In case you missed it, Michelle Obama uttered a surprising statement over the weekend. It was all over the news, but unfortunately, not for the reason it should have been.
Most commentators covered Obama’s statement because the former first lady let a choice and vulgar term slip into her vocabulary. Had it not been for that fact, Obama’s statement may never have seen the light of day, for it runs contrary to the accepted feminist mantra that women can successfully manage a home, children, and a job.
This thought, Obama bluntly declared, is a lie. Women can’t have it all at once.
I found that to be a fascinating admission, not only because it goes against feminist messaging, but also because it sounds a harmonious chord with a recent piece in the New York Times on stay-at-home moms by Caroline Langerman.
Writing on her decision to stay at home with her two young children, Langerman explains the horrible days of her early motherhood as ones in which the hours slip by with children who continually made messes, cried, and in general, made life as it was before motherhood look like a fairy tale dream. So draining was the stay-at-home mother experience, writes Langerman, that she would spend her limited free time in sleepless exhaustion staring into space.
But when she was told to go back to work or hire a nanny, Langerman refused. “It’s like I’m taking a sabbatical,” Langerman writes. “A sabbatical in which I learn what it’s like to be a human mother.” And she refused to stop this sabbatical, not because she was miserable or felt like she could make better use of her life in the workplace, but for something more.
She refused because her life was now meaningful.
“Now I was needed. I was never alone. Maybe there would come another stage of my life, some magical equilibrium in which I would be sometimes needed and sometimes not. In which I would laugh with my husband in a dimly lit restaurant and chat about books with my sweet mother. Maybe the old me was not really dead, just changed, and the reward of my choice to stay home would not be better-off kids but a better-off self. I would return from my sabbatical with a broader perspective and a bigger heart, knowing something of the world that I hadn’t before.”
Langerman appears to have discovered the age-old beauty of motherhood, the beauty which was once captured by French author Alexis de Tocqueville when he toured America in the mid-1800s. In his book “Democracy in America,” Tocqueville outlines the hardship and sacrifice he saw in the mothers of frontier America. But beneath the hardship, he caught a whiff of something else: