Work Wednesday
With the launch of the Discovery space shuttle STS-131 mission on Monday (you can follow the mission on the NASA website here), there are now four women in space. (Three on the Discovery, one orbiting space in a Russian capsule.) It's the most women ever in space at the same time!
Two crew members on board the Discovery, educator Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger and Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki, are working moms. Astromoms! With daughters. As the mother of a six-year-old girl who could name all the planets by the time she was three and asked for a model of the solar system for her last birthday, I think this is totally awesome. My daughter will grow up in a world in which female astronauts are considered commonplace. (Well, maybe not commonplace. After all, astronauts are still pretty extraordinary!)
Sadly, the closest I'll ever get to the stars is my high school nickname. Spacy Stacy. I can no longer remember (or will no longer admit to) how I earned the appellation. (It does have obvious rhythmic appeal.) Nonetheless, last week I lived up to the title. Just one example should suffice. (More than one might ruin my super working-mom reputation, right?)
Rushing from work to the supermarket to my daughter's school to the airport (to pick up my parents who were arriving from Florida), I tossed what I thought was an empty take-out sushi container into a trash can in the school's cafeteria. Somehow, I had managed to throw away my personal cellphone and work Blackberry too!
After numerous frantic attempts to find the phones, the school principal (yes, the principal!) called me on our home phone. Someone had retrieved the cellphone from the ringing garbage can. (Actually, it wasn't ringing. It was playing Verizon's Latin-influenced default ringtone.) I flew back to the school, reclaimed the phone, and rooted through some rotting tuna sandwiches and other decaying lunch matter for the Blackberry before hightailing it to the airport. My daughter looked at me like I was from outer space.
What? Why? How? Well, I'm not a fan of the frazzled working mom stereotype but that day, I fit it. I had too much to do at home. (Did I mention the four-year-old birthday party and the holiday meals on top of my parents' visit?) And I had too much to do at work. I simply spaced out.
Good thing, then, that I'm not an astronaut. Flying the shuttle, docking at the space station, hauling spare shuttle parts. Who knows what might happen?
* * *
For an odd take on what did happen to one Astromom, see the March 25 Time article on China's seemingly capricious preference for married mom astronauts. The China story, which offers a jumble of rationales ranging from concerns about reproductive fertility to married moms' supposed maturity, is weird enough, but Time also uses the piece to dredge up the bizarre tale of former astronaut Lisa Nowak. (Nowak, you might recall, drove 900 miles from Texas to Florida with all sorts of scary paraphernalia intending to kidnap and kill her romantic rival, the girlfriend of another astronaut. Nowak was terminated by NASA, pled guilty to various criminal charges, and is now facing Navy discipline.) And, inexplicably, it takes the opportunity to attribute Nowak's behavior to work-life stress.
Really. The article cites unidentified "experts" who claim that "Nowak, who was married at the time and has three children, may have been driven to those extremes by the pressures of juggling her demanding space career and motherhood." And it goes on in that vein. It quotes a psychologist, Thomas Nagy, who says "where there is no balance and the career has demanded too much of the woman, there may be chronic sleep deprivation, stress-related disorders, anxiety, depression and sacrifices to parenting ability and quality of life." (I wonder what he'd say about a career-driven man.)
Now, I can certainly accept that an astronaut's career is more than a tad more stressful than most jobs. And that it's a lot to juggle, like Nowak did, a demanding career and three kids, including twin five-year-old girls. And I'm even willing to concede that work-life conflict might have played some role in Nowak's unraveling.
But I think Time missed the spaceship on this one. No matter how stressful it can be to juggle career and family obligations, it's hard to imagine that any woman without deep psychological damage would do what Nowak did. Remember, Nowak had been having an adulterous affair with co-astronaut William Oefelein for several years. She was devastated and severely depressed when he broke off their relationship. Her marriage was in shreds. And she reportedly had never recovered from the death of three of her fellow astronauts in the 2003 Challenger shuttle disaster. There have been a raft of theories and a slew of mental diagnoses about what made Nowak snap, but ultimately nothing, and certainly not work-life stress, can truly explain her behavior.
Even Time acknowledges later in the article that Nowak's "epic meltdown . . . almost certainly hinged on more than her working mom status . . . . "
So why raise it?
After all, it's not as if there's a heap of working moms out there ready to snap. Right?
Well, maybe there are.
Hopefully, they'll do nothing more than toss their cellphones into the trash.
I am amazed you got the phone and Blackberry back. Now that's good fortune!
Posted by: Jamie | Wednesday, April 07, 2010 at 01:03 PM