Women as Breadwinners

I was on call this past weekend and in and out of the hospital everyday. Babies seemed to come only in the middle of the nights whenever I was on call.  Luckily, I  was able to run my usual 3.2 miles Sunday afternoon followed by a 50-minute swim in my next door neighbor’s pool, so the weekend call was not all bad. The Washington area has been plagued with a 90 degree heat wave.

Although I had only two hours of sleep on Friday night and on and off sleep Saturday night, I have to admit that I was a happy obstetrician, very tired but very happy. All my deliveries went well, and all my patients were nice and overjoyed with their new babies. Obstetricians have an awesome job as long as there are little complications with the deliveries. After all, how many of us get to see the beginning of life? How many of us get to see a nine pound baby squeezing his or her way out of a narrow canal? The magician Houdini would have had a horrendous time reproducing that act, except for when he himself was a baby in his mom’s vagina. It shows how clever the creator is, a mysterious amazing engineer.

The only bad part of Sunday morning was the hollering from the women who wanted to go “natural” without the epidural. There were, for some reason, quite a few of them that morning. The nurses and I were able to keep a straight face and went on with our days, while the visitors were looking around, totally frightened by the screaming. Women can be very different when it comes to labor pain. Somedays, it is like walking through an Opera house; others, like Sunday morning, it was like Jurassic Park! I guess the creator must have been an amazing engineer with a wicked sense of humor, if you asked these laboring women!

As I drove home when the clouds were gathering, announcing the impending rain that the grass so desperately needed, I thought about the Pew research that made the cover of the Washington Post’s Metro section several weeks ago. It was about how many more women have become the top household earners. This news should have been on the front page of the Post, not the Metro section! It should have been national news for women, not local news. But then we women often get used to being at the “back of the bus”.

This Pew study shows that women now earn more than men in 23% of US households , a big leap from 4% since 1960! We women are breadwinners in 40% of households, with the top group being educated women, and the bottom group being single moms living near poverty.

However, half of the people surveyed feel that it would be better if the mothers stayed home with their young children, while only 8% of them feel the same for men. Are you surprised by this ambivalence about working women?

A few months ago there was an uproar about Sheryl Sandberg‘s “Lean In” book. It has been on the best selling list for 16 weeks now.  Ms Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo and is married to the multimillionaire CEO of “Survey Monkey”, another big computer company. There were multiple attacks from both sides of the women’s world, the traditional stay-home moms and the “women libbers”. It’s the same mommy war that I have witnessed since I came to the US in the mid 1970’s.

As I grew up in Vietnam, I got used to seeing women at work. Many men had to go to war, leaving the women behind to care for their children. It was an typical scene for me to see tiny women carrying big baskets hanging down from a long wooden bar resting on their shoulders. They somehow were able to walk and balance this “Don Ganh” while the heavy baskets full of different types of food would swing back and forth with each step. They walked for miles to get to the open markets where they would sell foods for the day. They probably didn’t even have time to think about women’s issues. It was a survival game and there was nothing intellectual about it. Whatever they earned that day would help feed their children at the end of the day. The children also tried to survive by themselves while waiting for their mothers to come back from work.  They swept houses and washed their clothes in between their homework. Somehow things worked out and everybody had a meaningful existence. You would think many of these children would be doomed to poverty and you are right. However, many of them also progressed to a higher level of education and became “somebody important” in society. It’s all about attitude and drive, and how you, as a parent, want to guide your children through life.

I think women in our society should learn to “leave each other alone” in order for society  to progress. Not everyone likes to work outside of the home, and the same for working women. I, for one, frankly admit that there would be a lot of Greek tragedies if I was to be a mom at home. I am a better mother when I get to do, part of the day, what I believe I am best at.

“ I can’t understand why women would have children and leave them to be cared for by strangers? Why have children then?” One of my patients once posed this question , ignoring the fact that I was one of “those women”.

“Because many of us want to play many roles in our lives.” I gently told her “Besides, why do women go to women doctors if they think these doctors should stay home with their kids?” 

As you have guessed, I only got a smile from my patient, no argument!

My bootcamp friends, all working professional women, will tell you how we won’t pretend we are the best moms, the best “possible” moms that we can be, but not the perfect moms. But then, if we are wise enough, we should realize there are no perfect moms, as there are no perfect dads. I, for one, missed every basketball game that my son played when he was a sixth grader at a private school in Washington D.C. The games were always around 2 or 3 pm, right in the middle of my afternoon sessions. I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to cancel my patients’ appointments, some made from three months before, and some with serious medical problems, to watch an hour of a middle school basketball game.  My husband, even as the “breadwinner” in our family, fortunately had a more flexible working schedule  and managed to watch most of the games and told me how dressy many of the stay-home moms from other private schools looked. Most of them were in their fashionable sporty clothes as if they just came from some Yoga studios. He told me not to feel bad missing the games as Sandy’s team lost most of the games that year.

“They just ran around not scoring many points while the moms from the other school were hollering their lungs out. You didn’t miss much, especially all that screaming”

I agreed with my husband  that years from now, Sandy  probably will not be on a psychiatrist’s couch complaining that he was “scarred for life” because his mother missed all his 6th grade basketball games.  He probably will even agree that knowing how intense I was, it was a good thing I missed his games. To hear me hollering back at those dressy women would not have been a good scene for Sandy to observe. He knows I always wish for him to win all the games that life throws at him, whether it’s a basketball game or a history test. I am just like a stay-at- home mom, maybe even a little harder and more competitive. Women at work know how hard it is to rise to the top. We become “more intense” as we deal with all the issues of our careers.  Most of us do not rise all the way to the top, as most of us probably realize it isn’t necessary to be at the “very top”, if we want our life to be in balance. 

