Working moms. I scoff at the Internet’s idea of a working mom. Sorry Internets, but I do.

I have been a working mom for the better part of three years; and by working I mean dragging my ass out of bed at 4:45am to get showered and dressed, waking my child(ren), getting breakfast going, dropping off at daycare and sitting in traffic ALL to get to the office by 7:30am.

I work through an eight and a half hour day of telephone calls, emails, meetings, reports, proposals, arguments, disagreements while someone with a higher authority, a boss, dictates my time.

After those eight and a half hours, I get in my car to sit in traffic, pick up my kids at daycare, get dinner going, oversee bath time, read stories and put my children to bed.

I see my children for a total of – at the MOST – three hours a day – and most of that time is spent doing chores like the cooking and bathing. I very rarely have the luxury of sitting down and actually interacting with them.

Let’s talk about being a REAL working mom shall we? Not this fluff about working from home because I’ve been there too. I’ve too worked from home, designing, freelance writing, and trying to manage my house at the same time. I was doing what I could to keep us afloat while home with my children.

There is no comparison. None. I don’t care how high up on the blogging ladder you are: working from home is not even in the same realm as being a Working Mother.

Is this what it is? Who is their right mind would sign up for this? If this is what being a working mother is like, why don’t we all just stick with pets?

President and Mrs. Obama, something’s gotta change here! Employers, something’s gotta change here.

The cost of all our prosperity-

What families, even those who are prosperous, typically lose in the exchange are the small grace notes of everyday life, like the ritual of having a daily dinner with everyone present. The more substantial thing we sacrifice is time to experience the joys and mysteries of nurturing the children, the small pleasures of idle curiosity, of learning to craft things by one’s own hand, and the satisfactions of friendships and social cooperation.

These are made to seem trivial alongside wealth accumulation, but many people know they have given up something more important and mourn the loss. Some decide they will make up for it later in life, after they are financially stable. Still others dream of dropping out of the system. If we could somehow add up all the private pain and loss caused by the pursuit of unbounded material prosperity, the result might look like a major political grievance of our time.

More important than all the other losses is that people are also denied another great intangible–the dignity of self-directed lives. At work, at home and in the public sphere, most people lack the right to exercise much of a voice in the decisions governing their daily lives. Most people (not all) are subject to a system of command and control over their destinies. They know the risks of ignoring the orders from above. Not surprisingly, many citizens are resigned to this condition and accept subservience as “the way things are,” and their lives are smaller as a result. Many find it hard to imagine that these confinements could be lessened, even substantially removed, if economic organizations were informed by democratic principles.

I’m thinking about a question I’m supposed to answer soon on cnn.com: in these times, should we be launching a mission in space to fix the Hubble? And I was thinking about iconic images I’ve seen in the past of early space launches, and how I felt in 6th grade when I heard about the Challenger going down. Those were times when we could all coalesce around something like space travel: watch it all together on TV, mourn the loss of a crew together. Get excited about America’s future together. Now, I’d bet most Americans don’t even know the shuttle is launching because our news consumption is so diffuse. The days of shared experiences around national events feel over. In part because of what Greider discusses (families simply have no time to digest and share experiences like a space launch), in part because of our new media landscape.

Maria Shriver announced that we now live in what she calls “A Woman’s Nation.” She wrote on the Huffington Post last week:

“For the first time in our nation’s history, women now represent half of all workers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before. These two facts have far reaching consequences to government, business, faith communities, women and even men. “

The “mancession” means women are gaining economic responsibility for families across income and professional levels.

“For the first time in economic history, the male unemployment rate has surpassed the female unemployment rate. The December 2008 unemployment rate for men was 7.9 percent, versus 6.4 percent for women. The U.S. economy lost 2.956 million jobs in the last year, and a full 82 percent of pink slips have been handed to male workers.”

As Heather Boushey, economist at Center for American Progress put it, “Families will increasingly rely on women’s earnings, which are typically lower than men’s and are less likely to come with health insurance.”

My question is: what impact will the new labor force shift have on women’s ability to negotiate roles at work that allow them to be caregivers? Women in power often have to contend with the “ideal worker” stereotype. We’ve always idealized the hard-striving, dominant man with a wife at home to take care of matters outside the office. Now, as many of those ideal workers are losing their jobs, women have an opportunity to redefine what an ideal worker is. But we have to play it carefully.

A new survey from Cali Yost at Work+Life Fit finds 94% of employees are willing to change their schedule or cut their salary to avoid layoffs, but 47 percent of workers are less likely to voluntarily leave the workforce for a period of time. Women (56%) were significantly more likely than men (40%) to say they are less likely to voluntarily leave the workforce to take care of a child or elder, for example. Does this mean, if women hold the majority of jobs, but are less likely to leave to assume the child and elder care responsibilities they traditionally hold, they’re forced to negotiate with employers to make it work?

