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The debate surrounding whether a mother is better off working versus staying at home with their children is decades old. Critics of working mothers argue that women should care for their children full-time, not drop them off with a nanny or daycare for someone else to manage. Critics of the stay-at-home mom might argue that her education is going to waste, she should help her husband, or worse, she’s lazy.
Working mom and Straight Arrow News contributor Jordan Reid recounts her emotional exhaustion and points to the Hulu series “Fleishman Is In Trouble” as a startlingly accurate depiction of mothers who work and parent at the same time.
I watched the Hulu show “Fleishman Is In Trouble” with particular interest given that just a few years ago — true story — the book changed my life.
On the surface, “Fleishman Is In Trouble” is a show about divorce, but it’s really about aging and ambition, and that moment that you stop and you look around, you realize you’re not waiting for your life to start…this is it. There’s also been a very interesting cultural reaction to the show. It describes with startling accuracy the midlife reckoning faced by a very particular subset of women. These are women whose on-the-surface privilege makes them very hard to describe with any real sense of empathy. Except I read the book that the show is based on shortly after getting divorced myself and by the time I turned the last page, I was like sitting there open mouth, having just learned with razor-sharp specificity what had just happened to my marriage, and my life.
So a big part of the release I felt when reading the book was the acknowledgment that you know — it’s a simple one, you would think, but not in our society — that while parenting is extremely difficult, parenting and working an outside job is more difficult. It’s almost impossible, in fact, unless those aforementioned privileges are in place, given that there is next to no structural support for parents in our society. The book holds that the condescension that suggests that stay-at-home mothers have the hardest job creates the risk of ignoring what’s happening to working mothers, which is that, frankly, they’re trapped in a system designed to break them.
