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May 30--Caitlin Flanagan is the working mom that working moms love to hate.
She has a great career as a writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, yet she sees herself as a stay-at-home parent and cautions the rest of us that "when a mother works, something is lost."
She has an extensive domestic staff -- at various times, nannies, a maid, a gardener and a personal organizer -- and yet she gets misty-eyed when she writes about traditional 1950s homemakers who never served takeout and "knew how to iron and mend."
Critics have called her new book, "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife," hypocritical, "maddeningly smug" and the work of "an extraordinarily privileged narcissist."
But Flanagan, 44, the mother of 8-year-old twins and the wife of a Mattel vice president, is by no means chastened.
"So here's what gets 'em," she says. "Wanna know what gets 'em? Three things. The places that I'm published. They don't like that. It legitimizes what I'm writing. It gets 'em that I don't take this all extremely seriously and that I'm funny.
"And it gets 'em that buried within the pieces, or ultimately, the conclusions of the pieces, are truths that are really painful to a lot of women and they're not couched the way they're usually couched in the liberal press."
Flanagan recently spoke with the Tribune from her home in Los Angeles. The following is an edited transcript.
Q. If you're known for one sentence, it's probably, 'When a mother works, something is lost.' What did you mean by that?
A. I meant that when a mother works something is lost.
Q. What is lost?
A. Time with the child is lost.
Q. And how important is that?
A. Well, every woman has to make her own decision about that. For some women, who absolutely have to work, it's one of the harsh realities about their situation. For some women, it's a cost that they're very willing to pay because of the fact either that their career is really important to them, or because they feel they wouldn't be as good of a mom if they were there for 14 hours [a day].
Maybe in the two hours that they're there, they're happy and they've been fulfilled, so they're going to be a better mom.
But what they have lost is the time. And the thing about kids is they're not videocassettes. You can't put 'em on pause. What gets lost is all the different things that happen during the course of a day: The child discovers something or sees a picture. When we're with our kids, [there are] all the moments that we're kind of bored out of our minds, and then they say something that's so charming and so funny that we're going to remember [it] forever. And they're saying and doing those things all day long, and if we're not with them, we miss it.
Q. The underlying feeling I get reading your book -- and you don't say this directly -- is that it's morally better to be a stay-at-home mom than a working mom. Is that what you believe?
A. Well, I think that the very first issue is income and that it would be morally derelict for a mother to stay at home and then have her child not have any food or not be in a safe place to live. Are you really asking about mothers who have the economic choice?
Q. Right.
A. I think that the gold standard is to be raised at home by a mother who loves you. And I think that women have to think deeply about can they do that?
Q. So it is morally better to stay home?
A. No, I wouldn't say so, because it's not an option every child has, and it's not an option every mother has. [If] a woman says, "Look, I'll be miserable if I stay home, and the child will soak up nothing but my depression," then that woman is morally right to do what it takes to put her family in a good way. And for her it would be to go to work.
Q. Is it emotionally better for a child?
A. To be raised full time by a mother who loves them? Oh, yeah, of course.
Q. True or false: When a father works, something is lost.
A. Oh, when a father over-works, something is lost, absolutely. . . . I think the underlying question you're wanting to ask me about fathers is, is it inherently more valuable for a mom to stay at home than a dad?
Q. Right.
A. And it's not. I think that the at-home dad movement is fabulous. And when my mother went back to work [when Flanagan was 12], which was a very hard time in my life, one of the things that palliated it was, at a certain point they rearranged things so that my mother started working more of a night shift and my dad would come home [and spend time with me]. And I am a killer poker player because he taught me. We played hand after hand of old-fashioned -- none of this sissy-girly -- poker. To this day, I can remember him saying, "OK, put on your jammies, and we can play one more hand."
Q. Reaction to your book has been so strong. You've been called "hypocritical," "preening" an "extraordinarily privileged narcissist." Have you been surprised by those responses?
A. Are those print reviews or bloggers?
Q. Slate, Scripps Howard [news service], Newsday.
A. I would take Newsday seriously. What did she say?
Q. Tongue-in-cheek that Caitlin Flanagan is a man and then, not tongue-in-cheek, that you're a "sad child."
A. I wasn't a sad child; I was a sad adolescent.
Q. I think she was speaking in the present tense.
A. Oh! I like that. I am a bit childish. But I'm very happy, so that's not right. I was at lunch with Christina Hoff Sommers [another critic of mainstream feminism] -- we were at lunch together last week -- and we were talking about "top this" as far as things that had been said about us, and she said, "I've been called a non-woman." I said, "I've got you, Christina! I've been called a man!"
That's kind of delightful, you know?
What are you going to do?
nschoenberg@tribune.com
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