Yost’s survey finds that employees are willing to work more flexibly (in the guise of reduced hours) to save their jobs and help their employers reduce costs. She found “nearly 8 in 10 employees would be willing to work a compressed work week, while nearly 60 percent would take additional unpaid vacation days or furloughs (several weeks off without pay). Nearly half would share their jobs with colleagues (48%), or take a cut in both pay and hours (47%). A little more than 4 in 10 would take a pay cut but work the same amount of hours or switch to a project-based contractor employment status (41%). Just under a third say they would take a month or more unpaid sabbatical.”

I wondered, is this desperation under the guise of flexibility, or is it employees being willing to sacrifice money for extra time and flexibility and using the recession as an opportunity to do so? Why do I feel like women would be the first to consider flexible options and a pay cut, and this may not be a great thing for women at work? But I asked Yost about this, and she said,

“For the past twenty years, flexibility such as reduced schedules, sabbaticals, job sharing has primarily been driven by employee-need. What this survey says is employees understand that these same flexible ways of working can also be led by business-need….

“After studying and writing about this issue for over a year, I believe the willingness of both men and women to sacrifice pay and schedule to manage through the recession with their jobs intact is less desperation than pragmatism and shared sacrifice. I see this as an opportunity for flexibility to finally come in from the “nice thing to do, perk and benefit” wilderness and become part of the way the business operates, and the way people manage their work and life in up and down cycles. “

I asked Yost, if she worried flexibility is coming at the expense of opportunity for advancement for women, or is this not a gender issue?

She said, “I think this finding will have ramifications on the advancement of women and will, ultimately require an even more effective use of flexibility in the future… More women will remain employed for longer more consistent periods of time, but the inevitable reality will arise—yes, they are working BUT they need flexibility to continue to care for their families. They aren’t leaving as they might have in the past, so how to we make flexibility really work for everyone.”

Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel part: as more women become breadwinners, our visibility increases and so does our collective bargaining power. Is now the time the ideal worker model becomes less important than the flexible, practical worker?

I don’t know the answer. Would you propose a reduced or flex schedule to your employer right now? Does feel less, or more risky than before?

I was moved to respond when I read Jory’s post questioning if there is ever a right time to have a kid if you’re serious about your career. I recently had a baby. Jory, you write that you fear “the underlying sacrifice that has, time and again, come with the responsibility of children.” I thought I would share with you some sage advice- not my own. This week, a group of women gave me an incredible gift: a shower of their professional and personal advice on how to manage work and home, the love for my husband and for my child. These women work in what’s lamely called the “work life” field.

They work with families, companies, and leaders to create better work+life fit (Cali Yost’s term). One of the women at my shower was Jessica DeGroot, who teaches shared care (or 50/50) parenting and whose work inspired the New York Times magazine piece from Lisa Belkin that you quote. All of the women at the shower work hard to help parents take equal (or nearly equal) responsibility for childcare and work outside the home, what Jessica calls the “Third Path.” Here are some pearls from Sharon Teitelbaum, a career coach and wise woman:

1. “Go with it.” What I took away was that moderation and compromise are the keys to having kids and a career. We don’t talk a lot about moderation in our culture of extreme jobs and super parenting. But it’s how you get through with a minimum of stress.

2.    Which brings me to Sharon’s second point: “Spaghetti O’s.” “They’re in a can. You open them.” In short, you don’t need to prepare deluxe home cooked meals or keep an immaculate house. And I guess now you can even buy organic Spaghetti O’s.

3.    “Date night”: have one with your partner very often. And also, as Lisa Levey suggested, have a night for your own self often. Take care to keep your own time sacred. In my short time as a parent, this is the biggest sacrifice I’ve noticed. Which leads to the next point…

4. “Create intentional boundaries.” While working and parenting, you need to be deliberate about time commitments, saying yes, and controlling your personal resources of energy, time and attention. So Jory, if you’re a mom, you probably can’t work seven days a week. Some things will have to get let go or delegated. But surely you can live with that? And, to reference Meers and Strober, who write, “every time you correct your spouse’s “errors” or criticize his way of doing something, you’re dealing a blow to 50/50 [parenting].” This too comes back to creating intentional boundaries. If your husband is on baby duty, don’t hover and check to see if he’s doing things right. Leave the house. Take your time (after all, that’s the deal) and let him figure it out.

And one final point from Lisa Levey, which I’ve heard over and over again and which is worth raising. Most new moms are asked, “well, if you go back to work, how much do you need to make to cover childcare”? This question is usually posed to the mother, not the father. Because the mother is often the default parent, childcare is so often thought of as a cost that comes out of mom’s salary. I did it myself. In Lisa’s words, this is a reductionist view. Investing in childcare so mom and dad can work is an investment in the whole family.

