My piece for the anthology is about how we fetishize motherhood so we don’t have to pay women to do the actual work of mothering. It’s also about calling bullshit on the “motherhood is my greatest accomplishment” line that moms (both SAHM and working moms) are supposed to spew out instead of any accomplishments that might get the recognition outside of the home.

Over at RandomBabble and today at Pandagon and with some of the people (mostly guys) that I have talked to about the essay, I have started some shit. Apparently being pissed off that women get pigeonholed into an unpaid and thankless role means I’m bitchy or something. Fine.

But here’s the thing. Women have been having babies and raising them to adulthood for at least 200,000 years, and pretty damn successfully. In developed countries with access to prenatal care and childhood vaccinations and general freedom from the violence of wars and famine, raising a child to adulthood is a given. We don’t spend every day of our child’s life worrying about whether they are going to starve to death or be turned into war fodder. We worry about whether they are reading at grade level or socializing properly or getting the right organic nutrients and college entrance test scores. These are not life or death concerns, they are marginal. Being a mother in a developed country rarely means making life or death choices for your kids.

So if you’re a SAHM in America claiming that your kids are your greatest accomplishment- I call bullshit. If you’re a working mom in America and you say the same thing- I call bullshit on that too. We (moms) are doing a tough and thankless job, yes. But not a job that hasn’t been done by billions and billions of women before us.

And lots of people have tough and thankless jobs. Fast food workers, secretaries, farm workers, customer service people. I have yet to hear any of those people demand that people acknowledge their sacrifice for showing up everyday at a crap job. Because we pay them. Moms, on the other hand, get paid in stupid cards and flowers one day a year and a giant shitload of platitudes and sentiment the rest of the year.

I would rather have the cash than the sentiment. And I am sorry if you feel hurt because I think choosing to stay at home with your kids isn’t an accomplishment worthy of my admiration. Whopdee fucking do. You’re not some poor Sudanese mother who has managed to keep all of her daughters from being raped and her sons from being slaughtered (which would be an accomplishment). You’ve just managed to get little Chloe or Zack to sleep through the night or pick up cheerios in a pincher grasp or whatever. And so have we working moms, with half the time and twice the workload.

Be your own damn greatest accomplishment, let your kids be theirs. Give them an example to follow, not a fucking martyr.