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— by Michele Miller
illions of voices will ring
out later this month with
greetings of “Happy
Mother’s Day.” Weeks before Sunday,
May 12th, commercials will air on TV
and radio, sponsored Facebook posts
will clog up your feed, and #mothersday
will rise to the top of trending Tweets,
as businesses market their multitude of
wonderful wares — all to encourage the
buying of gifts to honor mom.
Mom may indeed be happy on this
special day of the year, when she might
be indulged with breakfast in bed, served
by her smiling children and her adoring
husband (or other loving partner, as fam-
ilies come in many forms these days).
She might be barred from the kitchen for
the rest of the day, taken out to dinner,
or perhaps allowed to actually have some
time all to herself to do exactly as she
chooses, including nothing at all, for a
change of pace.
I first became a mother in 1979 af-
ter six years of marriage and a teaching
career. U.S. Labor Department statistics
from around that time (1980) show that
56.6% of mothers with children under
the age of 18 were in the labor force.
6 WNY Family May 2019
Many mothers were still able, emotion-
ally and financially, to make the choice
to remain at home with their children.
At the time, I was one of them, taking a
leave of absence from teaching.
By 2013, stats showed that 57% of
women whose youngest child was un-
der one year old were in the labor force;
61% with youngest child under 3 years
old; and 64% with youngest child under
6 years old. Jump ahead to today, and
70% of women with children under 18
participate in the labor force.
Motherhood has never been easy,
but it’s my belief that the job has be-
come much more complicated in today’s
world.
If you are a mother in the workforce,
you truly must be a superwoman, a term
that just happens to have been coined in
the 1970s-80s, coinciding with what’s
described as “the shift of the woman’s
traditional role of a housewife towards a
more career-oriented way of life.” Says
Wikipedia, “This life involved the pur-
suit of both traditional female roles in the
home and with children, as well as the
pursuit of traditionally masculine goals in
the form of jobs and public social status.”
After doing research for this article,
I realized I was right in the thick of this
major change, with my second child, a
son, being born in 1982.
Today, my 39-year-old daughter is
the superwoman I worry about. To me,
her life is a whirlwind and I don’t know
how she manages to find the energy for
it all. She and her family live in Web-
ster, NY, and my two grandchildren are
10 and 6. A very successful technology/
marketing executive, she now travels
frequently for her job but still manages
to write a family blog every Sunday
night to keep us all updated on her busy
life, complete with photos. After read-
ing it each week, I’m the one who’s ex-
hausted!
Getting kids off to a before-school
morning program, picking them up at
afterschool care, juggling work com-
mitments with unexpectedly sick kids
or inconveniently sick pets, schedul-
ing a multitude of kids’ play dates and
sleepovers, parent/teacher conferenc-
es, dealing with the barrage of emails
that now come from school, oversee-
ing homework, taking part in the wide
spectrum of activity choices available
to today’s young families — all this is
just a small portion of a parent’s life. I
haven’t yet mentioned groceries, meal
prep, laundry, housecleaning, etc. Fortu-
nately, my daughter has a very involved,
wonderful husband who shares the work
load, and in-laws who live nearby and
are always ready to lend a hand.
Add to this already busy mix, a full
work week outside the home with pre-
sentations to prepare for prospective
clients, trade shows and conferences
to attend out of town with colleagues,
traveling to clients’ sites in other states,
plus various work-related community
functions after hours. Even when she is
home, she is rarely far from her laptop.
She works in airports while waiting for
planes. While visiting me, I’ve seen her
go out to her car to take a scheduled call
from a client on what was supposed to
be a day off. If she has a “sorta-sick”
kid who can’t go to school — she’ll take
him to the office for half a day; then
switch off with her husband, who has
some work flexibility, to take over for
the afternoon shift.
She is a master of technology and
uses it to its fullest extent to stay orga-