I was attending a small inaugural event with friends and family when our 44th president was sworn in a couple of weeks ago, and a few of the female members of our early morning group let out a cheer when Michelle Obama, first lady and self-proclaimed "mom-in-chief," was introduced at the ceremonies.

The reason the ladies at our little party were rooting for her was because we all understood what "mom-in-chief" means. It's our job, too. And perhaps with a mother of young children now established at the center of our nation's most prominent family, we feel validated in some way.

I found myself saying, "you go, girlfriend" to our first lady as soon as she announced that the household she'd be creating for her two daughters and husband would be her main concern, and that she'd give up her successful career for awhile to focus on that. Not because it signaled a return to a previous era when that would have been expected of her, but because when a Ivy League-educated, high powered attorney decides it's OK to take the career off-ramp for a few years to care for her family, maybe, finally, America will begin to treat the career position of any family's mom-in-chief with the respect it deserves.

In many ways, her decision to primarily focus on her family is a courageous one, because Michelle Obama could also have stood proudly as a role model for career women. Trained to be strong and smart, gals like Michelle Obama, with college degrees and salaries rivaling their husbands, are capable of chairing the committee meetings, auditing the reports, and presenting to the board of directors whenever needed (not to mention replacing the water cooler bottle in the break room without asking for help, since they also somehow manage to squeeze in an upper-body workout at the gym a few times a week).

Yet as many of us former career-track women have discovered (often to our bosses' chagrin), our careers are also subject to the needs of our family, whether it is to young children, aging parents, or relocating spouses, and we've on-ramped, off-ramped, geared up and downshifted according to what they needed at particular times in our lives. We may be able to do it all and have it all, but it's tough to do it all and have it all at the same time.

Many families cannot afford the financial hit they would take if Mom decided to stay home with the kids full-time as Mrs. Obama has, but that doesn't change the fact that mothers are, generally, the ones who make things run smoothly in any family, whether they work outside the home or not.

While Barack Obama was presented with "the football" immediately after his inauguration (a briefcase containing the activation codes to the nation's nuclear arsenal, along with other top-secret info), most mom-in-chiefs understood that First Lady Michelle already carried the first family's "football" around in her head just like most moms do, and that she's probably the only person who knows it all by heart. What size shoes do the girls wear? Which antibiotic is Malia allergic to? What time is Sasha's dance class on Tuesdays?

And most mothers will tell you it's always a balancing act to organize the life of a family, and that more often than not, the task falls on the woman of the house to carry the family "football." Michelle Obama, when faced with her husband becoming the Leader of the Free World, wisely realized she would inevitably be the one picking up the slack with the kids, and decided to choose that as her full-time vocation for right now.

Perhaps her choice will finally alleviate some doubts in women (like me) who have had careers but chose to off-ramp and care for their families in mid-career.

Too often there's a small yet nagging sense of guilt about that choice. We have fears about not utilizing our hard-earned college degrees or former career experience as we clean, cook and chauffeur the kids around, eschewing professional careers for, perhaps, the same kind of uncompensated (and still largely unappreciated) work our own mothers did. We have fears about whether we should be OK with no longer being equal financial partners with our husbands.

We worry that if we're not putting in an eight hour day of work followed by another eight hours of cooking, cleaning and homework help, that maybe we're not trying hard enough.

As we watch Michelle Obama make the job of providing a stable and steady influence in her family's lives her main focus, hopefully it will inspire those of us who share the title of "mom-in-chief" to feel a renewed sense of pride and a sense of accomplishment about how we spend our days -- the invaluable, and vastly underrated task of making a family run.

Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Her column appears weekly in the Sentinel. Readers can write to her at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.

(Feb. 2, 2009)