As a proudly self-declared feminist, your obstruction of my wants, dreams, and desires offends me. What is more feminist than expressing my womanhood through the raising of beautiful soul bearers? How is that “selling myself short” or “not embracing my full potential”? When ancient warriors brought back tribute to their country, they did not just bring back slave laborers. No, their acquisition reached much further than petty manservants. Along with those, they brought the best and the brightest minds from the conquered nation. Why? To raise their children. To teach them and instruct them and give them the best possible future. They chose to give their most prized possessions, not to a profession, such as engineering or inventing which would be useful to the immediate benefit of society, but to the children to pour into the next generation of youths and raise them to be the best and the brightest.
If I want to raise my children from home, I follow a tradition rooted deep in human history. A tradition that states children, recognized as leaders for the next generation, deserve the best. Your claim that I could be so much more than a mother is anti-feminist. It’s saying that my children are not worth my best. They deserve my sloppy seconds after an exhausting day at work, or they deserve not to exist. That my life could be so much more, whatever that means, if I didn’t have children, and if I didn’t aspire to give them the best parts of me. You’re saying I don’t deserve the early morning breakfasts, the late night conversations, the well prepared snacks. The parts of motherhood I’m most looking forward to, where my children climb into my lap, and I read them Dr. Suess at 10 in the morning, and we have circle time and discuss chinese culture, or make indian vests out of paper bags. The parts of motherhood I’m most dreading where I find my walls inked by their latest “masterpiece”, or definite “no’s” resounding from their little lips. The moments I cry myself to sleep and wish for tomorrow to be a better day. Everything I would miss if I let the public school educate my children, if I let a day-care center raise them.
As a woman, I’m told I can be anything I want to be. Anything, that is, that society deems productive and empowering for women. When I proudly announce that I want to be a stay at home mom, I’m quieted. No one wants to hear a women declare that she deems her time most valuable in the workplace. They claim that I’m going to let my talents be wasted, that my math inclined brain shouldn’t be teaching simple arithmetic to second graders. Instead, I need to be out curing cancer, or changing the world, not knee deep in toddlers with smelly diapers and potty training accidents. To assume that’s all I’m meant for is ludicrous, they tell me.
Isn’t that just as anti-feminist as telling me working is ludicrous? Isn’t that why women were picketed, arrested, and thrown in jail? Because they were tired of being told their dreams of voting and equal rights were ludicrous? How far we have come, that feminism is attacking itself. That we are so intent on providing women equal workspace that we forget to acknowledge the home as a legitimate use of a woman’s time and energy.
I want something different for my girls. I want a world where they can be, without a doubt, anything. A doctor, a lawyer, a stay at home mother, an entrepreneur, a small business owner, a corporate shark. A world where they are not frowned upon for “selling themselves short” as I was. What will that take though? How can we reverse the effects of feminism, not to revert back to barbaric treatment of women, but to free them from the idea that success is defined by the size of their paycheck, and cannot also be defined by the character of their children.
