Other lives:

...I do not presume to write a revisionist piece on the way life was in the 1950s and 1960s...

...At fifty-five, however, she established a law practice concerned with the legal rights of women and children...

...My friend Janice is one of these, a women given to balanced sentences: "While it is true that they don't let you march in academic processions," she says, "they also don't make you serve on academic committees...

...She is an Episcopal priest...

...Welcome aboard on the mommy track, a way of life presently sought-out by women who are not only prone to distractibility, but embrace its opportunities and invite your support...

...We moved more slowly...

...They ask for her "the right to be home and to have allowances that permit her to devote herself exclusively to home tasks...

...Most of us who married during those fertile decades were similarly distracted from careers barely underway or perhaps only imagined...

...But why not...

...A later and major distraction came soon after my acceptance in a doctoral program, when I was readily diverted from that goal by a man whose offer was more appealing than the prospect of tracing the philosophical indebtedness of Percy Bysshe Shelley to his father-in-law, William Godwin...

...these she cared for, and two more, confining her writing to an occasional column done after-hours...

...recidivism is not unlikely...

...Why is it always the mother who comes hurrying down the block, baby and briefcase in hand...

...and typed his doctoral thesis...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain, some time back in a Commonweal symposium (June 17,1988) on the first draft of the bishops' pastoral letter on women, suggested that the bishops "resist the temptation to define the family as a male wage earner and a mother who stays at home to care for the children," a construct Elshtain described as "a bourgeois norm of recent vintage and not essential to the moral vision of the family...

...For goals pursued earnestly but not exclusively, in a world that asks unswerving allegiance and early commitment even of the very young...

...that acknowledges values other than those of the organization...

...And so we end up talking about other women...

...A mommy-track vocation to the priesthood...

...the marriage that has failed to realize its bright promise...

...The most generous among us thinks it is possible...

...And two among us had foster-parented on a grand scale...

...Analyzing responses to test items, applications, and personnel files of thousands of workers at every rung of the corporate ladder, they had found that today, younger men, as well as women, can be divided into those who may be moved like chessboard pieces, worked long billable hours, relocated at company need or whim, and those who cannot be so manipulated...

...scraping carrots for a slow-cooking stew to be presented with pride at dinner-time...

...OTHER LIVES KATHARINE BYRNE A REPORT ON THE 'MOMMY TRACK' Like the Moliere character who found that he had been "talking prose for forty years without knowing it," I have learned only recently that the erratic, late-started, come-and-go career path which I have been following for forty years without knowing it is called the mommy track...

...ambition...

...Harriet Beecher Stowe is her sturdy example: caring for six children while she wrote one of the most important books of her century...

...The philosophical indebtedness of Mary Shelley to her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wasn't even mentioned...

...As we prepared to leave the convivial gathering, one of us found in her purse, along with the grandchildren's pictures she offered for admiration, a clipping from a newspaper on the mommy track...

...Talking about ourselves is almost endlessly diverting...

...Bonnie admits that her own career has not been illustrious...

...Thanks, Jean...

...No paid vacation, advancement, health insurance, or pension...

...It was a good way of life and the division of labor was unremarkable...

...For twenty years she tried to teach college freshmen how to read and write...

...Bonnie quit school when she was nineteen and had run out of money...

...As someone said, and I know exactly who it was, "The women who returned to college in the 1960s and 1970s were not in a mood to burn down the campus...

...An eleven-year-old I know is urged to take the SAT this year, and in coming years, to get used to test-taking and to demonstrate a capacity and willingness to pursue unfalteringly a "serious career in the sciences...

...Some virtue in the necessities...

...Our daughters are farther removed in time or by temperament from the either/or dichotomies we inherited...

...It depends, of course, on where you want to go, and when, and how lucky you are...

...Even assuming this gender-based division of familial labor, one must ask, for how long...

...We have found," the report said, "that men's attitudes toward work and family questions are very quickly coming to resemble women's...

...For one reason or several, among my friends, this moving out into the great highways of the world was tardy and timorous by today's standards, and we were likely to stay in the lane that hugs the shoulder, with easy access to the exit ramps...

...they just wanted to find a parking place within a mile of it" (Katharine Byrne, "Repentant Dropouts," America, May 5,1970...

...They have something else on their minds: What's in the freezer for dinner...

...On a number of campuses across the country she was famous for flaky, fragile dinner rolls...

...Is it likely...

...Even today, in a document being circulated among admirers and detractors, the American bishops seem to assume the nur-turant and custodial aspects of motherhood as a given that does not go away...

...Their daughters are likely to be more serious about out-of-the-house or other-than-home involvements...

...And if a "furor," like a trend, lasts more than a season, welcome to those whose aberrant behavior you have reported...

...assures us, apparently with admiration, "They have their babies and get right back to work...

...Perhaps...

