that, too

from kactus:

You know what? I think the next time I read about stay-at-home-mums-by-choice who have Opted Out of their White Collar Jobs to raise little Courtney and Nicholas, I just might scream.

Because, well, welcome to motherhood under fire. Welcome to motherhood that isn't allowed to stay home, that is forced out into the slimiest, lowest-paid, most enervating work in the world. Welcome to the world of mothering-in-poverty, where you're damned for staying home with your kids and damned for leaving your kids to go to work. Either way, you're to blame.

Welcome to motherhood in the middle of violence. Welcome, and weep.

A four year old baby was murdered, shot in the head in a drive-by. She was just being a kid, sitting on her porch, and some jackass fool with a gun stole her life.

Talk about the upsurge in violent crime in Milwaukee. Talk about how lots of these crimes are being committed by our youth. People shot in arguments; innocent bystanders and children victimized; pregnant women gunned down waiting at bus stops; mobs of kids beating a man to death; violence in the schools.

And then in the letters to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, people cry, "why don't these people get some control of their kids? Why don't they stop their kids from beating/shooting/murdering/knifing/fighting/drug dealing?"

Heh. Talk about a chickens coming home to roost moment. When years ago welfare reform was being debated, the same cry, "why don't these mothers get jobs? Get them out of the house! Let them be examples to their kids!"

So what happened? Here we are, ten years into welfare deform, and those children whose mamas went off to work at any job, anywhere, at any wage, because they had to or lose their homes/kids, now these kids who spent the flowers of their young childhoods in daycares or the streets, now they're the teenagers without mamas, teenagers who've had to somehow raise themselves and their siblings...