I never regret not making homemade Halloween outfits for Sandy. He got to choose what he wanted to be from the racks at Target or some other stores. Does he remember now what he wore at various Halloweens?  Not really. He remembers who was with him on certain Halloween nights and how much fun he had. Like me, he learned that it is the “essence” of things that are important and not so much the “existence”.  I have taught him to see the forest and not to focus on the trees. 

Many stay-at-home moms would be shocked at how organized we working women are. I briskly walk through the grocery stores with multiple lists and know what I will feed my family for the week. We do not eat frozen food. As working women, many of us feel “guilty” enough about our work that we overcompensate our children with excellent food . We can afford to spend more on special items at the grocery stores. True, I might be wasteful by not cutting all the coupons I need for my grocery trip, as I do not have time to peer over the items on sale.  That is quite ok, I often tell myself, a few dollars more from me would be helpful to keep the grocery afloat in this economy.

For almost three years, I have watched my bootcamp friends juggle the roles of motherhood and  working professionals, and observed how well rounded their children have turned out, with many of them finished or about to start professional schools themselves. They are compassionate, accomplished, and respectful young adults, proving how their parents, together, have done such amazing job. 

I know I just used the awful words “feeling guilty” to describe working women. Why do women have to feel guilty when they are productive to society? The billion dollars women pay in taxes help build the schools and the roads, support multiple social programs, and subsidize the social security for many stay-at- home moms. Why don’t men feel guilty when they go to work? Because many men and stay-at- home women often are critical of the working women! They believe we women work for “the money” because of our greed, that we do not “care enough” about our families.  

Many of us women work because we need to. In this Washington area, for example, many women work because of the high living cost. It is outrageous that women have to feel guilty working outside of their homes to make ends meet.

On the other hand, as in my case and many women in my bootcamp, we find meaning in our work. Many of us are top physicians in our fields. Just to name a few in our bootcamp group, Holly removes cataracts, Ann diagnoses intestinal cancers, Malini removes brain tumors, Angie helps patients have their peaceful and safe sleep while undergoing surgery, Judy and Kim read mammograms and MRI scans, while Erica, Linda, Marsha and Amy take care of the diabetic and hypertensive patients…Should I say more? We are as helpful as our male counter parts in doing “something good” for society; we just do not get the same respect.

As I ponder on this subject, I think of my mother-in-law Dr Cathy Wilfert, a Harvard Medical School graduate and long time Duke professor in Medicine who, in 1985, created and implemented the first successful protocol to treat HIV+ pregnant women with AZT and thereby prevent the transmission of the virus to their infants. Her incredible work has reduced the transmission rate of the HIV virus from 80% to less than 2%, saving millions of children from this horrible virus. Should Cathy have stayed home tending to her two daughters and making brownies for their birthday celebrations in class? Should she have made every dinner instead of getting help from her children’s care taker? Between saving millions of lives and making a few more trays of home made cookies, I think you know the answer. By the way, in her little spare time, Cathy learned to be a phenomenal gourmet cook and even cultivated her own vegetable garden.  She often took walks in the woods surrounding her house and came back with fresh oyster mushrooms for her dishes.  Not all of us working women are “overachievers” like Cathy. She admits, however, that she, like us working moms, would have gone for the grocery store’s’ rotisserie chickens in her younger years if they had existed back then.

Just imagine a world where all women stay at home to take care of their children. We wouldn’t have seen Mme Marie Curie winning two nobel prizes , the only individual who ever won two nobel prizes in multiple sciences (Physics and Chemistry).

Marie Curie, as many of you know, pioneered the studies of radioactivity. She discovered the elements Polonium and Radium. Her works led to the treatment of  different cancers using radioactive isotopes. She must have been a wonderful mother since, she not only got along with her daughter Irene, Curie trained Irene to be her assistant and worked closely enough with her that Irene herself, together with her husband Frederic, went on and won a nobel prize among four other nobel prizes won by Curie’s institute !  Aren’t you glad Mme Marie Curie did not stay home to take care only of her children?  She took care of the world 

And what about Dr Carol Greiger of Johns Hopkins Medical center, who won the Nobel prize in Medicine in 2009. She received the phone call from the Nobel committee at 5 AM while she was folding laundry! She had been a working mom of two children.  She packed their lunches for school every day, just like most of the stay-home moms. I can go on and on about the 41 women up to today who have won a Nobel prize in different fields.

On the other hand, a stay-at-home mom’s job is very tough. Several years ago, the Washington Post reported how much money a husband saves when his wife stays home. They added up the salary of a full time cook, maid, chauffeur, manager etc… and came up with a six figure salary for a housewife!  Since then, I have used this article to advise my stay-at-home patients not to belittle their job. I even tell them to mention this article to their husbands every time the husbands complain about how hard they are working outside the homes. Marriage is a partnership, I tell my patients, in which mutual respect is a must. 

I think it is time for us women to “Lean On” each other to carry on our meaningful existence. The end goal is to bring joy into our family life but not to exclude joy in our own lives. Do what we think are best for us. A guilt-ridden working woman or a bitter stay-at- home mom is not a happy woman. Let us be free of guilt or bitterness and replace it with pride in whatever we do.

My boot camp friends over the last two years have shown me how important it is to show each other sincere support.  We console each other’s sorrow or hardship and give advice to try solving each other’s problems. To have a network of noncompetitive and supportive girl friends definitely makes our lives easier. By having this wonderful network of girlfriends, I am sure our men are also happier. It is not easy as a hard working man to have another woman “Lean In” him every time he walks in the door. After the men read this blog, I hope some of them will come home and ask their wives:

“Hey, honey, do you have any girlfriends to lean on? Maybe you should think about it!”

Wouldn’t it be a better world for both men and women?

Do what you love and do it well!  This is a better strategy for joy!

Lean On,

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