Skip to content

Month: May 2016

Maxed Out: Is System Rigged Against Working Moms?

I have an ugly secret: For 18 years, I’ve felt like a fraud both at home and at work.

From the moment I became pregnant with my first child, who graduates high school next week, I’ve had the unshakable sensation that I’m faking big chunks of my life, playing the part of a competent and confident mother and professional — but in fact always shortchanging someone their due: arriving late to work after delivering a forgotten lunchbox to school, darting out of a too-long meeting to arrive at the school awards ceremony 30 seconds after they call my kid’s name, emailing with the college counselor when I’m supposed to be watching that IT training, or grinning robotically through my son’s trumpet-lesson story at the dinner table when my mind is on that proposal I need to finish by morning.

A Shrine to Splitsville: The Flotsam of Ill-Fated Flings

White opera gloves. Orange underpants. One pair of crutches.

The objects on display are unrelated in almost every way. The only quality they share is heartbreak.

Lock of hair. Shards of glass. Penguin cuff links.

Some are outright funny, some are gut-stabbingly sad, and some border on heebie-jeebie creepy. But no matter their size, condition, or origin, all are fraught with a feeling that’s familiar to most any adult, in any country: the ache of a fizzled affair.

Fur-lined handcuffs. Mercedes hood ornament. Under-knee prosthesis. Yes. That’s right. Prosthesis.

Feeling the Pay Gap — Personally

[Yes, we know there are words missing in this column. That’s what it feels like to get stiffed on a regular basis.]

Picture this: You’re 10 years old, and there’s just enough cake left for two delicious. Dad cuts a big piece for your twin brother and a small one for you, hands you your plate and smiles as if. You take the meager slice and say thanks, but you feel. What could his reasoning? Are you not as? Does Dad not? The idea’s absurd, of course, but.

This is the reality of working women throughout the U.S.: a frustrating daily, dollarly injustice that affords them less than what. That falls maddeningly short of what they. That takes them almost to where they deserve to go and then.

Irritating as hell, isn’t?

Welcome to our.

The contents of this site are © 2022 Starshine Roshell. All rights reserved.