Well, I have comments back, but like AGK, I'm going to leave the BlogSpeak code in, in case it comes back. I'm thinking this one might be better in some ways than BlogSpeak though, so maybe this isn't all bad.

Now to haul out my soapbox.

My husband likes to watch Everybody Loves Raymond reruns. He says their family is so messed up that it makes him appreciate how good we have it. Yes, dear. That's nice. I'll be in the next room.

The other night was an episode about Debra (the wife) wanting to write a children's book. Ray (in case you're not familiar with the show) is a sportswriter and columnist. Since she'd never written before she asked him for help. He didn't want to.

At this point I knew exactly what was going to happen. Debra would try to write the book anyway and she would fail. Now humbled, the episode would end with her acknowledging her total incompetence and hubris at having dared try to do anything like this.

And that's pretty much exactly how it went.

Every time they have an episode where Debra (a stay at home mom) tries to move outside her assigned sphere of homemaker it's the exact same pattern. Failure, followed by humiliation and the not at all subtle overtone that she was wrong to have even tried.

I don't usually pay too much attention to the show (I find it kind of irritating), so this was the first time I really paid attention to that particular pattern. It caught my attention, of course, because I kept thinking of all the great Momwriters I know and how they would have handled the various obstacles Debra kept running into.

It left me wondering, though. This pattern the show's writers have developed for Debra - is this just sitcom cliche writing, just another case of setting up a conflict that doesn't actually go anywhere and never was by next week's episode? Or (as my paranoid feminist side suspects) is this an unwitting reflection of a bias against stay at home moms?

I know. I'm probably reading way too much into it, but this is one of those things that really gets me going. I am a stay at home mom because I choose to be. This isn't something I'm doing because I'm avoiding the scary outside world, or because I'm incompetent, or dumb, or lazy or any of the other stereotypes I see in the media. In fact, making the decision to put my career on hold was a wrenching one. I'm not so sure I'll be able to go back to it later on. I chose to stay home anyway. There is nothing more important that I could be doing right now than this.

There is plenty of time in life to accomplish all manner of things. Raising children is only going to take a couple of decades, not even a third of my anticipated life expectancy. I had years before they came along, and I'll have many more years after they're on their own. And if (as someone once postulated to me) I die young, then I've done what mattered most to me first. What more could I ask?