same of us as mothering does. It often leaves not much left of us for our children. I come off of my current shifts desiring only silence, a hot bath, and sleep. And yet, I do believe it to be an honor to care for others, to be the person they trust to place my hands on their vulnerable bodies to clean them up or steady them, to explain to them what is happening and to talk to them when they need a distraction or someone to listen.

Therein, a true conundrum exists. It is both a blessing to care for my patients and for my own children. Both of these tasks require all of me. I cannot physically or mentally give all of myself to both. Therefore, someone inevitably gets a less patient or focused version of me, and it usually is my own children. Often, to be a working mother is to be a fragmented mother. To be a mother working is often to be a fragmented worker. To be the woman in the middle of it all is to be a whirlwind of ideas, thoughts, intentions, needs and wants, and not have time or energy to fully embrace any of it. The state of distraction is perpetual. Smartphones and social media only make it worse. It’s really no wonder that we all think we have ADD. We live and operate amongst the swill of disjointed, competing forces of attention theft.

When I quit my first nursing job, I took another night shift, full time nursing position at a community hospital closer to home. The unit was a LDRP unit, which stands for labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum. In addition to all of this, I also took care of a limited amount of GYN patients, mainly older women who had had hysterectomies, and also did OB triage and things like non-stress tests for outpatient patients.

My intention when going into nursing was always to work in women’s health. This job initially seemed like exactly what I had desired. My delusions quickly unraveled however. While there were positive aspects of my work—I enjoyed my coworkers and I felt very privileged to witness women giving birth—many aspects of the job left me reeling and feeling complicit in an entire system of mismanagement of birth and devaluation of women and babies.

I didn’t want to do cervical checks, I didn’t want to probe another woman’s body just to get answers to questions I never felt were necessary in the first place.

I don’t believe in induction of labor for the vast majority of women.

I don’t feel that constant electronic fetal monitoring always makes babies and women safer, but that it often creates problems where there are none.

I find internal monitors extremely invasive, not to mention potentially dangerous.

Watching external versions to turn breech babies made me want to vomit.

I don’t think doctors should be hooking the amniotic sac with glorified crochet hooks to break our waters.

C-sections, while life saving when truly necessitated, are utilized much too often, creating potentially harmful future consequences for women and their future pregnancies and sometimes difficult healing.

I am merely scratching the surface here and could go on and on (and I did in this article, recently un-paywalled ¹).

In working in matters of birth, I witnessed both the magic of women becoming mothers and the tragedy of women losing their babies. I also witnessed the unraveling of my inner sense of what “work” meant to me. If work meant my participation in a multitude of practices and procedures I found debatable at best, and abusive at worst, then my paycheck was being earned via a snuffing out of my integrity. I validated it for a little while by telling myself it was necessary so I could send my daughter to a nice Montessori school, that in choosing to stay I was committing to the sort of environment I desired for her learning.

I failed to realize right then, but did quickly learn, that a mother’s duty is to her values and her adherence to them more than it is to paying for nice things. By ignoring the voice of reason within me and trudging on through nights shifts where I wanted to run away and wanted to tell the women I cared for that they didn’t have to but felt my hands were tied, I was performing a long, ongoing gesture of self-abandonment. No daughter needs to see her mother abandon herself, her integrity, her righteousness. Daughters need more.

And so, I moved on. I decided to be a school nurse. A job I could basically take my daughter with me to. I worked in a middle school and she went to the elementary school down the road. It was a nice district, much nicer than the one we live within. I truly loved the nurse I worked alongside with, managing bloody noses, asthma attacks, scraped knees, occasional emergencies, med pass at lunch time, insulin for type 1 diabetics, and of course, mental health/social issues galore.

