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Reprinted with Permision of the Bangor Daily News

By Alicia Anstead, Of the NEWS Staff

The Mommy Track

Michelle Atherton was working as a transportation engineer in Connecticut when she and her new husband moved to Bucksport in 2001. Within five months, she joined a local engineering firm but decided to quit six weeks into the job because of intense morning sickness.

Now Atherton, who is 35, stays home with 1-year-old Maggie. "I wasn't sure whether I'd go back to work after I had a child. I wanted to stay home for at least a year but it was open to discussion. Mike and I thought I would stay home if resources allowed. But going back full-time was never in the cards," said Atherton, who has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a graduate degree in technology education.

Highly educated and professionally driven, Atherton has joined the trend among women in their 30s and 40s who choose to stay home with their children rather than continue in their jobs. While the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that three-fourths of all mothers worked last year, a growing number of two-parent households have a stay-home mom. In recent years, the question of working or staying home has become a national issue, with cover stories in Time magazine and The New York Times magazine, a Web site for The Mothers Movement, and best sellers with titles such as "How to Avoid the Mommy Trap" and "The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women." In the June issue of W magazine, the pregnant Gwyneth Paltrow gives motherhood a celebrity spin by announcing that she "might not work for ages" after her child is born.

Motherhood, it turns out, is fashionable.

"You know how things come back in style, like bell bottoms? I think staying at home with children is back in style," said Bonnie Quesnel, a former banker who spends her days with 10-month-old Samantha in Monroe. "My husband and I figured it's not about us anymore. It's about her."

For all their education and career gumption, however, neither Atherton nor Quesnel was prepared for the isolation that can come with motherhood, especially in a rural setting. Atherton anticipated needing a community of like-minded women to connect with long before she was pregnant. She joined a book group, but it wasn't what she needed. "My husband has an extensive family, but I knew I needed more than family," she said. While pregnant, Atherton surfed the Internet and the newspaper in search of mothers groups. One day at her prenatal swim class at the Y, she saw a notice about a local group called Mothers & More.

"I started going when I was pregnant," said Atherton.

Now she and Quesnel are co-leaders for twice-monthly meetings of the Bangor chapter

of Mothers & More, a national organization that supports mothers through education, advocacy and discussion groups. Founded in 1987, the network has more than 180 chapters and 7,500 members. The Bangor chapter was incorporated in March of 2003 and has 13 members, most of whom moved to Maine to raise families.

The meetings, which are for moms only, take place on the second Wednesday and fourth Tuesday of each month at Bangor Theological Seminary. At least once a week, the women meet during the day for play dates with their children. Once a month, they organize a "mom's night out" and other activities, such as picnics, that involve their husbands and children. They also receive Forum, a bimonthly newsletter published by Mothers & More.

"The only thing we have in common is that we are moms," said Kerry Rice, who once worked as an outdoor education specialist and Web designer and now punches the clock with Hayden, 31/2, and Finley, 1, at their Bangor home. "We're trying to find a supportive structure to find out how to do what we are doing better. There's a lot to be said for recognizing we have one common thread. We don't all agree on everything. We came together because we made similar decisions about family."

At the two-hour evening meetings, the mothers spiritedly and democratically discuss a range of issues. They listen with interest to each other and understand when someone loses her train of thought because she is "thinking of Cheerios." If someone arrives late, no one chastises her. They understand the difficulty of getting out of the house - even if you are leaving the diaper bag behind.

During an April meeting, the mothers shared a homemade cake and talked about approaches to the wills they had written or amended since becoming parents. Inevitably, the conversations turned toward home life and the changes each woman has experienced since leaving the paid work force. They spoke of postpartum depression, adjustments to losing regular paychecks and the awkwardness of a social life with friends who are childless.

"For me, the hardest part was a loss of identity," said Rice. "I still struggle with it. Not so much in Bangor, but when I go to Boston and see my friends at parties. They ask me what I do, and it's a conversation stopper. Now I steer conversation away from career and into extracurricular things and what's going on in the world."

While they all agreed it is up to each mother to make a choice about working or staying home, each expressed certainty about her own stay-home status.

"I don't think of it as not going back to work," said Kate Dickerson, founder of the Bangor chapter and mother of two children, ages 4 and nearly 2. "This is where my life is right now. Almost all of us have decided to step out of the go, go, go. I think this is far more challenging than paid work."

In every case, husbands have become the breadwinner, gone during the day, awaited in the evening, and on-duty when the mothers take their breaks.

