Good Enough Mothers: Changing Expectations for Ourselves Book

"I'd like to stop having to prove myself" sighs Madeline Wilson. "I feel like I'm short-changing my kids, working this much, yet I feel like my professional colleagues don't take me seriously, working 'just' three days a week. I'm so sick of feeling this way." Women don't have to feel this way - as some 70 mothers interviewed in this book attest. Working full time or part time, at a job or a career, in an office on Wall Street or a basement room in their home women trying to do right by their kids, their husbands, and seemingly all of society can enjoy their many roles (rather than resent them), provided they aspire not to what others expect of them but to what they determine is best for themselves and their families. Being a good enough mother, Marshall argues, does not depend upon how many hours one spends at home. Being good enough is a matter of choosing one's priorities - and accepting the inevitable trade-offs. Being good enough, according to Marshall, is being able to excel at compromise. Compromise has never been easy. But the mothers in this book, by virtue of being pulled in so many directions, have come to embrace the middle ground. They are no longer striving to realize the ideals fostered by both feminists and stay-at-home factions. While they eagerly await or actively fight for a new day to dawn - for a more responsible administration to take office, a more flexible workplace to take shape, a more equal-minded man to evolve - they do not expect motherhood, and particularly working motherhood, ever to be easy or perfect. They expect only to choose what they want to do best, what they want to do well, and what they don't want to do at all. Good Enough Mothers offers women solace and solutions by recounting the personal journeys of scores of women seeking peace of mind in the many roles working motherhood has forced them to adopt. Marshall examines our most agonizing conflicts - working vs. staying at home, the gender gap between wives and husbands,