CNN Moms

Growing up on CNN I was always trying to imagine how these perfect looking anchors with flawless
make up and hairdo can look like when they wake up at 5 am before dawn and instead of smiling “Good Morning America!” into the camera yawn a prolonged ‘mooorning to their dearly loved husband. My first day at CNN gave me an unforgettable revelation and answer to my immature ponderings: guess what, they look like any “man on the street” (or MOS, by media jargon).
Ok, maybe from the aesthetically more gifted clan.
When I first met the anchor who was sitting right across me for the last 4 months, I uttered a relieved sigh seeing she was indeed human. Then my eyes rolled down to undergo another shocking discovery. Not only was she human: she was pregnant. Reeeally pregnant. I guess you can’t be more human than that but that’s something you can never tell from your couch watching her updates on Wall Street trade indexes or the latest merger of the month.
Amazing how professional pregnant moms can sound on air and how naturally they can switch over to random baby care topics ranging from the daily record number of diapers to babysitter drama. The more I walked around in our trillion-dollar building the more I felt that literally every second woman seemed to have an unusually large and suspiciously round belly. And no, this time it actually didn’t have anything to do with world famous American obesity. CNN moms simply flooded Time Warner Center this year. This made me wonder whether I missed some sweeping libido booster cupid-tsunami this year or Time Warner just simply pays CNN moms a decent enough paycheck for maternity leave. Well, it turns out that the second guess was as far from the truth as one can get. Namely because in the US moms get (read my lips) “ze-ro” paid days when they pay their duties to society and give birth to a new proud member of the American citizenry. The US and Australia happen to be the only industrialized countries in the world that don’t recognize that parenting is as tough a job as any respectable work on the labor market. While in most EU countries it is a mother’s codified right to have an average of 3 months of maternity leave, most US companies fail to provide any financial assistance for the new moms. When Maggie left us a week ago, although she gave her professional-as-always anchor-self, her tummy-size was alarming and we couldn’t stop wondering when the baby eventually would plop out. On her leave I asked when she would be back and she said she’ll be back February. I gave a puzzled look and thought of my mom who being a decent European social welfare mom took out a seven year leave when me, my brother and my sister arrived one after the other. But that’s Europe, where governments don’t just preach family values but use tax revenues to defend them. Here, being at home for more than a couple of weeks is a huge financial sacrifice and by the way: they’re the epithet of women labor inefficiency.
The phenomenon might not seem so perplexing and hyper-feminist if we consider Workaholism and
Productivity as America’s true secular religion but if I were an American, I’d rather satisfy myself
with a slightly smaller chunk of the world’s GDP and raise my children in peace, at home.