Tim Cahill: The Politics of Motherhood
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Tim Cahill, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™
Now I don't believe for a moment that poor Hilary Rosen ever planned to attack Ann Romney for staying home to raise five children while her husband worked. The plan was to attack the Romneys for being "out of touch millionaires" who could not possibly relate to middle-class families. Especially Mitt's wife Ann, who "merely" stayed home all those years raising her five boys and, as Ms. Rosen so artfully put it, "never worked a day in her life."
That is when she crossed the line. A line I am all too familiar with. You see, my mother stayed home to raise my eight brothers and sisters and me. I can promise you, because I was there, that as much as my father dutifully went to work every day, her job was ten times (okay maybe nine times) harder than his. Raising children, especially a lot of them, is probably the hardest job of all.
Hilary Rosen was trying to stoke the class warfare fires that the Democratic party is using to drive Americans to their side in this election. Instead, she stepped on a land mine and may have, at least temporarily, driven people the other way. Raising children is perhaps the most important job that any parent has. And believe me, it is a job.
Let's list the average everyday duties of a stay-at-home mother with multiple children. First, she runs the household restaurant. A mother is the cook, waitress, and dishwasher. Then, she handles the taxi service driving her children between school and activities and sports. She also functions as the de facto nurse practitioner, diagnosing illnesses and dispensing medicine. She is a cleaning service, picking up constantly after her children and cleaning the house.
She is a teacher. Reading to her children, teaching them how to spell, how to add and subtract, and preparing them for the world they are about to enter. She washes and cleans her children or at least makes sure that they do it themselves, and at night she often becomes a maid service, turning down the covers of their beds and making sure that they go to sleep. I know this as well because it is what my own wife chose to do after we had the second of four children. The work began every day before the children woke and generally ended well after they went to bed.
For Hilary Rosen, or anyone else to say, that someone who has stayed home to raise her children has never worked a day in her life and doesn't understand basic economics because of that choice has no clue what they are talking about. It is they who don't understand what goes into raising a family that you can be proud of. It is they who don't understand basic economics. Imagine what it would cost to hire all the people it would take to adequately do what a stay-at-home mother actually does. And even if you can afford to, as the Romneys obviously could, the one thing you cannot hire someone to do is to love those children of yours like nobody else can or will.
What Ann Romney and Theresa Cahill and Tina Cahill all chose to do is far more important than any paid job can ever be. And please do not get up on a soapbox and claim that you speak for us and are on our side if you do not understand what a real job it is to stay home and raise your children.
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