On a personal note Jory, I think about the amazing company you’ve helped to build, and which has probably required many sacrifices at times. I, and probably thousands of others who read BlogHer, am in awe of what you and Lisa and Elisa have built.  If you’ve managed to birth and nurture an entrepreneurial gamble with grace, imagine what you can do with your child!

Yes, I was supposed to have written this post two days ago, except that every time I sit down to write, the baby seems to have a meltdown. And then, I got turned down for a job I really wanted and I’m wondering if things will ever be the same again. The truth is, life with a child is better than anything I have ever experienced. I can’t recommend it enough. And it makes time for work sweeter too, because it is time for yourself.

When it comes to marriage, the more things change, the less things change. In a society where mothers who work full-time still do twice the amount of housework and even more childcare hours as working fathers, the idea that Dad would give up his career advancement to cook with the kids is pretty radical.

When we define equality for adult women and men, we usually use breadwinning as the key indicator. At home meanwhile, this mother puts it best when she says, “someone has to be in charge.” That someone is usually mom, a fact that hasn’t changed in decades. Look, we say, a mother can work too, and keep bringing home the bacon, even though she’s also staying up late to clean the house and take care of the children. That’s not equality – that’s taking on an extra job. These social norms change slowly, but we see more examples each day.

And now, in Barack and Michelle Obama, we have a fantastic opportunity for American leaders to model change, as psychologists say. Michelle has told us Barack forgets to pick up his socks, but most of their communication, both verbal and non-verbal (even the famous fist jab) signals he and Michelle are equal partners. Starting now, I hope they show us how.

For many, myself included, to be frank, it’s challenging to see men in these nurturing roles. It goes against so many of our cultural norms. We need leaders to model new norms for us. Amy Vachon, a shared care parent featured in the New York Times article, states that the “philosophy of being teammates” is more important than how tasks break down. And though his career clearly hasn’t suffered, the Obamas, with their international stage, can offer insight into how to manage an equal partnership, its successes and failures.

While much is made of Obama’s new masculinity – a non-martial viewpoint, his sensitivity and gestalt openly informed by a matriarchy – this is not a person who worked part-time so he could plan Sasha’s play dates and clean the house. But nor is Michelle, who was the breadwinner for many years. The Obama’s have offered us a rare, frank snapshot of their relationship, but I want to know more. I would love to know how these two super-achievers did it, because right now I see Michelle holding the lion’s share of the household duties, and that is equality version 1.5, not 2.0.

Michelle has gotten a lot of flak for describing her husband, but I recognize this loving self-deprecation as banter between equals. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had had the guts to rib Bill a little back in 1992. Defending her comments about Barack’s difficulty picking up after himself, Michelle said in an interview in Glamour magazine: “People understood that this is how we all live in our marriages. And Barack is very much human. So let’s not deify him, because what we do is we deify, and then we’re ready to chop it down.”

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What she meant was, stop multi-tasking for a second. Stop Twittering, blogging, IM-ing, catching up on email, or reading Gawker and listen. We all hear, we’re adept at hearing and performing actions at the same time. But listening is different, and at the modern tech or political conference structure listening is out of style. Like she often does, she referenced her two teenage daughters, who according to Arianna are always online, multitasking, and sometimes think their mom doesn’t get it. What Arianna–who gets it so thoroughly it’s staggering– meant was, her daughters aren’t present. Few of us are.

The conference was fabulous but it seemed nobody listened. The entire interplay happened not in the meeting rooms, but on Twitter. At some point the Twittering grew so self-referential that those on a panel referred not to each other or to the audience but to the giant Twitter page displayed on a screen above.

The conference closed, appropriately, with a “Twitter song.”

I realized I haven’t been fully present at work in years. I rarely listen in meetings, on phone calls, at conferences, and nor does anyone else I know. It’s not so much that Google culture has made my stupider (a la the Atlantic monthly article). It’s that I am distracted. Dave Winer wrote a great post about how un-useful most conferences are boring and unilateral (only fun for the panel) and so that’s why people space out in the audiences. I think most of us have too many options to keep busy in our virtual lives, and so we prefer to do that.

In so doing, we don’t process any information. We hear it, and post it immediately. We lose the valuable thing that happens when we are confronted with information and then have to break it down, understand what it means, and re-frame. Cogitating- it’s a dying art.

“…It starts with equal pay. 62 percent of working women in America earn half – or more than half – of their family’s income. But women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In 2008, you’d think that Washington would be united in its determination to fight for equal pay. That’s why I was proud to co-sponsor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which would have reversed last year’s Supreme Court decision, which made it more difficult for women to challenge pay discrimination on the job.

