Quick Observation

This article is making the rounds of Twitter and the conservative blogs, and there certainly is a lot to say about it. Women who dropped out of the work force to raise their children are appalled because while they were watching the children, they were also expected to do things like sweep!!! and they are bitter because they cannot simply move back into their half-a-million dollar earning jobs once they re-enter the work force. One of Ace's cobloggers Monty makes an excellent case for how selfish the woman in this article are, and how little they understand of how the world actually works. The contribution I have time to add to this at the moment is personal, but well worth saying.

Yes, there can be sacrifices in staying at home with the kids, and not just from the financial perspective. But Mr. BTEG has made plenty of sacrifices in our marriage to fulfill his role as breadwinner that maybe those wealthy shrews at the NY Times can't appreciate. For one, there was the time when he took a job waiting tables during the eight months time when he couldn't find a job in his field. He was working 60-80 hours a week, and mostly seeing our daughters when I brought them into the restaurant to see their father/eat a meal that his manager often comped for us. After that, he took a job where he was away for a good bit teaching the client about the product for a week at a time. Mostly difficult of all might be when he took a job as a consultant in Chicago, and he was mostly away from home for seven months in all. He missed his family, but he did what he had to do to support us. That's the kind of stuff that gets ignored by these whiners. Then again, this article seems to be only for the elite anyway, not for those families where sacrifice is seen as a matter of course.