...She has converted a leftover bedroom at last, that room of one's own into a place for her desk, word processor, telephone, and file cabinets...

...They may do it again...

...but remember, this was a long time ago...

...The diverting of attention, the distraction, which each child represents, has also a price, of course...

...LeGuin argues the advantage of motherhood for a woman artist, as well, in immediate and inescapable contact with the sources of life, death, growth, love, citing the German Expressionist painter, Kathe Kollwitz, who, after yearning for the day when her boys would be off to school, found that her inspiration lagged in their absence, and that she had worked better when she had to fight for time to paint, after their needs were attended to...

...Back in the work-world, my contemporaries have operated in the manner characteristic of those on the mommy track: seeking wholehearted commitments but part-time involvement...

...for we did acquiesce in the spirit and practices of our times, with apparent good will and with the indisputable evidence of all those children...

...She is putting together a book of their reminiscences, pieces which an exquisite memorist M.F.K...

...Working their second shift, as Hochschild and Machung call it in their book of the same name...

...Their mother-most-admirable combines the qualities of mama mia, mother machree, and I don't know how to say it in Polish...

...For home is not only a snug harbor of a cheerful caravan...

...We did, however, eventually return to old careers or prepare ourselves for new ones, looking for ways to be socially responsible and economically contributive...

...Moreover, such women are no longer to be trusted...

...Up betimes, on the days when classes met, preparing for the long hours ahead...

...abandonment, starting over...

...Does it not seem strange that the argument should need to be advanced...

...She makes her rounds at two local hospitals, offering solace and prayers for sick and dying patients...

...Fisher comes to mind would dismiss as the "homegrown thoughts of elderly ladies," but valuable nonetheless to its contributors...

...Laura is a publicist for a nearby university...

...An absent member of our group, unable to take time out for a lunch date, says that none of us "ever got anywhere...

...Currently, however, she is sharing space with an Olympic-size tropical fish tank, its accessories, and a golden retriever dropped off temporarily by one of her adult children...

...LeGuin talks about women who have literally written at the edges of dining-room tables, where the milk gets spilled and relationships curdle, surrounded by children, distracted by their demands, as meals are served and milk mopped up...

...Among them are the assistant to the manager...

...KATHARINE BYRNE, formerly director of the Division of Continuing Education at Mundelein College and intermittent essayist, is presently working as a legal assistant to one of her daughters...

...These observations are fragmentary, anecdotal, lacking in verification...

...And to their mentor...

...and cleaning-up after, more likely than not, after the prideful presentation...

...LeGuin believes that an artist's work may profit from the tensions and opportunities of a busy family life...

...Now a lot older than that, she has set up shop in the basement of her condominium, doing mostly real estate closings...

...As was customary, my husband earned our living, children were born to us, and I stayed at home taking care of their needs and their father's...

...Increasingly, they noted, men as well as women are refusing promotions or opportunities they regard as inimical to personal or familial well-being, looking for a congenial career track could it be gender-free...

...Even those of us who married into a bourgeois construct could hear the great Cardinal Suenens tell us, more than twenty-five years ago, in a book directed primarily to the nun in the world, that mothers of families, blessed with a longer life and a better education than their own mothers, would have, when their children were grown, "another life, as it were," in which to move beyond the confines of home, doing work of value to the world outside...

...When she gets home, she may be tired and discouraged by the draining demands of her calling...

...persistent effort...

...A refrigerator magnet reminded her, "Behind every successful woman there is a huge pile of laundry...

...So be it...

...home is also about rancorous breaking apart and leavetaking...

...the lawyer who never made it to the top of the letterhead...

...those fictive scripts, Heilbrun calls them, written by men, to which women's lives were expected to conform...

...And if so, one of my children wants to know, why should not the experience be generously extended to the children's father...

...Weaving experience into art or merely transcending the quotidian concerns, experiencing in them some pleasures that compensate for a lesser place in the world outside the domestic curtilage...

...In the dead days of our recall, we were told about "the duties of one's state of life," for women with children a curiously static condition, apparently, for there was no mention of growing out of it...

...What's left to say...

...Spare us, O Lord...

...Can any value be claimed for the failure to achieve the rewards of fidelity to a career goal...

...Lenore gives four days a week to her late-in-life, career, a vocation to which she felt called when her last child left home...

...I would just like to add a postscrip-tive note, an answer to the question: What came next in the lives of some of the mothers in those burgeoning families when they ran out of children...

...On balance, adding up rewards of home and marketplace, working for love or money, they do not think they have fared badly...

...And have fewer children, or none...

...Suenens's optimistic and, at the time, revolutionary encouragement, did not take into account death and other domestic disasters...

...A women's distractibility makes possible management's or the academy's system of part-time work...

...I cannot deny the realities of our lives, the cheerful myths of domestic tranquillity we are presumed to have embodied...

