Career Moms vs. Stay-At-Home Moms

With the economy in a tailspin and showing no real signs of recovery, job hunting is a competitive sport. What you've done, what you know and especially who you know are the points on your scorecard. However, how long you have been job hunting matters a lot, too.

The new sport needs trainers and Lives in Transition, a program organized by Rye Presbyterian Church, has stepped up to meet that need without charging fees to its financially challenged members. The program is run by volunteers and is designed for people experiencing career transition, providing support, networking and information on strategies for finding new employment. The program holds workshop and networking events twice a month at the church and some months ago proposed creating smaller groups proactively titled "Jump Start Your Job Search."

I jumped at the chance to join, expecting, as advertised, to be included in a group with other job seeking executives. I was thus quite surprised when I discovered the program chose to merge two groups: the one I intended to be in for transitioning professionals and another group comprised of stay-at-home mothers looking to return to work after extended absences. In other words, those whose careers had been interrupted combined with those who'd chosen it for themselves.  In "Mommy War" parlance – victims of the economy vs. career cop- outs.

Real or a product of an overzealous media enamored with the idea of Mommy cat fights, the "Mommy War" story has been around for decades. While it's not without its soldiers, drafted and mercenary alike, the truth is that if the battle between working moms and stay-at-homes is indeed real, this economy opens the door to a new level of competition: downwardly mobile mommies battling for bucks.

If I sound like one of the career mom, Mommy War lieutenants it would be because for many years I held tightly to many preconceived notions about women with education and work experience who 'dropped out.'  Now hunting for a new job and technically a stay-at-home mom myself, if only by default, I have learned that much of what I believed to be true often is – just check out a PTA meeting sometime – Yikes!  The egos, power struggles, brown nosing and desperate need for validation rivals that at some of the freakiest executive meetings I ever attended.  And now you tell me, a serious career woman and job seeker, that I was going to be in a job search group with these ladies?

On week one I learned that several had husbands who'd suffered job loss, which inspired their newfound desire to go back to work. Others had children who were getting older, all that part-time flexible hours volunteering was no longer sufficiently interesting and gee, they too had suffered a negative impact to their husbands' income.  They all had a story.

Of course, those of us who were unemployed executives and the like had our own stories, but since I related to those, to me they were less of a sob story and more decidedly unjust. We were two camps on opposite sides of the river of jobs that was really a stream that was really a trickle.

Did these ladies really think they deserved a job?  I didn't think they did, at least not until us work-outside-the-home women had gotten ours. Had they not gotten the memo from the Career Mommy General which states that you don't get to drop out and then come back in?

Was my internal dialogue narrow-minded and vicious? Yes. I'm not proud of it. I believe I'm better than that.  Most people who know me think so too, at least I think they do. I am spiritual, compassionate and "equanimitous " (I know, not a word but it should be) but there it was, all my career mommy prejudices fueled by the media and a ton of books and blogs on the subject. 

But then, during week two the strangest thing happened. Okay, maybe not week two but as the weeks went on it happened. We got to know each other, learned about each other and while we didn't spend time in the group discussing our different choices about staying home or working, we didn't need to. All the women in the group were educated and interesting. Most had achieved some level of professional success, some more than others. We came from different industries and demographics, had been out of work for as little as a few months to more than 10 years and had a variety of reasons for desiring and needing to go back to work.

With the help of our extremely capable and supportive facilitators, we explored our work styles, personalities and preferences and suggested industry shifts, target companies and new business ideas based on our newfound understanding.  Fears and anxieties were discussed and addressed and oddly enough it was often the career moms, myself included, who were first to offer suggestions and encourage confidence from the members for whom Excel was an adjective and who'd left their jobs when people still sent memos.

The Jump Start program has ended and while neither I nor any of the participants have successfully transitioned yet, my search is energized and my beliefs about the choices mothers make have evolved. My experience may not bring Mommy Wars, real or imagined, to a close, but I'd be happy to discuss it over a "ladies who lunch" or a "power lunch" meal with the women across that river, whichever comes first.

Mindy Gibson has worked in broadcast media through most of her career, primarily as a television programming executive launching three networks, including Telemundo and USA Network's cable channels in Latin America and Brazil.  Her column, Career Interrupted, will appear twice a month on Rye Patch.