EDITOR’S PAGE

As I was browsing at a local bookstore recently, I happened upon a recent entry in the parenting category; The SuperKid Catalog. Written by an author deft at planting tongue firmly in cheek, the catalog promised to provide a sourcebook for “putting little prodigies on the fast track” to “the challenging new world of competition, egocentrism, over-indulgence, irrelevant education, and conspicuous consumption.” Naturally, I was intrigued. Inside, I found this “letter” from a catalog fan, Mrs. RJ. from N.J. Dear Catalog:

I have this friend.. .If she and her son have a swell time baking brioches but she needed to make those brioches anyhow, can she honestly count those minutes in the kitchen as Quality Time?

Would she deserve full Quality Time credit or only half credit? What if she burns the brioches and then kicks the oven while uttering a string of strictly non-quality expletives? Does she forfeit all Quality Time earned until that moment or what?

Help.

Clearly, Mrs. R.J. hits right on the line of demarcation among modem mothers. Those who aspire to “quality” time are the subspecies known as Mothers Who Work Outside The Home. All others owned up to the term’s uselessness a long time ago.

Yet this Mother’s Day will find more working women than ever caught in the unending struggle to make more and better use of the time spent with their kids. Two recent articles, one a cover story in Fortune called “The No. 1 Cause of Executive Guilt,” and another in Ms., ’’Caring About Child Care,” approached the dilemma from different perspectives but reached the same conclusion: the universal need of parents to be involved in their children’s lives has implications that reach far beyond the individual family.

I recently sat on a neighborhood panel with six other women who had been asked to address the peculiar consequences of being a woman in the Eighties. I knew I had been selected to articulate the concerns of the working mother, and I felt a familiar sense of foreboding in playing that role. As one who managed to conceal the fact that I was working from everyone I met in the course of my son’s first year of preschool, I am more adept at playing down my concerns about juggling family and career than announcing them to a jury of my peers.

Hearing the initial proclamations of joy from the mothers who had forsaken their own ambitions to tend the family fires, I was awash in emotional conflict. I did little to defend my counterparts who have chosen (we weren’t talking about those who can’t choose) to continue pursuing an identity outside the traditional confines of the stay-at-home mother. The fact is. I’m confused about it myself.

Like many of the women-and men-in the room, I was raised by a mom who elevated mothering to a high art. She was no pushover, but her loving presence extended into every phase of my life. When, at the age of seven, I demanded to know whether, if one of us had to be pushed out of a moving car by a robber, she would choose me or head out herself, she insisted that she would lake the plunge. At sixteen, when I flung myself across my bed and swore to a life of spinsterhood because a certain Hillcrest football player (#63) had chosen my best friend over me, my mother grieved convincingly alongside. Even today, when the conflicting demands of my life overwhelm, I head for my mother’s cool rationality.

Surely, she cannot completely comprehend why I would bring this multitude of pressures to bear on my life. This is a woman who was aghast that I would have the nerve to call Ross Perot for an interview. When, this past Christmas, I managed to pull off a virtually flawless holiday dinner, she glowed with a pride that no professional accomplishment of mine could ever evoke.

Apparently, my internal tug-of-war is a common one. “Even parents who can afford the best child care worry that it will not provide the warmth and doting attention they remember having as children,” writes Fern Schumer Chapman in Fortune. And how do guilty parents squeeze more time for their children into their lives? According to a survey by Fortune with New York’s Bank Street College of Education and Gallup, they cut corners on the job. And they deal in guilt, guilt, guilt.

Is this a mother’s problem? A father’s problem? A corporate problem? Society’s problem? Writing in Ms.. Suzanne Braun Levine wonders why this “critical family issue is so resistant to change, especially when so many other challenging issues-freedom to choose abortion, tax reform, pay equity, redress for sexual harassment, divorce law revisions-have met with some institutional responses.” Both authors conclude that the question of “Who Is Taking Care of the Children?” has yet to be meaningfully addressed. Clearly society in general and employers in particular must come to grips with changing demographics and economic patterns. Enlightened responses like on-site day care, flextime, parental leaves, and child-care benefits are the province of a very select minority of American companies.

But meanwhile, I have this friend.. .If she’s typing her editor’s column, and her five-year-old finds the “J” key for the very first time, and her eight-year-old learns how to make a paper airplane (an F-16!), does that count as…