How to Change a Diaper Like a Porn Star

Because I like to keep in tune with popular culture and embrace my inner stereo-type, on the one afternoon a week that I spend completely unencumbered by work or anything else, blissfully at home with my daughter, I like to watch Oprah while my daughter takes her afternoon nap.

Like her or not, Oprah is still among the most popular household names, among the highest paid female professionals, and (for a more current reference of popularity) has the most people following her tweets (along with God and Lance Armstrong).

You can imagine my surprise last week to tune in and find Jenna Jameson, the “number one porn star in America,” as Oprah's invited guest. I don't know exactly what it takes to become a “number one porn star,” whether it means your name or other choice body parts are most commonly recognized by the masses. Oprah kept sighting that Jenna's films and popular spin off web site grossed billions and Jenna's autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, had spent several weeks on the New York Times best seller list at number 8.

I was amazed by many things during the interview, but what surprised me the most was the fact that in addition to her erotic notoriety, the focus of the interview was not Jenna's professional expertise, but rather the fact that Jenna was now a “retired stay-at-home mom.” Considerable time was spent with a video tour of Jenna's home that featured the kitchen (which revealed a star with more money than taste), the nursery, and shots of Jenna cuddling her two infant twin boys.

Let's pause a brief moment to appreciate the irony: me, an aspiring stay-at-home mom (that I would be if I had any guts and a bigger savings account, more on this later), watching the show of a woman who will never be a stay-at-home mom herself and yet has been made famous by them, interviewing a stay-at-home mom who has taken early retirement from a career that has no room in it for mothers.

Sure, we've come a long way from having to de-sexualize motherhood to the point where we are making up stories about virgins and miracles, yet this whole scene makes me wonder if there was a feminist revolution at all. Is there any question, after forty years of trying, as to why we still can't successfully combine work and family life?

Jenna's is the classic perception problem. She can't be both a porn star and a mother. Of course not, the thought offends our sensibilities. We all wish we could erase the unfortunate moment when our parents should have installed better locks on their bedroom doors; it makes me squirm to think her sons will one day find the DVD. So, on the surface, this statement makes perfect sense.

In the tearier parts of the interview, Jenna worries about what her now eight-month-old sons will think when they grow up. (She can't hide the internet from them forever.) I, too, wonder if Jenna will indeed be accepted into the PTA at her son's middle school, and I would love it if ten years from now Oprah was still around to have her on again and find out.

Yet, if we scratch the surface of what Jenna is going through, is it really all that different from the rest of us, trying to force together the disparate pieces of our lives that refuse to fit? The forever private, intimate, protected, and innocent moments between mother and child spent in the nursery or running around the house without clothes on because that's what you do when you are first in the world and trying to air a bottom out from diaper rash or feel the niceness of breeze on places that don't get enough air normally (Christ, the unabashed nudity required of the birthing suite) versus the former, more public, hardly recognizable, pre-mom, independent selves? (I fully recognize the ironic mixe of images here, too.) So it begs the question: Is the difference only in the details?

I need only to rewind the interview to find out:
Oprah: Now that you are a stay-at-home mom, do you miss it (your career)?
Jenna: No (uttered emphatically).
My answer would be the same of my career if I could give it up, as that would mean that I could spend the next few fleeting years helping my daughter explore the world without being so tired and frazzled and pulled in so many other directions (at least until she is old enough to require less time-intensive assistance from me); and if I could do so without the fear that my resume gap will render me completely un-hireable, save by Wal-mart.
Oprah: Do you have any regrets?
Jenna: No.
Me: Only that I didn't know enough before I became a mother to know that I'd want to spend every waking moment with my daughter and wish I could have chosen a career that would have more space in it for being both a mom and professional.
Oprah: Was it really something you wanted to be when you grew up?
Jenna: No, Oprah, I wanted to be you. (Uttered with such honesty and sadness that it makes me catch my breath at how there is still such little room in the world for women that make a living with their minds, instead of with their bodies.)
Me: No, Oprah, I had no idea that it would be this beautiful, this hard, this singularly important.