One of the hardest additions to married life, the group members said, was finding ways to include husbands in the daily routine. "He is masterful at his job," said Emily Fontaine, the only Maine-born mother in the group. After traveling the world with her work in textiles, she is raising Isabel, 2, in Hampden. "If I had to do his job, I would have to ask a lot of questions. He has his job, and this is my job. So I don't mind if he asks questions."

As articulate, thorough and smart as these women are, the adjustment, they say, hasn't been easy. They speak of coping devices: daily walks, time with adults, and the Mothers group, which they all call a lifesaver.

With similar candor, they speak of all the reasons they love staying at home.

"The greatest achievement," said Atherton, "is growing your children. But I am growing myself, too."

That complicated scenario is not unfamiliar to Joanne Brundage, founder and executive director of Mothers & More, which is based in Elmhurst, Ill., and relies on a 99 percent volunteer staff. Her original goal was to connect women, bring them together in their communities and into a national dialogue about the many roles of motherhood. The slogan of the organization - The Network for Sequencing Mothers - is based on Arlene Rossen Cardozo's 1986 book "Sequencing," about the phenomenon of women whose work pattern is influenced by motherhood and changes, temporary and long term, in employment.

While the current wave of mothers has been well-trained to be independent and fulfilled, many are shocked by the unexpected issues they face after deciding to stay home with their children, said Brundage, recipient of the 2004 Mother of the Year Award given by the florist service FTD Inc.

But the profile of members, who pay annual dues of $45, has not changed in 17 years.

"Our demographics have been strikingly similar in 17 years: women in their mid-30s with two kids," said Brundage, whose children are 24, 17 and 15. "Two-thirds of them stay at home and another third do some kind of work. Over 80 percent have a college degree, and 30 percent of them have graduate degrees. The women who are attracted to this group are professionally focused, well-educated women. That hasn't changed."

What has changed, said Brundage, a former letter carrier who created her organization after deciding to stay home with her second child, is the starting points for women, especially those in the so-called third wave of feminism. Now in her 50s, Brundage was the product of the baby boomer generation, born into a women's movement split between the traditions of the past and the pressures of the future.

"We had childhoods in the '50s and '60s - the Donna Reed-June Cleaver time," she said. "We had to prove we could do it all. We were angry, but we also felt guilty. Mothers today have been told and led to believe they can be anything they want to be and that women are an important component of the professional world. But for us, the concept of sequencing wasn't there. In fact, the original name of the organization, F.E.M.A.L.E. - Formerly Employed Mothers at Loose Ends - reflects the feeling we had that if you quit, you're done. Today's women don't see it that way."

Participants in the local Mothers chapter all graduated from college, are all in their 30s, all married, all white. Before choosing to stay home with their children, they held jobs in engineering, mathematics, entomology, marine sciences, education and environmental science. They have worked for corporations, governments and nonprofits. They are well-dressed, witty, worldly and informed. Their intelligence and resourcefulness as mothers is as much a boon to the world of children and society as it is a loss to the professional world.

Despite the strides of feminism, however, they do worry about their futures. How will they "sequence" back into the professional world once their children are in school or grown? And will it be OK if they decide not to? Their varied responses underscore one of the principle points of the Mothers manifesto: to respect the right and wisdom of every mother to decide how to care for her children, her family and herself.

"I wanted children five years ago," said Megan Schiff, who, with her husband, is raising 1-year-old Kaelyn in Bangor. "We planned for it, and I knew I'd stay home but I didn't know if I'd like it. I never felt I was good at my job. Being a mother is one thing I feel really good at. I feel confident about what I am doing. I plan to go back to work in six months, but I don't want to go back. It's financial more than anything. We want a bigger house."

Michelle Atherton, the mother with degrees in engineering, now says she is thinking about the possibility of rejoining the work force, too.

"I'm getting the itch to do part-time work," she said, "because I miss that part of my brain, that analytical part that makes me an engineer. But it would have to fit what I need."

Fitting the rest of the world to the needs of motherhood is a prominent issue for many women in the sequencing pattern. They want family-leave policies, flexible hours, job sharing, home-based businesses and federally funded day-care centers.

For those who know their American history, such demands would not be unprecedented. During World War II, when women stepped into the labor force to replace men at war, federally funded, onsite day-care centers were set up in factories determined to meet production deadlines. One of the largest centers, according to Rosie the Riveter Trust in California, was set up to care for nearly 4,000 children. Once the men returned, the experimental system largely was dismantled.

"There is some unfinished business to the feminist work," said Brundage, "and it is about motherhood."