my advice would be to start drinking early

A nice girl from my high school's alumni program called tonight to ask if I would like to participate in their new mentoring program. Because I'd had a few glasses of wine I am an incredibly generous and kind person, I said yes, of course, I would love to help!

Because you know, I can give career advice about being a stay-home-mom!

I'm kidding. Sort of.

The Mommy wars are back in the news this week with the publication last weekend of E. J. Graff's Washington Post editorial, "The Mommy Wars Machine." Graff argues that "The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds -- and the marketing machines -- of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom news flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950s."

No kidding.

Most women today have to work: it's the only way their families are going to be fed, housed and educated. A new college-educated generation takes it for granted that women will both work and care for their families -- and that men must be an integral part of their children's lives. It's a generation that understands that stay-at-home moms and working mothers aren't firmly opposing philosophical stances but the same women in different life phases, moving in and out of the part-time and full-time workforce for the few years while their children are young.

The question now, of course, is how precisely one manages that movement between part-time and full-time work, and where those of us who gave it all up completely for that little window when our kids were very very small get our feet back under us and go back to work. I'm still waiting for the answer; you would think with all these books about the Mommy wars, someone would have figured it out.

Or not.

Graff's editorial was published in the same week that The New York Times declared the Mommy wars (or at least their literary manifestations) dead, asserting that "with rare exceptions (and it's too early to say whether [Leslie] Bennetts's book may be one of them), these so-called mommy books fail to transform their talk-show and blogosphere buzz into book sales. Talk, it turns out, is much cheaper than the $24.95 cover price." In other words, those of us who feel like we really need to know what Leslie Bennetts is saying should skip the book and just read her Huffington Post piece.

Or, better yet, read Judith Warner's incredibly insightful and surprisingly moving response to Bennetts' book. Warner says a lot of smart things about class and choice and the rock and a hard place between which so many women live these days, but this was the moment that struck me the most:

There was a time, a couple of years ago, when I made almost no money at all. My kids weren’t yet in regular school, I couldn’t afford much child care, and I wrote articles at night after they’d gone to sleep. I woke up at 3 a.m. terrified about the future. Then I got a book contract. It gave me the equivalent of a modest salary. I lived in the library and I loved it, and when the book was done, I swore I’d never go back to living from article to article again. Opportunities came after that, and I grabbed at every one – like a dog eating everything in its path, out of instinct.

I understand that desire, in a way I never imagined I would. I loved the work I did before my children were born (even though, ironically, it was primarily part time) and I missed it deeply after I quit. I was ill prepared for long days at home with a baby, for the complete lack of intellectual engagement. And now that I am working again, even in the small way I am, I find myself wanting more, even though more work means less time with my children. I envy Warner her book contract, her real writing job, even though she goes on to explore her own conflicted emotions about being a working mother, to tell us about a particularly painful and poignant moment with her daughter: "Julia, who has always taken great pride in my career, who brags about me, asks about my work, brings my articles in to share with the class, was interrupting me now to say, 'Of course some mothers stay home. They want to take care of their kids.'"

I have said before that I don't believe in the Mommy wars, and despite actual evidence to the contrary, I still don't believe that women are going out of their way to criticize each other's choices. But I do think that we are at a loss as to how to talk to young women about the balance of parenting and working, or about how they will map a life that includes a career and a family.

What would I tell a young woman about being a mom with a job? I don't know. I'm still not sure how my reentry to the working world is going, primarily because my work day still includes laundry and dirty dishes and playing with Legos, but also because I am not paying the bills with my paycheck. I don't know very many women who have made it work out in the idealized way E. J. Graff is describing, where they move fluidly from full-time to part-time and back again. One friend, an attorney who worked for a DC area law firm, decided to leave when she and her husband began to think about starting a family. The firm tried to keep her, offering to let her work part time. What would that mean? my friend asked.

Forty hours a week, they told her. Part-time would be forty hours a week.

My friend left the firm, because forty hours a week is not part-time. Or maybe it is and we're being unrealistic in our expectations. "The problem is," Warner argues, "part-time work generally isn’t 'worth it.' It’s poorly paid and hard to find, comes without benefits or any chance for promotion. It is – like far too many of the pleasures and comforts of family life in our time – a privilege enjoyed by the lucky few."

The real problem with the Mommy wars isn't that they are a creation of the media but that they offer no solutions to the real problems of working and raising children. Maybe the best career mentoring comes in pointing that out. Or maybe it's all about being able to make a really great martini. Because that I can do.