Back to Work: Queers and Family/Work Balance
Today I’m going back to work. Gulp.
My partner will be staying home with my daughter until the end of the semester (I’m a college professor and writer; she’s a public interest lawyer). Then we’ll switch: I’ll be home for the summer, and she’ll be back lawyering. After that? Who knows. But for now, I’m an Official Working Mom.
Working all this out was surprisingly simple. My partner and I earn about the same amount of money, but she is at the beginning of her career as a public interest attorney, and can more easily afford a break in her career than I can, as I’m up for tenure in two years. Moreover, I only have to be at work 2-3 days a week, whereas my partner’s job involved the 9-to-more-than-5 grind. Though I’ll miss tickling my baby’s tummy before lunch, this feels like the right decision for us.
We both feel the need to stay home and bond with our daughter as much and as long as possible, and we both want to stay engaged in our respective careers as deeply and fully as possible. This mutuality may seem less than earth-shattering to you, but if you’ve been following the current dialogue on stay-at-home versus working moms, it is indeed a minor revolution. The revolutionary part is that both of us assume that we have the right to pursue our respective careers fully, and we also both assume that we have the right to stay home and care for our child full-time. What’s missing? Gender, and all the baggage/assumptions that come along with it.
Now, in case you’re picturing Chris and Kris or some other matching set of boring androgynes, don’t worry. My partner passes as a guy, whereas I am the queen of all things Sephoralicious. Our differences go way beyond our gender performances; we differ in race, sexual orientation (bi vs. 100% lesbian) , age, ethnicity, religion, music taste (country western vs’¦ anything but country western). But like many queers, we’ve grown up without the assumption that we either get to be the bill-payer, with all the stress and self-determination that comes with that role, or the nurturer, with all the emotional connectedness and professional impotence that comes with that territory. We’re sometimes both, and sometimes neither.
In fact, I’ve noticed that this is the norm in queer families. Regardless of who does the bulk of the child care and who does the lion’s share of the bread-winning, queers seem to come to the parenting table without all the confining gender assumptions that lead women to feel like it’s their job’”and theirs exclusively’”to nurture, and men to feel like it’s their job’¦to have a job.
Of course this doesn’t make everything all shiny and utopic. I’m grumpy about going back to work; I spent an hour on a stuck commuter train this morning, missing my plumpkin (that’s the baby, not my partner) like crazy. My partner will surely go stir-crazy, and is already reading legal briefs for fun on the weekend. We’ll have less money for the moment, and will have to budget carefully, as we’ll be on one income until May. And the fact that we don’t have gender baggage to unpack doesn’t make the larger culture any more family-friendly; we’re still contending with a society that pays lip service to ‘˜family values’ while depriving families of reasonable family leave, good-quality, affordable daycare, flextime, and so on. But nonetheless, our negotiation of the work vs. family hairball so far has been free of the sort of gendered assumptions that seem to dog so many of my otherwise-enlightened hetero friends.
I can’t speak for all queer families, of course (and I invite others to give their queer two cents below), but I do think that we queers have something to offer the larger conversation on family vs. work debate: a model which assumes that all humans, regardless of their gender identities, desire BOTH fulfilling, well-compensated work AND meaningful, connected family relationships. Crazy talk, I know!
What do you think? We’ve had some interesting debates about gender and its relation to queer finances here on Queercents. How about gender and the queer work/family balance?
Happy 2008 to all the queer families out there. I wish you all the best with your personal work/family juggling act. Wish me luck with mine; I’ll need it (I think that’s the sound of all the balls dropping at once…)
I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I’d like it to both be true and impact on the rest of society. Breaking down unhelpful stereotypes is always a good thing.
What you two have going sounds really cool. Once kids come around, our plan is for me to focus on the kids during the school year (married to a prof!) while working on my writing/blogging/freelance and to do more intense writing in the summer while hubby’s not teacher as much/at all.
Also, if we’re still in DC area I’d like to keep a part-time job I have at a certain university’s hospital 😉 and just schedule my work around his teaching.
It sounds like a great arrangement. I guess you must be a professor in the humanities, social sciences, or math since the science and engineering folks are stuck living in the lab rather than working from home when they aren’t teaching.
I wrote a post last spring that tackled the so-called “mommy wars” between employed and stay-at-home moms, and offered my own queer perspective. My partner and I have also each spent time as the stay-at-home. In general, I agree that queer families have more flexibility, without the constraints of traditional roles. At the same time, I think we run into other limitations. as I asked in my post:
I also happen to know one same-sex couple that is probably more “gendered” in their parenting roles than many straight families I know. Not that they’re the norm for queer parents, but they do stand as a counterexample to the fluid roles my partner and I have.
Jennifer: I’ve noticed that Jeanine and I have taken on certain roles within our relationship. I’m in charge of batteries, lightbulbs and the toolbox. She ends up doing more of the cooking and was the one that was going to carry our baby before we decided to adopt.
I always figured that the actual raising part was going to be equal. We both still need to work full-time. Well, “need” is a funny word. If we “want” to continue living in this particular house and in an expensive part of the country, well, then we both still need to work.
We’ve talked about alternatives that would allow Jeanine to take on part-time work and stay home. We even took a trip to Portland last year to check things out. That was a bust. Portland is a wonderful city and it was a fun weekend as weekend get-a-ways go, but we both really like our life in Southern California. This life comes with a price especially when children enter the equation.
I work from home, so while I’ll be in the house (except for those long business trips), we plan on having a child care provider here during the day. This will give me the luxury of tickling our baby’s tummy whenever I wish. I’m sure Jeanine will be grumpy at work… but unfortunately, that’s the reality of our life. Interesting though, because I’ve never attached gender to this discussion before. It’s always been about money and that we both still needed to work. If Jeanine was a guy, I believe we’d be having the same discussion… except maybe he wouldn’t have as big of a desire to stay home and nurture. Then again, I’m a bit of brute and if I had ended up with a man, I’m sure he would have been the sensitive kind.
Jeez, I’ll stop now before I completely hijack your excellent post!
Same as you, Jennifer. I am the “working” femme mom while my more masculine counterpart is the stay at home.
Here’s an interesting question- do you think femme moms are more likely to be the ones as wage earners? On some level, we interface with the world at a more stereotypically accepted way- and blend in.
Thanks for the thought-provoking feedback!
One more thought: It can feel scary to underscore the ways queer families are different from hetero families in the current climate, when our very right to exist is being undermined. And of course we are, in so many mundane and profound ways, no different (love is love, and a poopy diaper is a poopy diaper!) But I think what makes reactionaries uncomfortable with queer families is that they are not predicated on static, predetermined gender roles. Even if we as queer individuals (or couples) choose to assume those gendered roles in a conventional, diadic fashion, those roles are assumed, not presumed. And for me at least, that makes a world of a difference. Does that make any sense? I’ve gone blind editing that last sentence a zillion and a half times to make it clearer…
Anyway, it’s wonderful that we can have such a generous, productive conversation about all this, without the ‘mommy war’ nonsense.
Off to finish my syllabi now, and dash home to meet my daughter’s first tooth, which of course came in on my second day at work!
Divajean- I posted my response before I saw yours!
That is an interesting question; I do think femmes tend to face less gender/appearance based discrimination. But on the other hand, most butches that I know are very self-sufficient! But on the *other* other hand (I now have three hands, I guess!), I think it’s a myth that butch women (and trans men) are any less interested in nurturing than anyone else. This also speaks to the issue that Dana raised: many queer moms don’t have the option of staying home, due to the discriminatory legal framework. So the work/family balance is shaded by so many factors for queers…
Okay, I’ll shut up now and let other folks jump in!