In the year 2008, does anybody want to be identified as a soccer mom?
This was the question that Nancy Star, above, the author of a satirical novel about soccer moms, Carpool Diem, asked at her book party Saturday night.
Turns out not even Nancy would call herself a soccer mom, though she told a funny story about how a reporter from her hometown paper tried to get Nancy to identify herself as a soccer mom.
I was holding a glass of wine in one hand and a piece of shrimp in the other when Nancy told the story, so I didn't take notes. But I believe her conversation with the reporter went like this:

"Are you a mom?"
Yes, two kids.
"Do your kids play soccer?"
Uh, yes.
"Well, then you're a soccer mom!"
And so, the story called Nancy "a self-described soccer mom."

Nancy was embarrassed and decided to look up the term. What she found were a horrifying array of definitions, which boiled down to: SUV driving, cell phone wielding moms who spend all their time catering to their over-privileged brats. (One definition simply began: "the downfall of human society." Read here. )
Interestingly, the term was popularized in the 1990s when politicians suddenly detected suburban moms as a powerful voting bloc. So why is it that soccer moms are suddenly the subject of a new movie, play, books, and a reality TV show?
And what does it say that these shows and books come out just as Hillary Clinton is running her historic campaign for the presidency?
Nancy Star is smart and thoughtful; she isn't the type to pontificate, spinning grand theories off the top of her head.
But I am!


(see me pontificating to Nancy)

So here is what I think: it reflects the confused and contradictory images we hold of women today. We're both celebrated and pilloried as stay-at-home moms, while we also are attacked and lionized for being ambitious achievers.

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As any women's magazine editor will tell you, the surest way to generate controversy is to run a story about working mothers opting out or at-home mothers opting in.
Both working moms and at home moms feel dissed by each other (and the media), so no matter what is published or aired, you can be sure someone is going to be upset by it.
So, it is perhaps no surprise that soccer moms are the subject of two new novels, Nancy Star’s Carpool Diem, and Meg Wolitzer's The Ten Year Nap, an off-Broadway show, Secrets of a Soccer Mom, an upcoming movie, Soccer Mom, and a new reality show, The Secret Life of A Soccer Mom.

"This show is terrible because it TEMPTS a mother who has been at home with her children to leave them for her dream job!"
"Unless you're about to starve there is no reason for you to be at work. If you didn't want to raise your children, you should not have had them. It's child abandonment."

On the show, a “soccer mom” is secretly set up with her dream job for a week while her husband and children think she is enjoying a week at a spa. Then, drum roll please, the family learns the truth and Mom must make the big decision: Should she follow her career dreams or stay at home?
When I sat down to watch an episode, I expected to see the usual highly scripted unreality that passes as reality programming these days. But watching the episode in which a frumpy mother of four (and wife of a police officer) spent time as a cadet and performed so well she was offered a scholarship to the police academy, I found myself unexpectedly moved.
The mom lit up with pride when the scholarship was announced in front of her family. But she wasn't showered with congratulations by her husband. Instead, he icily declared, "That isn’t going to happen.”
End of discussion.
In a voice over, the mom claimed that the final decision--to turn down the offer--was hers, but she didn't fool anybody. The power dynamics in their marriage was exposed. And it wasn’t pretty.
In 2008, how many mothers have stayed at home because their husbands have decreed this is the way it will be?
I’m looking forward to cracking open my copy of Carpool Diem, Nancy Star's comic novel about the life of soccer moms.
After this show, I could use a dose of humor.

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