Blog 21 of Top 25 Political Mom Blogs

Favorite Blog Posts

• Work-life Balance: Finding the Swede Spot
• If You Give a Mouse a Prozac
• What Would You Call It?

Where I Am On The Political Spectrum

I'm left of center. Make that, FAR left of center. But all kinds of people read my blog, and I hear regularly from conservative readers as well as liberals. I think that in our pursuit of rugged individualism, we're losing the idea of a 'common good' in America. No one wants to pay taxes, people seem to have lost faith in government, and the safety net is eroding. I'm deeply concerned about how this plays out in our lack of care for the environment and education, and the yawning gap between the poor and the extremely wealthy.

The Political Issue That's Most Important To Me

On my blog, I focus on one issue: women and work. The women of my generation (I was born in 1972) were raised to think we could (and should!) do it all. In other words, we would have have children and have careers. Then we had our kids and went back to work, and we slowly began to go crazy. The problem is most jobs are made for people who don't have children. Which means we take short maternity leaves because we can't afford the time off, we struggle to find daycare to cover our long work hours, and we get the stink eye from coworkers when we have to leave work early because our child is sick. We give up our personal time and devote everything to our jobs and our kids and it's still not enough. When we can't take it any more, we quit, or drop down to the Mommy Track, and feel like failures.

If I Was In Charge At the White House For One Day, I Would...

Based on my own experience and the thousands of comments I've received from other moms and dads, I'm beginning to think that this mismatch between work and our personal lives is a much bigger problem than most people realize. It's a public health problem. But it's not something the White House can solve single-handedly (even if I was in charge!). We need change on every level. We need government policies like paid parental leave, guaranteed sick days, and universal health care. We need to change workplace culture to be more results-oriented, with managers embracing "custom-fit" work practices like telecommuting and flexible scheduling. We need to change household dynamics because when both parents work, women still do twice as much childcare and household chores as men. And finally — and this is the tough part — we need to change ourselves. Women can be terribly judgmental. We need to cut ourselves and each other some slack, and realize that there's no such thing as a perfect mother.