Who would have guessed that the motherhood and identity question had so much to do with acronyms?
Really, so much relies on how women describe themselves as SAHM, WAHM, or WOHM that the entire alphabet seems reduced to about 4 letters.
And, as is the problem with other four-letter words, these acronyms are dirty. Imagine the shame of committed SAHM who finds that she has to take in a few neighbourhood kids as an after-school daycare provider in order to pay emergency dental fees? Imagine the WOHM who, after years of double-duty, is handed a pink slip and sent home to the …read more

The news that mothers who work outside (WOHMs) the home tend to be healthier and slimmer than stay at home mothers (SAHMs) is still echoing around the world press. I assume the findings also apply to work at home mothers (WAHMs) like me.
Acronyms aside, according to an article in the Irish Independent, this need not be the case. In How to Be a Stay at Home Mom… and Keep Fit, writer Sue Leonard interviewed a doctors, a stay at home mother, and a Weight Watchers’ leader. The quotes reinforce that people use staying at home, working, living alone and a …read more

Whilst in the midst of my moody funk this morning, Cottontimer announced the results of a study that found mothers who work outside the home are thinner and healthier than mothers who stay at home.
Does this news make anyone feel better?

My friend Anne is the modern amazon. I’ve thought of her in legendary terms ever since her brother told me she was back at work a week after the birth of her third child by Cesarian section.
Her maternity leave was actually only four days long.
It got me thinking about the contemporary equivalent of our mother-ancestors who lay down in the field, gave birth, strapped the babies to their backs and got back to work.
Anne’s tale of her rapid return to work is not a tale of an abandoned infant. In a recent email she told me about taking the baby …read more

6 days until Mothers’ Day and you’ll be relieved to hear I won’t be teaching my three year-old how to scramble eggs for the main breakfast in bed event. Toast is fine, I just hope I don’t get any crumbs on the baby’s head. Does every child insist on nursing the moment their mothers prepare to eat or is it just me?
I often think the only thing mothers have in common is that we’re all women with children. That’s probably why it doesn’t take long to embroil a new mother in a passionate argument. The opportunity to stake out a …read more