There it was again - another puke on the page catastrophe. A blogger spills her guts out and gets viciously attacked by her assembly of commentators. Not an uncommon phenomenon, but what seems to be popping up frequently in these attacks is the both ludicrous and highly sensitive "mommy wars."

The blog read something like this:

"I know that being a stay at home mom is really hard, but on days like today I would trade the amount of guilt I feel for working ten hours for the pains and sufferings of an at home mom who gets no time away."

The responses went something like this:

"Easy for you to say sitting in your fancy office in fancy clothes NOT covered in puke, making money and paying someone else to raise your child."

Ouch. And then there was: "Well if you really mean that why don't you quit?"

Uggh. Sigh. I debated getting in there and giving my usual spiel about unity and freedom to choose and that if the stay at home mom is allowed to vent on her hard days, why can't the career mom do the same on her hard days? But, it seems at junctures like these that some would rather hear themselves self-righteously rant than take a moment to connect with another human being in their pain.

Haven't we had enough of bashing each other about who is making the "better" choice in raising their kids? Is there such a thing as a better choice when compared to another mom?

It's time, in fact it's long overdue, that we start to see ourselves as in this motherhood gig together. Whether working outside the home or within it, whether working by "choice" or by need, whether we think we're right or not, it's not about that anymore. We face as human beings, bigger problems now than who is cooking the dinner and who is ordering in.

The mommy wars are a myth created, in all honesty, by the media and advertisers to sell products and make news. But, unfortunately this supposed war has been perpetuated by moms unwilling to see that taking "sides" doesn't serve any of us. It divides us and keeps us from getting together on issues that really matter.

Such as universal daycare, such as proper funding for education and our school system, such as health care, such as crisis intervention, such as global warming. Every time we give into the playground politics of who is nannying it and who isn't, we lose sight of what really matters. Each and every one of us has the right to follow a path that suits our individual and family needs. An argument can be made for any scenario, but the only person you should worry about convincing is yourself. Quite honestly, the rest of us have more important things to worry about.

When you have to work and the school calls for volunteers, trust me, you want to feel grateful that some moms (and dads) have the opportunity to go and help out. And, when the school soccer team needs new uniforms and our BC government surplus hasn't reached the 3.5 billion dollar mark apparently needed to pay for those "frivolous" type of expenditures, we should all be grateful that some of us choose to work long hours from time to time in order to help pay for them.

Like anything else, what goes around comes around and if the level of appreciation for each other and the respect for our choices is evident, we could make a really good team again. We could unite on issues that could make life easier for all of us. For example, what if we lobbied for universal, subsidized daycare for stay at home moms and moms who work outside the home? It's been done before in Europe where said government has allotted a minimum of three hours per week of day care per mom, regardless of her job status. Now there's a cause worth fighting for. What if, we valued all mothers and assessed their needs on an individual basis instead of trying to make square pegs fit into round holes our entire lives?

Perhaps we could shift our focus to the bigger picture. Let us realize that the problem isn't so much that one chooses to work and one doesn't, making one better than the other, but that if women have the luxury of choice, we are usually pretty good at doing what is best for ourselves and our children, especially with the love and support of friends, community, and our tax dollars.

Let us unite on the mothering front again. Perhaps we could pretend that this is as important as the right to wear pants or vote, because it is. Because if you look at the world, there's enough fighting going on. And if you look real close, our children don't need us to be fighting each other, they need us to be fighting for them.

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