[...]Sequencing, schmequencing – The ImPerfect Mom[...]…

But so are other women support groups without coining new labels.

I dunno. The term ‘sequencing women’ just sounds contrived and smacks of, well, clever copywriting. And that, to me, trivializes your cause somehow and gives off an impression of trying too hard. I guess The Network for Women or The Network for Mothers just does not have the same zing to it.

There’s really no more need for words to describe what women do in a day. Especially women with families.

Supermom, Career-home juggler, Working mom … aiyoh! Maybe that’s just me feeling that all these labels are just to make us feel special for what we do. (Not that we’re not special!)

Sometimes that’s just too much ego-stroking. I realised this one day when a woman at work (grandma status) looked at whiny me pointedly and said, “When my husband left me, I had to work and take care of my children. I just did it. Why is it so hard for you?”

Urgggg… felt really, really small then. To think that I thought I was the only person who had to figure out how to have it all.

Maybe we should realise that giving ourselves these labels and what-have-yous, only serves to give us the opportunity to complain – ” I can’t get ahead in my career because I have to bake cookies from scratch for my little ones.”

At the end of the day, what you hope to achieve (as a mom, as a working woman) is a responsibility you’ve chosen to undertake. Whatever you want to call it, it’s still your responsibility.

Granted everyone needs a supportive word or social network – but c’mon, can we just get the job done with minimal fuss?

It’s not as “wiping the brow” as all of that, as you might think.

It would all be really frivilous if there were only a keyboard a monitor to create meaning, rather than real mothers and real lives, lived largely day to day, working, caring for others, and being part of communities.

Things like: proportional pay and benefits for part time work, restructuring our workplaces so that there is time to care, and recognizing and valuing the caregiving work we all do and need…these are not frivilous things.

Though I’m wondering if the semantics of this conversation is…

this month alone one of our chapters will be hosting a meeting on part time work options and mothers, another will be hosting a meeting breast cancer awareness and still others will be celebrating Mothers & More’s 20th Birthday. Begun in the have it all era – and ringing in our birthday in a climate of increasing awareness. Not bad for using language well through the media, our chapters and our members over 20 years….

Without this attention and acknowledgement, it seems we barely have the energy to get up each day. Adversely, the more attention and acknowledgment we are given, the more we want.

Still, networks like Mothers & More have their uses and, I believe, serve more than merely stroking the collective egos of an entire ethos, that of women in transition. If nothing else, I believe in the technology that enables the support and acknowledgment.

Since that time, other words have been used – caroseling (Miriam Peskowitz) and on- and off-ramping (Sylvia Ann Hewlett).

I think the need for language is enormous because the need for society to recognize that mother’s caregiving work has value is enormous – which is why 60% of mothers, when asked recently, cited their desire for part time work. What the term reflects is the desire to give voice to the lives of real women – to not render how they live their lives invisible, or their contributions invisible. Sometimes using a lot of words to describe something really simple leaves the thing itself aside, as if it were unimportant and as if the needs that go with that thing were unimportant as well.

Mothers & More has a membership of over 6,000 women – about half work caring for their families at home, and nearly half work in the paid workforce. When they make that first step into or out of the workforce – they are ‘sequencing,’ making a transition.

It may seem easy without a need for new language but isn’t there a need for a common language before one can be understood? Thevarious books you describe are an effort at this articulation, the beginnings. Cardozo’s work was an early example of this…and it goes on…