Get OVER it already.

This week, my wonderful friend Lisa Belkin published an article written by the very funny Dawn Meehan over at Lisa's new Huffington Post blog. I would give you the name of Lisa's new HuffPo blog, but... uh... it is kind of in name limbo after the NY Times took unkindly to her calling it a similar name to her old NY Times parenting blog. Helloooo... someone didn't learn all he or she needed to learn in Kindergarten, NY TIMES.

Anyway, Dawn's article is about, unbelievably, the ridiculously belabored question of who has it "harder" -- the Stay at Home Mom (as you know, a term I recently dropped from my vocabulary) or the Working Mom?

Dawn is a talented writer and she makes me laugh. But seriously? Are we STILL talking about this? It's so... depressing. As I said in my recent post, we are all MOMS. I mean, do we have to have a winner of the Who Has It Worst question? This parenting stuff is, hands down, the hardest thing I have ever done. And I am not even talking about the crazy amounts of laundry that have to be put away, the constant dirty dishes, the cleaning of the bathrooms, the existence of pee absolutely EVERYWHERE in my life (will my house ever not smell like pee?). I'm talking about the emotional difficulty of being responsible for another little human's existence, character development, physical health and well-being, education, and, you know, FUTURE. Every single mother, no matter what her circumstance, has this burden. Some take it more seriously than others; some don't have the capacity to give it as much mental and emotional weight as others. But we all have hormones and we all gave birth or accepted a child into our hearts somehow, and when we did -- boom. HARD. NOT EASY.

You cannot shoebox a mother into a label. I have a good friend who is not working outside the home, but she is staying home with not one but TWO special needs children under the age of five. Her youngest might never really walk. She might never potty train. She might not have a normal life span. Her oldest is allergic to so many things that she cannot go to anyone's house who has ever owned a pet. She cannot come in contact with certain foods. So this mother's life at home is very isolated and very emotionally difficult. Are you going to tell me that someone else has it "harder" because she works outside the home?

I have been working from home this past year, and it definitely sucked for me. I am not great at that kind of multitasking, not great at drawing lines between working and mothering when it is all happening in the same room at the same time. That's me. Someone else might thrive on it -- it might be her lifeline. I don't care who has it harder. We're individuals, and we have individual kids with unique needs and obstacles and circumstances. Moms are married, divorced, single. They have children with special needs. They themselves might have special needs. Maybe they have spouses with special needs. We live in a sucky economy with sucky consequences for many families. Parenting is HARD -- for the rich, for the poor, for the working outside the home moms, for the moms not working outside the home. PARENTING IS HARD. That's why there there is no solution to the "who has it harder?" question. The answer is, we all do -- at any given moment, in any given situation, at any given age.

I would be a happy lady if I never saw another woman try to assert who has it "harder." Every time that sentence comes out of another woman's mouth or from another woman's keyboard, it's like some mom out there loses her wings. When will we stop trying to put stars on our bellies and start banding together? We could do so much good if we stopped arguing this question and started arguing about why we need better family policies in the American workplace, better health care, better maternity leave, better support for ALL mothers out there. It takes all of us to make up the village that needs to raise our children. Let's acknowledge that and MOVE THE HELL ON.