Home vs. job: Are you fighting a losing battle?

During my early childhood, I wore my mother’s unhappiness like an invisible cloak. I brought her handpicked daisies on May Day, tried to bring her breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day (she refused to stay put long enough), bought a trio of garish painted parrots for her birthday, cooked dinners and made my bed every day, brought home report cards filled with A’s, and took care of my youngest sister to lighten Mom’s child-care load. As I grew up, I abandoned my campaign to make her happy; I grew dismissive of her flaws and determined to never, ever, repeat the sacrifices that seemed to lead to her inescapable unhappiness as our mother.

Nothing was going to stop me, an optimistic Harvard student in the 1980s, from cherry-picking the best of my mom and dad’s worlds. My senior year, Judsen Culbreth, mother of two and editor in chief of Work­ing Mother magazine, spoke on campus about the benefits of working motherhood. “The most important factor in a child’s life is a happy mom,” she said. Her advice flashed like a traffic light turning green; work would be my Route 66 to happiness, freedom, and good mother­hood. I could and would have it all.

After graduating, I got a job in New York City at Seventeen maga­zine. My salary, though significantly less than a year’s college tuition, covered the rent on a shabby-chic basement apartment in Chelsea, the subway uptown to Seventeen’s offices, and five-dollar dinners at the In­dian and Israeli restaurants lining St. Marks Place. I was deliriously happy. School was out for good. I was finally working — and at a ridicu­lously fun, engaging job writing and editing a publication every woman in America has read at least once in her life.

After two years love intervened. I fell (hard) for a brilliant young man I met on the New York subway, a man from a welfare family who dreamed of blue-chip business success. I knew exactly where he could get it. In college I’d organized alumni reunions for Harvard Business School and met dozens of graduates at all stages of their careers. All of them seemed more in control of their lives than any other adults I knew. I se­cretly wanted to get an M.B.A. too, despite feeling like a traitor to my lit­erary ambitions. My lover figured this out and convinced me to leave the job and city I adored to run off to business school with him.

NBC VIDEO Answering your 'Mommy Wars' questions March 13: Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of "Mommy Wars," and Dr. Judith Sills reply to email questions about moms who stay at home and those who work outside the house. Today Show Entertainment

Despite my Ivy League background, in my world the feminine Holy Grail, no matter a woman’s IQ or accomplishments, was attracting men. As a child, I’d watched my mom in the space of one afternoon transform herself from a tear-stained, dirty-apron-clad wretch into a ravishing cocktail-party hostess in full makeup, gleaming black hair, and gorgeous halter dress greeting partners from my father’s law firm at our front door. Presenting a perfect front to the outside world of men clearly mattered tremendously. My primary quest had always been getting men to notice my legs, staying skinny, looking pretty at parties, in class, and on subway trains.

But I also craved economic independence. I simply did not want to be my mother. So I traded my glamorous, underpaid pink-collar publishing world for b-school.

Those first months I found myself dumbfounded by the academic mater­ial. I nearly broke down in accounting listening to professors discuss credits, debits, and accruals. The droves of former Wall Street analysts intimidated me to the point of muteness. What had I gotten myself into?

Toward Christmas, I went to New York with a study group to inter­view the founders of Wasserstein Perella, a renowned Wall Street invest­ment bank I’d never heard of. On the train back to campus, three men in suits sat next to me. One tried to start a conversation. The two others joined in the mindless pastime of “Who can pick her up first?,” a game I’d played with decreasing enthusiasm for over a decade. I was no more real to the men than a Playboy centerfold. The closest one asked where I was heading. “Business school,” I said.

I will never forget what happened next. The men sat up in unison, like marionettes. They leaned forward. One actually kicked me by accident. At once they dive-bombed me with questions. What did I think of the economy? Was a recession looming? Should they pull out of the stock market? Was it a good time to change jobs?

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