Me versus You; all of us versus The Man.

Merlin Mann, of 43 Folders, is about to have a kid, so a contributor to the site asked the other productivity geeks who have progeny about how they manage their work/life balance.

At least two wrote in to say, "Have your wife stay home!" "My wife is a plain housewife," one said. "There's nothing like mother care."

It's a really good thing you can't kill people through the internets, you know?

I'm sure you can all guess my take on this as far as the men go. Jesus fuck, guys, why don't you stay home? Be a "plain" househusband! There's nothing like father care! Oh, you don't want to? Why not? Do you like your job? Like the money? Like the respect you get? Don't want to be spit up on all day? Don't want to lose your career momentum? Maybe your wife feels that way too. And even if you've made that decision between you and everyone's totally happy with it, who the hell are you to suggest it to someone else's wife?! Or even worse, to her husband, because everyone knows that men make the real decisions in families. I tell you, at least half the people I spoke to when I was pregnant asked if I was going to quit my job or stay home. You want to know how many people asked my husband if he was going to do that? Go on, guess.

It's not just men, though. I've been thinking about the work/home mothering split commonly known as the "Mommy Wars" a lot lately. The "wars" basically consist of mothers who work heaping scorn on mothers who stay home (hi, Linda Hirschman!) and mothers who stay home heaping scorn on mothers who work (hi, Phyllis Schlafly!) It's all pretty ugly, but it's also hard to avoid; these things cut to the quick of who we are as people - workers, mothers, partners, women - and even the smallest slight can feel like a vicious attack. I think the real issue is that we want to make our own choices, all of us, without being shoved into them by external pressures. And as things stand, the only people who get to do that at all with regard to work and parenting are men.

Other women's choices are threatening. They are. You can't really "live and let live" about it, because every time another mother chooses differently than you have, it negatively impacts your own ability to make your personal choices. The split gets framed in terms of judgment a lot - what is the "right" thing to do, for yourself, your kids, your family, women in general, etc. But when you get right down to it, it's less about what is the "right" thing to do and more about fear of having your own choice taken away or made more difficult.

Mothers who work outside the home threaten mothers who stay home with their children by creating an economic standard in which a two-income family is the norm, thereby making it increasingly difficult for families to be able to afford to have a stay-at-home parent. They also create an expectation that women can do "real" work (read: work valued by men), thereby contributing to the devaluation of the very real work that full-time parenting entails.

Mothers who stay home with their children threaten mothers who work outside the home by reinforcing a patriarchal status quo that continues to make it difficult for mothers to get and keep jobs or to move up in their fields. Employers often believe that women will get pregnant and leave the workplace, making them less likely to hire/promote women into crucial positions; every woman who does this reinforces the stereotype. And the fact that it is consistently mothers, rather than fathers, who stay home reinforces the cultural conception of childcare as the woman's role, contributing to the pressure on working mothers to be both good employees and primary caretakers.

It's not that I give a rat's ass what other mothers choose to do, in theory. Work! Stay home! I don't care! But it impacts me. There was a palpable loss of professional respect at my last position when I got pregnant, a sort of auto-assumption that I would no longer be as invested in or dedicated to my job. I hid the fact that I had a family in all my job interviews, because I knew that it biases employers. I fought with my partner over the division of child care labor, and was informed that he does more than any other father he knows; I had to point out to him that this was likely because the fathers he knows all have wives who stay home. I had trouble finding a preschool we could work with because so many didn't offer full-day care and/or required significant amounts of parent volunteer time during working hours. And I have a relatively supportive partner and work in a relatively family-friendly industry, so what I'm dealing with is the (very) mild end of it. I have heard stories from other working mothers that would make your hair curl.

And the fact that so many mothers work has equally threatening and negative impacts on mothers who stay home; I'm just less familiar with them, because I didn't make that choice. It's very easy to say, as "Mommy Wars" protesters often do, that mothers should work together against the larger societal ills that make motherhood so fraught. That's not wrong; there are great organizations like Moms Rising that do just that, and I support them. But it's hard to band together when our choices aren't just personal, when they interact with the ways of the wider world to create adverse conditions for people who choose differently.

I don't know what to do about it. I don't know that this hasn't been said before, by other people, people much wiser and more eloquent than I am. It was just a lightbulb moment for me, the other day - this isn't about judgment, this is about fear - and so I thought I'd write it out.