After a long week at work, and the weekend filled with two soccer games, a dance recital and a birthday party, I’ll drive 75 minutes to visit my mother this Mother’s Day. There’s no time for breakfast in bed, a manicure/pedicure with friends or dinner and a movie. That’s okay; that’s not what this working mother wanted for Mother’s Day anyway. You know what I do want for all working mothers? I want:

Paid Sick Leave. Almost half (48 percent) of private-sector workers do not have paid sick days. As a working mother, it’s common sense that occasionally you’ll need time to care for yourself or your child when they are too sick to go to school or daycare. It’s also likely you’ll need time to care for an elderly parent. I do. In fact, according to a recent Forbes article, more than 60 million families are caring for an aging or disabled family member. And do you know who does 80-90 percent of that caregiving? Women.

A few weeks ago, Melissa Harris-Perry appeared in a “Lean Forward” promotional ad for MSNBC and said:

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.

This week, Martha Roby (R-AL) will introduce the same discredited comp time bill that leaders in her party have been pushing for years. Misleadingly titled “The Working Families Flexibility Act,” HR 1406 would permit private sector employers to offer compensation time in lieu of overtime pay to their hourly work force.

At first glance the idea seems great: flexible time, family friendly. What’s not to love?

Public sector workers can answer this question.  In 1985, Congress voted to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) allowing government employers to offer comp time in lieu of overtime pay.  Family and flexibility had nothing to do with it:  the bill was framed as a cost-savings measure for cash strapped government agencies. The results:  longer work hours and less pay for America’s families.

They’ve hit a new low.

Citing significant concerns about long lines at airports and flight delays caused by the furlough of air-traffic controllers, Congress is allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to override strict sequestration rules and re-direct funds within its budget. And they did so with lightning speed.

With their big fuss over aviation punctuality, lawmakers make it clear that they’re not feeling the pain felt by the majority of Americans. Their message: In the United States it’s fine to wait — and face a steep climb — for housing, health care, cancer treatment, a pre-school slot, domestic violence intervention services, federal work study, or job retraining. But our planes? They better take off on time.

All right. I read it. The book that everyone, including my hero, Jon Stewart, has been talking about. So many reviews have been written about this book, that people have resorted to writing reviews of the reviews. The hype has been so incredibly, hyper—The Time story! The 60 Minutes piece! The banner ads! The web community!—that I was ready to harbor a deep dislike for this book. But that did not happen. At the risk of giving you Sheryl Sandberg fatigue, here are my thoughts, good and bad, on Lean In.

Co-written by Katherine Ullman.

An essay this month in The Wall Street Journal recycled a tired trope: “queen bees” in the office are making the lives of other women a living hell.

We’ve heard this before. Powerful women are just grown up high-school “mean girls” chipping away at the self-confidence of the women who work with and for them.

Suggesting that these women are at once “encircling” their prey and protecting their “perches,” author Peggy Drexler paints two incompatible pictures of the infamous “queen bees.” In one, queen bees cause the workplace to be unfriendly to women, by using surreptitious childish tactics to keep women down. In the other, these women’s bad behavior results from workplaces shaped by gender bias.

Those are two very different pictures, and we politely ask that she stick with one.

A little over 25 years ago, Dr. Heidi Hartmann dashed between meetings and a part-time fellowship in a 1969 Buick with a couple of boxes of files dedicated to research on women’s economic security in the back of a rather sizable trunk. This corner of Dr. Hartmann’s Buick can safely be referred to as the first unofficial office of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). The meetings she shuffled between were to unearth funding here and there for gender analysis on women’s role in a modern workforce. With a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale, Dr. Hartmann began her research career at National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council studying the underpayment of jobs typically done by women (for example, secretary, teacher, nurse). When she co-founded IWPR with other social scientists, she was driven by an awareness of the persistence of women’s inequality and economic insecurity, an awareness fostered by her upbringing in a single-mother, single-income household.

Dr. Heidi Hartmann, IWPR president and co-founder. Photo courtesy Chet Susslin, National Journal.

This blog post originally appeared in PunditMom.

Lean in! Take charge! No fear!

Out with flex-time! In with face time!

These are the messages two of the highest-profile working mothers in America are sending to the rest of us. If Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, and Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer, have their way, women in the workplace will remake themselves in their C-Suite images which, sadly, is looking like something from the 1980′s movie Working Girl. Their sentiments sound an awful lot like what I heard as a young journalist and then as a new attorney in a large law firm decades ago. Is this a case of “what’s old is new again?”

Photo: I am holding my son, then a baby, at my parents’ home in New Hampshire in 2004. At the time, my parents, grandparents and youngest sibling lived in the same three-bedroom townhouse. Growing up, I always lived with extended family or family members stayed with us for extended periods of time. -Elisa

Any day now, my baby sister, who is actually 28-years-old, will have a baby of her own and stay with me. She will be a single mother and I am her only family in the area.

She and the baby will be the 6th and 7th household members in my three-bedroom house here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Depending on your cultural background, this is a given – she is familia after all – or you will look at me as if I have three heads. What do your parents / husband / kids say about this? What the heck is she going to do? — as if single parenthood is the worst thing to befall on anyone.