In this work, I was tapped into the 9 to 5 reality of many Americans, significantly different from the three 12 hour night shifts per week I had been doing for years. Working during daylight was an improvement of course, but with my 40 minute commute, plus accounting for drop off time for my daughter and then sitting in the pick up line for a decent amount of time after my work day was over, our days were practically gone. With dinner and bath time and the homework I was shocked my kindergartener had to complete, I had maybe about 2 hours a day to tend to our home and the garden, to exercise, to run errands, to have any time to dedicate to hobbies. Never in my life have I neglected my home as much, and never in my life did I feel as decidedly not present within that home.

Working this schedule made it very clear to me that school schedules are necessitated by adult’s work schedules. I’m not one to go full on “school is just free babysitting” as I think there are valuable lessons and resources involved, and I have known many wonderful teachers. I do think that kindergarteners do not belong in full-day school. I think that a 4-day or even 3-day school week would be better for kids so they could more fully develop their other interests and abilities, as well as take a more active part within their households (and as a result, form a sense of pride over that household). I think that 13 year olds having to wake up at 5 AM to get on a bus isn’t healthy. And yet, this is what the majority of us do. Why? Because the 9 to 5 and the dual income household demand it.

Never was this more obvious to me than when two very life-shifting events convened. I had my second child and then, a month and a half later, the world shut down thanks to Covid. Having my daughter home with me and not having to leave to go to work both because school was not in session and also because I was on maternity leave felt like a perpetual sigh of relief. While Covid obviously was a nightmare, I was in new baby land, high on oxytocin, able to finish projects and cook meals the way I always had wanted to due to more time, was able to share those early baby days with my 8 year old and husband, and I felt a sense of comfort in my home I hadn’t felt before. It wasn’t just the place I slept at or the place my stove lived so I could heat up leftovers. It was the place we lived our lives.

When it was time for me to start working again, I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant, and I quit. I quit and I was unemployed for the first time since I was 15. This time without employment, while trying in some ways (I would be lying if I did not admit that not having my own ongoing income was a big shift for me, after that reality having been the only one I had ever known) brought with it a sense of harmonious alignment between my own emotional and physical needs, those of my new baby, and those of the child growing within me. The gift of gestating a child while not having to split my time in between work and home, answering to so many different versions of “boss”, was an immense one. Instead of my home, my husband, and my children feeling like those different managerial forces demanding various tasks from me as they sometimes did when my time and energy was split, they converged into one entity in my heart and mind—a symbiotic vocation emerged, that of homemaker.

There is so much current talk and debate on that one little word, isn’t there? Homemaker conjures up different cliches and ideas for different people, the 1950’s housewife, the TikToker making homemade Cinnamon Toast Crunch for her kids, the home economics class you took once in middle school, the weird lady down the street who homeschooled her kids in the 90’s, etc.

For myself, homemaker is a concise word that brings together two concepts—that of settling and that of creation.

The PIE root for “home”, tkei actually means “to dwell, to settle”. The PIE root for “make”, mag means “to knead, fashion, fit”. The homemaker is therefore she who shapes, both literally and also metaphorically, the place where a family lays their heads. Just as our growing family settled into our home, I similarly settled into this work. We chose to homeschool my eldest instead of dealing with the pandemic politics via public school at the time. The harmony I felt between the facets of my life meant that in mothering at home, I felt less disjointed as a human. The fragmentation I had always known in my roles dissolved into a more unified sense of self.

This is where I started conceiving of the notion of “women need freedom to mother”.

tend.her.heart

A post shared by @tend.her.heart

I found that by fully surrendering to the dependency of my children and the needs of the home they dwell in, I was confronting one of the most commonly held values of Western society—the value of individualism. I also found myself pushing against another commonly held modern idea—that formal employment by large corporations is a default positive. I learned how to make money by engaging in my hobbies in a more formal way. I thrifted vintage clothing and sold it online. I made various handmade crafts and sold them. I sold eggs from our chickens and delivered them to my neighbors. We raised meat chickens for profit. I did some work as a postpartum doula and did lactation support locally here and there. Yes, I was not making RN money, but I was making enough money to help contribute where it was needed.

