Today I’m going back to work. Gulp.

Back to WorkMy partner will be staying home with my daughter until the end of the semester (I’m a college professor and writer; she’s a public interest lawyer). Then we’ll switch: I’ll be home for the summer, and she’ll be back lawyering. After that? Who knows. But for now, I’m an Official Working Mom.

Working all this out was surprisingly simple. My partner and I earn about the same amount of money, but she is at the beginning of her career as a public interest attorney, and can more easily afford a break in her career than I can, as I’m up for tenure in two years. Moreover, I only have to be at work 2-3 days a week, whereas my partner’s job involved the 9-to-more-than-5 grind. Though I’ll miss tickling my baby’s tummy before lunch, this feels like the right decision for us.

We both feel the need to stay home and bond with our daughter as much and as long as possible, and we both want to stay engaged in our respective careers as deeply and fully as possible. This mutuality may seem less than earth-shattering to you, but if you’ve been following the current dialogue on stay-at-home versus working moms, it is indeed a minor revolution. The revolutionary part is that both of us assume that we have the right to pursue our respective careers fully, and we also both assume that we have the right to stay home and care for our child full-time. What’s missing? Gender, and all the baggage/assumptions that come along with it.

Now, in case you’re picturing Chris and Kris or some other matching set of boring androgynes, don’t worry. My partner passes as a guy, whereas I am the queen of all things Sephoralicious. Our differences go way beyond our gender performances; we differ in race, sexual orientation (bi vs. 100% lesbian) , age, ethnicity, religion, music taste (country western vs’¦ anything but country western). But like many queers, we’ve grown up without the assumption that we either get to be the bill-payer, with all the stress and self-determination that comes with that role, or the nurturer, with all the emotional connectedness and professional impotence that comes with that territory. We’re sometimes both, and sometimes neither.

In fact, I’ve noticed that this is the norm in queer families. Regardless of who does the bulk of the child care and who does the lion’s share of the bread-winning, queers seem to come to the parenting table without all the confining gender assumptions that lead women to feel like it’s their job’”and theirs exclusively’”to nurture, and men to feel like it’s their job’¦to have a job.

Of course this doesn’t make everything all shiny and utopic. I’m grumpy about going back to work; I spent an hour on a stuck commuter train this morning, missing my plumpkin (that’s the baby, not my partner) like crazy. My partner will surely go stir-crazy, and is already reading legal briefs for fun on the weekend. We’ll have less money for the moment, and will have to budget carefully, as we’ll be on one income until May. And the fact that we don’t have gender baggage to unpack doesn’t make the larger culture any more family-friendly; we’re still contending with a society that pays lip service to ‘˜family values’ while depriving families of reasonable family leave, good-quality, affordable daycare, flextime, and so on. But nonetheless, our negotiation of the work vs. family hairball so far has been free of the sort of gendered assumptions that seem to dog so many of my otherwise-enlightened hetero friends.

I can’t speak for all queer families, of course (and I invite others to give their queer two cents below), but I do think that we queers have something to offer the larger conversation on family vs. work debate: a model which assumes that all humans, regardless of their gender identities, desire BOTH fulfilling, well-compensated work AND meaningful, connected family relationships. Crazy talk, I know!

What do you think? We’ve had some interesting debates about gender and its relation to queer finances here on Queercents. How about gender and the queer work/family balance?

Happy 2008 to all the queer families out there. I wish you all the best with your personal work/family juggling act. Wish me luck with mine; I’ll need it (I think that’s the sound of all the balls dropping at once…)