...In a group I sat down with recently, a few old friends at a lunch table, the number of our children ranged from five to eight...

...May there be something of value in having been distracted from a single career goal...

...We may now watch with envy, chagrin, or distaste, young women running for trains and buses, having carried their babies to the local sitter-service...

...Was it fifty years ago that Ellen, a newly certified young lawyer, "gave it all up," as we used to say, to marry an ambitious university administrator...

...She urged them toward the idea of "caritas, the principle which makes possible the flourishing of individual personality and sustains the dignity of each person in the family...

...caught up, even bogged down, in domesticity...

...Financial need, real or imagined...

...Ursula LeGuin, mother, science fiction writer, and essayist, points out that a persuasive case can be made against the either/or argument...

...After a certain and insufficient number of these exercises, my mind would wander, my pen would waver as I watched clouds forming over Lake Michigan or a woman hanging out clothes or maple tree spinners twirling the wind...

...One of us has reminded her that Uncle Tom's Cabin was written on the edge of a dining-room table, but she is not amused...

...the author of occasional essays...

...During one of those painful bring-your-mother sessions, I heard myself described by Sister Regimenta as "distractible," lacking application, a quality described on the archdiocesan report card as "undivided attention...

...Each day the aspirants for a Palmer diploma warmed up to the task by producing on pale, blue-lined theme paper, row after row of up-and-downs and round-and-rounds...

...For whatever reasons, they are on their way...

...In its original use, "The Mommy Track" was a denigrative term used to describe a firm's relegation to a slow pace going nowhere, those lawyers who take time out to bear and care for children, and who are presumed thereby to have vitiated that single-minded, tunnel-visioned devotion to the organization that leads to prestige and partnership...

...In those times a subject called penmanship was pursued persistently, and the Palmer Method of Writing was as firmly entrenched in the curriculum as the Baltimore Catechism...

...She also executes and delivers "wills on wheels" for other old parties unable to get to her office...

...We wonder about the factors that determine their precipitous return to the places where money is made...

...Seeking a balance, how have the old mommy-trackers fared...

...And did not win a Palmer diploma...

...Making the family secure," he reminds us, "is not a matter of adding appurtenances for its comfort, but of making it a place from which all members can move out into the great highways of the world...

...We wonder...

...But she did earn two degrees after her youngest child was fourteen...

...Has any man been asked to choose between being a writer or an artist and having a baby...

...devotion to a demanding career...

...Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colo...

...Now she encourages three groups at a community center, her students ranging in age from seventy-five to ninety-one...

...ies and invite your support...

...The same exploitative system that McDonald's uses on high school students or pensioners prevails in colleges where untenured serfs called adjunct faculty, many of them mommies, competent enough but not possessing the highest credentials, carry on that aspect of academic life called teaching...

...The part we liked were the conclusions of the DuPont researchers...

...It is possible that her elderly husband will have a warm, comforting meal ready for her...

...Perhaps Fred could have been more willing to share the wealth of pain and pleasure all those children afforded her...

...the three-day-a-week family therapist...

...Although LeGuin applies her thesis to women who are creative artists, is it not likely that even a woman in dress sales, a librarian, French instructor, seller of airline tickets, administrator in a home for the aged, in her time out for children has acquired an outlook and empathy that help her to do a better job...

...We were the mothers of all those babies in the boom years...

...By extension, the term can be applied to the faltering progress of any woman whose career is interrupted, distracted, perhaps more than once...

...In the case of writers or artists, the choice was books or babies, not both...

...Since distractibility, I see now, has been a leitmotif in my life, I am left with the need to put a good face on it...

...Early in my own life distractibility was evident...

...the dream house with the nightmare mortgage...

...Beyond such flexible-time work, they have volunteered in all the motherly nurturant fields...

...She found a job on a small-town paper, reporting what the bride's mother wore and who grew the largest pumpkin in the county...

...On the wall hung a fake-tapestry testimonial that said, "This is Nora's Kitchen," and no one challenged Nora's place in it...

...She lived the life of helpmate and hostess, keeping children quietly and productively occupied while her husband moved onward and upward in the arts and sciences...

...Thanks, DuPont researchers, whoever you are...

...The scenarios designed by men prescribed wife-and-motherhood, except for those called to the religious life...

...Or fantasized about the White Sox winning the pennant, if only Ted Lyons could pitch every day...

...Can I catch the last quarter of my daughter's soccer game...

...Even a couple of children may use up what could otherwise have been defined as "productive years...

...The photographer she married was a widower with three young children...

...throwing in a load of whites...

...Those of us who went back to college were, according to the counselors who encouraged us, bright and eager, humble and appreciative...

...nevertheless, our own advances and retreats are well known to one another...

...But here we are now, jobholders and careerists of sorts...

...The price is lower income...

...the adjunct member of the faculty (in the middle of the night I thought of a great definition: "adjunct: easy to add and readily junked...