But Senator McCain thinks the Supreme Court got it right. He opposed the Fair Pay Restoration Act. He suggested that the reason women don’t have equal pay isn’t discrimination on the job – it’s because they need more education and training. That’s just totally wrong. Lilly Ledbetter’s problem was not that she was somehow unqualified or unprepared for higher-paying positions. She most certainly was, and by all reports she was an excellent employee. Her problem was that her employer paid her less than men who were doing the exact same work.

John McCain just has it wrong. He said the Fair Pay Restoration Act “opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.” But I can’t think of any problem more important than making sure that women get equal pay for equal work. It’s a matter of equality. It’s a matter of fairness. That’s why I stood up for equal pay in the Illinois State Senate, and helped pass a law to give 330,000 more women protection from paycheck discrimination. That’s why I’ve been fighting to pass legislation in the Senate, so that employers don’t get away with discriminating against hardworking women like Lilly Ledbetter. And that’s why I’ll continue to stand up for equal pay as President. Senator McCain won’t, and that’s a real difference in this election.

As the son of a single mother, I also don’t accept an America that makes women choose between their kids and their careers. It’s not acceptable that women are denied jobs or promotions because they’ve got kids at home. It’s not acceptable that forty percent of working women don’t have a single paid sick day. That’s wrong for working parents, it’s wrong for America’s children, and it’s not who we are as a country.

I’ll be a President who stands up for the American family by giving all working parents a hand. To help with childcare, I’ll expand the Child and Dependent Care tax credit, so that working families can receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses. I’ll double funding for afterschool programs that help children learn and give parents relief. And I’ll invest $10 billion to guarantee access to quality, affordable, early childhood education for every child in America.

And with more and more households headed by two working parents – or a single working parent – it’s also time to dramatically expand the Family and Medical Leave Act. Since more Americans are working for small businesses, I’ll expand FMLA to cover businesses with as few as 25 employees – this will reach millions of American workers who aren’t covered today. We’ll also allow workers to take leave to care for elderly parents. We’ll allow parents to take 24 hours of annual leave to join school activities with their kids. And we’ll cover employees who are victims of domestic violence or sexual assault.

I’ll also stand up for paid leave. Today, 78 percent of workers covered by FMLA don’t take leave because it isn’t paid. That’s just not fair. You shouldn’t be punished for getting sick or dealing with a family crisis. That’s why I’ll require employers to provide all of their workers with seven paid sick days a year. And I’ll support a 50-state strategy to adopt paid-leave systems, and set aside $1.5 billion to fund it. I have a clear plan to expand paid leave and sick leave, Senator McCain doesn’t, and that’s a real difference in this election.

And at a time when folks are struggling with the rising price of everything from gas to groceries, I’ll provide working women with immediate relief. While Senator McCain wants to continue the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and didn’t ask for them, I’ll pass a middle class tax cut of $1,000 for each working family. This will deliver tax relief for over 70 million working women. And we need to help folks at the bottom of the ladder. Almost 60 percent of Americans who benefited from raising the minimum wage were women. I won’t leave any working people behind. That’s why, unlike Senator McCain, I’ll index the minimum wage to inflation so that it goes up each year to keep pace with rising costs.

We can’t afford an economy where folks keep working harder for less. We can’t let the women in our workforce get paid even less for doing the same work. And we can’t keep pushing more and more of the burden on to the backs of working parents who are struggling to balance their jobs and their family. Because what binds us together, what makes us one American family, is that we stand up and fight for each other’s dreams, and for the dreams of all of our children.

I want my daughters to grow up in an America where they have opportunities that are even greater than their mother had, or their grandmothers, or their great grandmothers – an America where our daughters truly have the same opportunities as our sons.”

Of all the issues a potential first lady could talk about, I feel this is the most crucial. Our legislators are slowly making positive changes to family and medical leave (the most recent was the House’s passing of the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2008). This act allows federal workers “four weeks of paid administrative leave, at regular salary, to federal workers, to be taken within one year of when babies are born or adopted. Right now, 75 percent of Fortune 100 companies provide an average of six to eight weeks of paid leave to new mothers, but federal employees who become parents are entitled only to unpaid leave under the Family & Medical Leave Act. Many cannot afford to take the unpaid leave that law provides.” One hopes this would provide a model for companies in the private sector to restructure their paid leave policies.

But it’s not just about maternity leave. Two working parents means something must give. I say it’s the outdated notion that work consists of eight (or 10, or 12, or 14) straight hours at a desk. And I’m not alone. There are many movements afoot to create structural changes in how we work, from ROWE’s (Results Only Work Environment) to MCC (Mass Career Customization). But you don’t need an acronym to start talking about change. I’m so glad Michelle Obama is doing just that.