SLATESURFER SAID: " I know that at least some of her education was financed using government subsidized loans, isn't it a wasted investment that she's not using it? I'm a scientist who's had much of her graduate education paid through gov't funded research. If I decide to drop out of the workforce for a few years not b/c I want to but b/c childcare is too expensive, isn't that an incredible waste of resources (more so b/c if I do stop research for a few years, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to get back in the game at all). I guess what I'm trying to say is that we seem to value educating everyone, which is why we subsidize higher education. But then we force people (particularly women) to choose between using their higher education or caring for their children? I guess one answer is that we stop subsidizing education/career training. But I don't think I need to go into reasons why that can only hurt us in the end."

Leaving aside whether government should subsidize education or career/training, you brought up a very valid point.

Although I consider myself conservative on fiscal issues and I believe in personal responsibility, hearing so many social conservatives act like a mother going back to work is a greater sin than murder, made me wonder - well, does that mean that the best world for them would be one in which women who wanted to have children in the future didn't get educated anymore and just looked for well-off men to take care of them and their children?

Because you are right - we get ourselves educated because it's the RIGHT thing to do, isn't it? We are taking personal responsibility for our futures and our welfare so that we won't wind up on the dole.

But then we want to have children and we have to work, but we're supposed to waste our education and stay at home for the rest of our lives in order to be considered "good".

TO SAHMs - I'm not saying that staying at home is "wasting" per se, I'm just saying that if you went to law school and are now a lawyer, staying at home is in many ways "wasting" the education, even if some of your organizational skills help around the house. Plus you still have loans to pay off (unless you miraculously were able to pay them off before you had children or didn't have any at all for whatever reason), so you are not really getting a return on your investment.

Regardless, of course, as the mother of 2, motherhood can be rewarding in and of itself for many. I know many SAHMs, was one for about a year, and kind of a "single mom" at that, since my husband was in Iraq (and he's off again in August). I respect the difficulty of it all.

I hope all of that came out okay. I hate "mommy wars" and I'm not trying to start one, I'm just trying, like SlateSurfer is, to understand the mentality of some more social conservatives (and frankly the society we live in ) where they want you to take charge of your future, but berate you when you do if it does not conform with how they would have done it.

"Family values" is often thrown around but is ultimately meaningless in this country.

I'm not saying we need the government to hand us anything per se, I'm just saying that our SOCIETY does not value motherhood like it says it does and it certainly doesn't value it in terms of mothers who go back to work. Frankly, it doesn't value the ones that stay at home since the working ones are the ones that get the (mostly useless) tax break on daycare. What do you get for staying home? Nothing.

Again, I'm not saying that government needs to give, I'm just saying that what does happen shows that family values and motherhood and parenthood mean nothing to this society.

If society cared, it would see that more women are entering the workplace, that this is a good thing, and to make it a little less stressful. Employers can do that with flex-time, on-site child care, telecommuting, heck, even plain old understanding that your life is not necessarily your work.

I mean, some people work because they are just obsessed with it. They work all hours even when they don't have to because they love it. The rest work it only to get ahead. If you found out that you didn't have to work like that to get ahead, would you? Most of us wouldn't. I don't mean we'd slack, we'd just actually have a life, work hard and do a good job without being chained to our desk, or register, or machine, or whatever, 24/7.

Our choices as women are almost the same as they were in the 1950s - work and be single or married with no children; or have children and stay at home.

Working and having children is still so difficult to do that many women don't do it anymore.

I have a neighbor that is 26 years old, very bright. She has 3 children, 9, 5 and 2. She became pregnant at 18 with her first and the parents, being Mormon, I'm sure "encouraged" them to get married. I'm not sure she and her husband dated long before this happened, although I don't know the details. I know that she had a full scholarship to University that she had to give up in order to have the child.

Her husband was able to finish school. He has a well-paying job in audio engineering and although she worked some part-time gigs in department stores, she otherwise stayed at home. She had her second shortly after my first and later had the third (it was an oops). Now, after almost 10 years of marriage, he decides that he doesn't want to be married anymore; plus, all this time, he's been suffering from mental illnesses which he refused to be medicated for (OCD is one; I think there was another) and which made him verbally abusive.

So while it's good that she's now in the process of getting a divorce from the idiot, she is also un-educated past high school and has never held a job other than department store clerk. In the State of CA, she will have to support herself sooner rather than later because the marriage is under 10 years.

So, on the one hand, she was "blessed" and stayed home with her kids. On the other, she is at risk at being one of those single-mom statistics.

Is this what we want for our daughters? To not get educated, or to get educated but do nothing with it, which is almost the same thing (no experience).

I'm sure there is a way to help out working families, of whatever economic class. We are just not thinking hard enough about it.