"The Work/Home Show. What are we talking about? Did you get pregnant accidentally and get thrown into
this world of motherhood and then piece back together how to make money and support your kid and you? Did you and your
partner carefully
adopt a child, planning how the time would go and who would be with the child when, on any given day or semester? Did
you lose your job? Did you choose to stop “working outside of the home” and do you carefully call yourself
a freelancer or are you on the at-home mom wagon, waving to the “two parent working” families and wondering “how
do they do it?” Are you a mom who is also a doctor who has two kids and a very loving nanny? Are you the stay-at-home
dad? Do you work two jobs and play relay with your partner who also works two jobs, leaving scribbled notes about which
kid goes where when? It’s my work to offer you some perspectives today on the lives you are leading, the choices
you are making and the dilemma we all face: how to balance work life and home life, when it comes to raising kids."
—Nanci
Olesen,
from NOW YOU MOMbo, Work/Home
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work by Arlie
Hochschild, Henry Holt and Company, Publishers
In our interview on NOW YOU MOMbo: Work/Home, Arlie Hochschild talks
about "a paradigm shift"—the idea that we need to start thinking of
a different way of managing our work lives during the early years of raising children. In this book, Arlie presents the research she did with a corporation
based in a medium sized American city. As readers, we follow the lives of parents as they manage their work day and their children’s day care and
home life. I recommend reading The Time Bind to get a handle on the American main stream way of life. I live as a freelancer, and I often peer
into the corporate world and wonder what the joys and woes of that life would be like for me. The Time Bind describes the realities of people who sometimes
become
MORE comfortable in their job than in their homes.
From the book:
"For three years, Arlie Hochschild interviewed everyone at a Fortune 500 company, from top executives
to factory hands.... The Time Bind exposes the rifts in our crunch-time world and reveals how the way we live
and work isn't working anymore."
Read more about Arlie and her other publications (including The Second Shift: Working Parents and
the Revolution at Home) at:
http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/HOCHSCHILD
Good Enough Mothers: Changing Expectations for Ourselves by Melinda
M. Marshall, Perterson’s Publishers
Marshall writes: "I had but one goal in my endeavor to write this book:
I wanted to find role models, women who not only grasped the concept of balance but had attained it and maintained
it, against formidable odds... mothers of young children (six and under) tend to confront the same hurdles, across
all
barriers of race, income, or age...."
Using her own interviews as well as various sociological studies, Marshall examines the internal conflict
that many women experience today about whether to devote their lives to a career or to motherhood. "To be utterly torn between
mothering and working," she states, "is the norm for the
current generation of women."
"The Good Enough Mother" an essay by Anna Quindlen
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anna
Quindlen's column from Newsweek magazine presents some of the same ideas Melinda Marshall writes about. Anna
Quindlen is the mother of three kids and often writes about the work/home dilemma:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6960127/site/newsweek
Mothers Who Think: tales of real-life parenthood, edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, Washington
Square Press
This book came out in 1999. The essays cover a wide range of topics. I've chosen to put the book
under the Work/Home Show, because this show so directly addresses our need to find out what kind of balance works for
each of us. Read this book. There's some wonderful mother writers included here. You'll
enjoy it. A great bedside table book:
http://www.katemoses.com/books/mwt_about.html
Mothers Who Think at Salon.com: archived material from a former department at Salon.com
I’m sorry that this department no longer exists at Salon.com, but it is enlightening to look back at the archives, and read some great writing about
motherhood:
http://archive.salon.com/archives/mwt/
Working Mother Magazine
Working Mother Magazine is a great monthly resource for "working" moms. It seems to be geared toward
the nine to five corporate mom, but I think they might want me to think that they’re more inclusive than that.
Check out the link and see how you relate to it:
http://www.workingmother.com
Strategies for Stay-At-Home Parents, by Kris Berggren, Meadowbrook Press
Author Kris Berggren wrote Strategies for Stay-At Home Parents to help parents define the parenting experience that
is right for them. Her book helps parents wrestle with the various forces that affect the decision to stay home: career,
temperament, finances, values, and overall family dynamics. Kris
lives and
works in Minneapolis and is a regular contributor to MOMbo. She is a featured interview on the NOW YOU MOMbo Work/Home Show.
http://www.meadowbrookpress.com/authorinfo.aspx?aid=97
The New Homemaker, a website by Lynn Siprelle
From the ABOUT US section of this website: “Who is the New Homemaker? She is the person who has discovered that
having both partners in the work world is not "having it all." Children, elders and the community have been
sacrificed for two generations to the crazy notion that households can run themselves. Well, they can't, and never
have. Working parents have struggled valiantly to "have it all," but are increasingly saying "we've
had enough"; someone has to be home. Even single parents are exploring ways to spend more time at home and less at work, or to work at home."
http://www.thenewhomemaker.com/
MAMAS INK: Enough Dishes, Already
MamasInk are a bunch of writers who are also mamas. From the site: "We quite often take motherhood as our subject
matter, but not always. We're blogging as a group to support each other in our adventures in writing."
At this writing
I am trying to work up my technical skills to figure out how to blog to this site and get it to link to MOMbo! I know
a lot of these women, and I’m in a listserve with them. This site is a great resource for some great writing
about motherhood.
http://www.mamasink.com/
"The quality of the everyday life of your family is at the core of your life as a mom. The balance
of work time and home time can be constantly re-evaluated. Don’t go crazy."
—Nanci Olesen
NOW YOU MOMbo: The
Work/Home Show
7) Introduction: Nanci Olesen
voice collage (see booklet!)
8) Interview w/ Arlie Hochschild
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work
9) Interview w/ Kris Berggren
Strategies for Stay-at-Home Parents
www.meadowbrookpress.com
10) "The Ideal Mother"
commentary by Darcey Engen
11) Credits and parting words: Nanci Olesen
"Powderhorn Mambo" by Steve Sabone Sandberg
Original music created by Amy Finch, for MOMbo
JB McLain: "It's Sunday Night" The Mystery
all music used by permission of the artists/ all rights reserved ©2005
MOMbo, Inc. www.mombo.org |
