Review of Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink

I heard about this book from a friend's share of the Today Show's overview on Facebook and was quite intrigued.  The author, Katrina Alcorn, chronicles her experience as a working mom and how she eventually broke down after trying to keep everything going- career, kids, relationship, household.  Ms. Alcorn and her story are easy to relate to as an 'average' mom.  I read this book right after reading Lean In and found it to be much more representative of my experience as a working mom.  I also thought it was fun to compare and contrast the two books.  They are worlds apart in some ways and very similar in others.  I think the two represent the diversity that exists within the working mom experience as there are so many variables that shape the experience and lead to distinctly different pain points for each mom.

Overall, I thought it was well written and did a wonderful job of sharing her story.  Alcorn is a talented writer and captured the many facets of being a working mom in a way that drew me in as a reader.  I was fully engrossed in the book after the first couple of pages and had a difficult time putting the book down to tend to other things!

My criticisms, while not as deep as the ones that I had of Lean In, still are important especially in the context of the larger working mom conversation.  First, this was one woman's experience that represented a combination of factors that may or may not be present for other working mom's.  This book is a memoir and I had to remind myself that there would be parts that were just that- a memoir.  Her experience, while representative of a larger group of working mom's, still is the experience of a single person and can't be assumed to represent the experience of any other working mom's.  It would be super interesting to read a book that includes the experiences of many working mom's and highlights similarities that exist across a larger group.  I feel like using a research study framework would be useful in really furthering the working mom conversation as our experiences have largely been left to individual memoirs and blogs.

Second, I liked that she included some very short sections in each chapter that discussed specific topics from a higher level, however, I was left wanting more from those sections.  I really liked how Sandberg included information from the research community throughout her book and focused less on her personal experience and more on what the research says about working mothers.  I think that Alcorn's book could have more credibility in the working mom conversation if it included more research driven information and data. The book description touts the book as being more research based and it simply wasn't that.

I enjoyed this book and found myself relating to many of Alcorn's experiences.  I think that for the working mom conversation there needs to be more than individual mom's writing about their experience.  There needs to be more research driven commentary and that really needs to be a bigger part of the conversation.  I also agree with Sandberg that men and women need to be part of the conversation as real change will take a collective effort.  Alcorn also says this (or alludes to it) in her book.  Advancing the needs of modern families is not a women's issue as it often is cast off to be- it is an everyone issue and will take a collective effort to create real change.

Oh the Irony

Whew- this has been a long break from writing.  I had the time in the fall to add some new posts, but didn't really have a topic in mind- although I easily could have come up with something!  I was contacted by a recruiter in December about a short term contract and long story short- I was working very full time for several months this spring.  Ideas were flowing, but finding the time to write was near impossible!  The contract went very well and has ended for the most part.  I'm spending large amounts of time searching for a new contract or FT position.  I'm also hoping to pen a few posts before I dig into my next gig!

I find that I have interesting parenting encounters nearly every day.  Most aren't given a second thought (who really has time to think twice, really!), but occasionally one strikes me as curious and I find myself reflecting on the topic.  I happened to have one of those encounters today.  A college friend of mine posted on facebook that her 8 month old had a stomach bug and then said that her child doesn't like pedialite and asked for suggestions.  I immediately suggested breastmilk because it quite honestly is going to be the most natural option to help a little one stay hydrated and fight off the bug.  I was surprised (probably shouldn't have been) that I was the only person out of 10 or so different posters who suggested it.  All of the others suggested beverages that were man made (with the exception of water- which ironically was only mentioned once).  I was a breastfed child and had zero intention of doing anything but breastfeed our son.  I try to remember that not everyone chooses to breastfeed or breastfeed for an extended period of time and really try to be respectful of that choice.

Here is where the rub came in for me.  This person regularly posts and very openly discusses how she eats clean and chooses to avoid many chemicals, etc that unfortunately are in processed foods.  Wonderful- we do some of the same- although not nearly as strictly as she does.  The irony to me was the conversation that ensued- she even said that she tried one of the flavored versions of pedialite even though she doesn't like things with artificial flavoring and dyes.  I'm thinking- put the boob in her mouth!  You can't get more natural than that!  My hunch is that she either didn't breastfeed or gave it up long ago and I knew it wasn't the time or place to think about bringing up this fact, but it still struck me as terribly ironic.  For the record- we use pedialite, too.  We also aren't very strict about many things related to our diet or our son's diet. I try really hard to keep our diet cleaner, but we have not completely removed anything in particular from our diet.

This is one of the many instances of the irony of parenting that I seem to encounter.  I get it- there are parenting choices that we all make for different reasons that probably will only make sense to us, but I often find food choices very interesting and in my experience, the irony always comes from the financially privileged white folks who "eat clean" and are very public about their "clean eating".  Instances like this one remind me that sometimes it is easiest to maintain and everything in moderation philosophy survivalist because it diminishes the possibility that our choices could be called ironic.