Professional mothers: they can be amateurs when it comes to raising children

I have to confess that my first impression of How She Really Does It was not positive. In fact, I snorted with derision. Flipping through the book and seeing testimonials from wealthy execu-moms such as couturier Vera Wang, broadcaster Ann Curry, and makeup superstar Bobbi Brown, I couldn't help thinking scornfully: "Great, just what the world needs. Another book celebrating the guilt-free glories of dumping your children with strangers so you can go to the office and be somebody."

Well, I was wrong. Although How She Really Does It deals with the stowing-away of offspring for the sake of female ambition, author Wendy Sachs does not flinch from acknowledging, for example, the corrosive guilt of peeling a toddler off one's bestockinged ankles before catching a train to the city. The balance she thus achieves, of cause and effect, of painful tradeoffs and often-irreconcilable desires, makes for a strangely refreshing and apolitical read. For Sachs, like many writers before her, is addressing the greatest dilemma of modern motherhood: What to do when you love your work, but also love, and want the best for, your children? Should you quit for the sake of your children, as conservatives are wont to recommend? Or should you keep working for the sake of your children (cash- and role-model-wise), as liberals tend to favor?

"It would be great if you had children and then the ambition went away," one mother tells the author. "But it's not like that."

No, it isn't, and you don't have to be a choleric feminist to admit it. As it happens, Sachs belongs to the generation of young mothers who feel almost no connection to the hairy-armpitted amazons of the sixties. Nor do they necessarily gravitate toward today's pedicured neo-traditionalist housewife counterculture. They are the product of what scholar Barbara Dafoe Whitehead calls the Girl Project: the great push from the sixties onwards to prepare girls for adult lives as independent, salaried careerists whose happiness was not dependent on traditional female roles. Wave after wave of these highly educated strivers have poured out of universities into demanding careers--only to find, five or ten years on, that they are totally unprepared for the compromises required by marriage and motherhood.

Of one such woman, Sachs writes: "Samantha says she felt completely blindsided by the impact motherhood had on her. She expected she would have her babies and would follow the course others promised her would be easy to navigate." Yet--surprise!--the "tug she felt toward motherhood altered her direction, surprising and scaring her at the same time. She, like other women I met, wants to impart advice to her own daughters--advice she never heard."

If that phrase sounds familiar to you, it should: Danielle Crittenden addressed this very phenomenon with elegance and force in her 1999 book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, in which she argued, in part, that ambitious women should have their children young and then have careers, which is how earlier generations managed to Have It All (think Madeleine Albright, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Margaret Thatcher).

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Many of the women Sachs interviewed for her book would clearly have benefited from such advice. "The overwhelming majority of moms I've interviewed," Sachs writes, "say they did not choose a career based on whether it would ultimately be compatible with having a family. It simply was never a factor until they were married or on the cusp of having children." She quotes a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan magazine: "I think Gen X women really feel misled."

Blindsided, as we have seen, and many rungs up the ladder of success, what do determined Stay-At-Work mothers do? Sachs relates various successful schemes. One Manhattan publicist organized a nursery in a spare office down the hall from her own and installed her infant and nanny in it. One entrepreneur--"mompreneur" is the clunky It phrase now--bought the apartment next door to supervise her business and her nanny simultaneously. A doctor imposes order on her hectic life by keeping office, apartment (with nanny and daughters), and gym within a five-mile radius. Bobbi Brown's assistant blocks out school holidays, half-days, field trips, and birthdays on her schedule before confirming any other appointments. And actress Cynthia Nixon makes a point of fetching her daughter from school "as often as I can even if I'm doing something later that afternoon, and I have to hand her over to somebody else after an hour. I feel that somehow that moment of me being there really seems to matter to her."

Of course it does--and this points to the poignant omission at the heart of Sachs' book. It looks at What Working Woman Wants, and only occasionally hints that the children involved may have very different yearnings.

Every afternoon, a crocodile of little children from a local daycare center ambles past our house--they toddle down the hill, and sometime later, they toddle back up the hill--and every day, without fail, one of the children is crying. It is always the same child: A redheaded boy of about three. The Hispanic daycare workers leading the troupe seem amiable enough; they talk to the children in sing-song voices. One of them always holds the hand of the inconsolable boy, but as she is not his mother, she cannot really be expected to take an interest in his emotions--and visibly doesn't.

One afternoon I happened to be looking out the window when the boy's mother arrived at the top of the hill earlier than expected. The effect on the child was galvanic: He rejoiced through his tears and tried to break away from the pack. A daycare worker restrained him until they reached his smiling mother, and he was released to rush into her arms. "How was he today?" I heard her ask, over his head. "Oh," the woman scoffed gaily, "He fine! We have lots of fun today, didn't we!" The boy kept his face buried in his mother's midriff, but she bobbed her head gratefully, thanked the workers, and off everyone trundled.

And I thought: She doesn't know. And they're not going to tell her. Her son is weeping his way through daycare, day after day, but she will be able to tell herself, as do many of the mothers quoted in How She Really Does It, that her child is thriving in a "happy environment."

Speaking of which, did you know that a "byproduct of having career ambition is a happier marriage and a more satisfying family life"? Sachs makes this claim based on a survey by Working Women magazine, which presumably would never feature a survey concluding anything else. Loretta, a marketing brand manager, confirms this felicitous finding in an interview with Sachs.

"I'm with adults all day," she says, "and when I come home, I have Lucas, so I do feel balance." No doubt she does, but as with the redheaded daycare kid in my neighborhood, you have to wonder, what does Lucas get? Sachs doesn't--perhaps can't--answer that one.

How She Really Does It

The Secrets of Success from Stay-at-Work Moms

by Wendy Sachs

Da Capo, 205 pp., $19.95

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group