No matter what you think of Alaska Governor and GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin's politics, I thought she had to at least be given credit for being an accomplished working mother of five.
Looks like I was wrong.
It didn't take long for the critique to start -- how can she be a good mother to five children, including a special needs baby, and be vice president at the same time? Isn't that impossible?
Funny how no one would ask that question if the candidate's name was "Sam" Palin and he was a father in the same set of circumstances (not including a run for the title of Miss Alaska, of course!)
The decisions of motherhood today are not easy. There will always be things we have to give up or compromise on depending on how things are going with our families on any given day. I don't like that, but that's how it is.
I was supposed to travel to the Democratic National Convention last week, but decided for a variety of reasons that the turmoil of being away from home the week before school started for my eight-year-old daughter would be counter-productive. If timing and circumstances were different, I would have made a different decision.
Every mother struggles with situations like that. Under slightly different circumstances, I would have made a different decision, but do I want someone telling me that I'm either a bad mommy or a bad professional because of that decision or the amount of time that went into coming to this latest compromise plan?
If Sarah Palin ends up moving to Washington in January, how long will it take before many start judging her based on how much time she's spending with the kids or whether she made cupcakes for her youngest daughter's classroom?
There are plenty of things we have to talk about when if comes to Sarah Palin -- her stance on abstinence-only sex education, why she cut funding for a program for young mothers in her state, and how we can possibly trust that someone with her experience could competently step into the duties of President, just for starters. The one thing we should not be tossing into the mix is whether she is qualified to be vice-president because she still has young children to tend to.
No need to fan the mommy wars flames that I had hoped were becoming dying embers. There are plenty of other substantive reasons to find for believing she shouldn't be John McCain's understudy.
Joanne Bamberger writes about all things political at her blog, PunditMom. She is also a Contributing Editor for Politics & News at BlogHer, and contributes to MOMocrats and MomsRising blogs.