I think of this sort of work as “living work”, because it is the integration of everyday life and family with financially productive activities. There is no bifurcation of life into “work life” and “home life”. I have often considered how truly strange it is that when we go to our workplaces, our children and spouses often have no worldly idea of what that place is like or what we do when we are there. We simply disappear for several hours, transform into a necessarily different version of ourselves and then return.

I can admit that sometimes, the disappearance feels like a relief and that sometimes being a different version of ourselves is enjoyable. That enjoyment and relief isn’t as ultimately valuable as the cohesiveness and calm that accompanies the alignment of work and home, however. The dabbling I did in this realm, for the two years that I was unemployed, showed me that there is another way. Between harnessing the possibilities the internet affords us and the reclamation of skills of yore, there lies the real possibility of a modern cottage economy. I believe that mothers are just the people to foster this possibility.

I did eventually go back to work, but in varying degrees of “less than full time”. For the last three years, I have worked either part time or PRN. This means anywhere from two 12 hour shifts a week plus taking call to one 12 hour shift every couple of weeks. I went back when my third child was 10 months old. In a way, it feels like a failure to state this, but I’m not here to pretend this concept of cottage economy is easily attainable or realistic for everyone, and I readily acknowledge the plight most of us find ourselves in financially due to the state of things, myself and my family included. I think part time, PRN, remote or hybrid work is often the best compromise for mothers.

I now work as a nurse with postpartum women and babies in a large teaching hospital with mainly high-risk obstetric patients. My work today, and the stories I hear from the women I care for, tells me that many women feel the way I do. A common topic of conversation for myself and the mothers I work with is how long they have before they need to go back to work and whether or not they have a breast pump for that purpose. Most of them have feelings of sadness and guilt surrounding these conversations.

Many women I take care of are immigrants and/or are very low-income. Many have several children already and have to work to feed their little mouths. More of them than not are single mothers. Working with women in these circumstances—some of which I have been in myself—tells me that the part of me which generally believes that women by and large can, if they seek out the right set of skills, be home with their small children is not a realistic expectation for many women whose situations are different than mine. It has also shown me that despite this, it is something many of them do desire as well.

While acknowledging the stark truth of this, I still hold some hope that by some women shifting the narrative by making these choices—to stay home, to be frugal, to pursue work that aligns well with the raising of small children, to work alternative schedules, to insist on marriage, to not keep up with the Joneses—these choices will over time become more and more difficult to ignore by the culture. In the legitimization of the mother who works in the home, for the home and through the home, the women who have less access to these choices will eventually have more access to them because they may demand that access, and because their own daughters will demand that access. It isn’t about aspirational living, it is about living, period.

Chalking up SAHM-life to privilege therefore is a massive disservice to both stay at home mothers and to the women who wish they could be at home with their children. I would go so far to say that being with our own children is a natural right of the human female that we should outright demand if this is what we desire. This doesn’t mean tossing productive and lucrative work to the side. This means integration of the two. This means, again, re-imagining the cottage economy.

This is where I stand as I face down the looming challenges that await me after my current pregnancy culminates in the birth of my fourth baby. Where will I go and what will I do?

What I won’t do is abandon myself and my physiology. What I won’t do is turn my back on the needs of my baby. What I won’t do is wallow in the idea of financial ruin. I will find a way, I will dig deep into the well of potentiality within myself. I will look to the past for the skills I need moving forward. I will lean more heavily on the women in my life than I have in the past. I will tap into the opportunities the current technological moment offers whilst being careful to keep in line with my personal line of integrity surrounding concepts of technology.

Motherhood offers much to us. For myself, it has offered a discontent with the state of the culture that is a particularly fiery discontent. This is why I write what I write. And this is why I will do what I will do—create a vocation which aligns harmoniously with my highest vocation, that of mothering. To become less fragmented as a woman is to become an amalgamation of all of each part of myself, spirit, soul and body. And if I have to toil all the more for this to manifest, I will.

The Gleaners by Jean Francois Millet

1. Being a Labor and Delivery Nurse Converted me into a Freebirther