What Mother's Day cards don't say

by karon jolna

None of it is easy. Not the emotional debate about "self-destructive" decisions concerning working versus "mommying" versus trying to do both. Not the carefully couched government statistics on women's participation in the workplace and women opting out. Not the competing commitments and trade-offs we face.

The career path can be rewarding economically, but it means long hours that spill out of the office onto your laptop, your dinner table, your bed. Fumbling is unacceptable. In corporate politics, families are often an afterthought.

There's also the Mommy track, spiritually satisfying but strewn with its own perils: lack of financial independence and security, difficulty getting back into a satisfying, well-paying job, not to mention all those household and family duties.

The common bond is anxiety about trying to do it all. And yet, working mothers are doing it.

The answers are not in the mommy books that working women often don't have time to read. The answers are in the stories we share with each other when we drop our children off at school or the day-care center, or talk around the water cooler. Each working woman has her story of how she does it.

Stories like Bridget Baker's. As president of NBC Universal Networks Distribution, she decided to have her third child in her 40s at a time when her career was flourishing. She shuns the idea of "balancing" motherhood. To her, being a working mother is a daily act of juggling priorities — not necessarily balancing.

Then there's my attorney friend who chose to leave her big studio job to work part-time so that she could have more time with her two small children. Her perspective is laudable and it works for her needs: Not to opt out completely, but to stay in the game while nurturing her family.

There are so many stories of working women who cannot afford the luxury of opting out. Choice is not an option. They must contribute to their family income while they provide the love and support and household work necessary at home.

For all of these women there are no easy answers. But solutions are possible. Corporations need to be far more aggressive in recognizing the challenges of working mothers — and providing significant opportunities so that women can continue to contribute at their jobs.

Our tax system needs to offer more incentives to women who often work for lower wages than their male counterparts. Lumping a woman's salary together with that of her husband's in a joint tax return is a disincentive to women — half our labor force — because it pushes middle-class households into the "alternative minimum tax" bracket designed decades ago to hit the wealthiest taxpayers. Widely seen as unfair to the middle class, lawmakers are working on ways to fix this taxation practice.

None of this is easy. But it could be just a bit easier. And isn't that part of the message we always intend to deliver each May when we hand out Hallmark cards and flowers and a wish: Happy Mother's Day!

Jolna, a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Women, teaches "How Does She Do It? Top Women Executives Reveal Their Keys to Life and Work Success," at UCLA Extension. She is the mother of a 5-year-old boy.