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First, welcome to any new readers who saw my last post highlighted in this month's issue of Chicago Parent!

Next...the wrap-up for the first weekend of training for the Progressive Women's Voices program. It was a blast and so tiring! Sadly Carmen & Kristin had prior commitments and had to miss the opening weekend. But the women who were there were great and uber-supportive. We spent our two days working on messaging and 30-second snippets. We practiced on camera, which is always very hard for me to do. 

While I was eager to meet Kristin because I know she's a fellow mom voice and Carmen, whom I'm still unsure about her mom status, but runs an awesome parenting site, I found out that there was at least one other mom in our group.

According to our bios, you would suspect that Kristin, Carmen, & myself were the only moms in the class. Now we all wrote our own bios, so I have no idea if mom status was stripped out of the stealth mom's bio or not. But it reminded me of a panel I was at some time ago. I can't recall who was speaking, perhaps Linda Hirshman, but they were being critical of the pro-mom movement...Rather giving it a reality check. The woman said that even the most accomplished moms don't list motherhood on their resumes. So why don't we? Should we?

I remember back in my science days seeing a post-doc's CV and noticing that he listed his wife and kids on the top of his CV under personal information. This floored me because I was already aware of maternal profiling, despite the term wouldn't be coined for another decade or so. I wondered then if I'd ever be able to list my famliy on my resume or CV without fearing that it was just a way to tag me straight into the circular file. Now that I have added writer to my list of identities, people want to know where I write, so the whole mom thing is unmasked.

But if I didn't do all this writing, or rather wanted it reflected on my resume, would I list it on my resume? Then again, I still don't like MOM as a job title and I don't have a blurb at the top of my resume that says, "Progressive feminist mom in search of writing opportunities..." either. I allow people to assume it from where I write, which is bad because I know not everyone who writes on parenting issues is a parent themselves. 

So what's a progressive mom to do? Especially one who views being a mom not central to who I am, but very much a large part of my identity and my work. That question will need to stay unanswered...at least for now.

When Veronica isn't clarifiying hastily written posts she blogs at Viva La Feminista, WIMN's Voices, and Work it, Mom! You can also follow Veronica at Twitter.