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"  On Tuesday, the daughters of Texas state senator Wendy Davis defended their mom against charges that she&amp;#039;s been smudging her biography to make it look like she was a more involved mom than she actually was. Davis, who is running for governor, has been under fire since a Dallas Morning News article accused her of &amp;quot;blurring&amp;quot; facts, like exactly when she got divorced and how long her family lived in a trailer park. That DMN article also seemingly took her to task for allowing her ex-husband to have parental custody of their daughter, quoting an anonymous source who said, Davis was &amp;quot;not going to let family or raising children or anything else get in her way.&amp;quot; I understand why Davis&amp;#039; daughters felt they needed to defend their mom and her parenting. The onslaught on Davis&amp;#039; parenting (and her politics) from the right, particularly in the wake of that DMN article, has been appalling: They&amp;#039;ve called her everything from &amp;quot;Abortion Barbie&amp;quot; to implying she&amp;#039;s a  bad, gold digging mom. Her daughter, Dru, points out that her mom always shared joint custody, even though she was living in her father&amp;#039;s house. But she also discusses her mom&amp;#039;s involvement in other ways: Her mom was her Brownie troop leader. Her mom was her team&amp;#039;s field hockey mom when Dru was a senior in high school. &amp;quot;She went with me to every field hockey camp, tryout, program that I ever had,&amp;quot; Dru writes, adding, &amp;quot;my sister and I were always her first priority.&amp;quot; I must admit this particular defense set me on edge a little bit, for two reasons. The first is that she&amp;#039;s being held to a completely different standard than male politicians are held to. When have you ever heard about a divorced male politician being taken to task for allowing his wife to have custody of their kids? When has a male politician ever had to prove his parenting bona fides in this way? Newt Gingrich cheated on his first wife, who supported him financially throughout college and graduate school, and then left her. He ran on a family values platform without anyone blinking an eye, while Wendy Davis is a GD field hockey mom and gets attacked from all sides. But I also object to the notion that to be a &amp;quot;good mom&amp;quot; you always have to make your kids your &amp;quot;first priority&amp;quot; in this particular way. My mom, who was a very good and devoted mom, was also a mom who was a doctor. She missed pretty much all of my field hockey games, my soccer games, my basketball games, my brother&amp;#039;s track meets and his soccer games when we were in high school because she could not leave work at 3 PM. That doesn&amp;#039;t mean that when push came to shove, my brother and I were not the most important things to her. We were, and are. But being there for her patients was important, too, and so was making money for our family so we could live, and so was her enjoyment of her work. In short, a lot of times her role as doctor trumped her role as mom\u2014and that&amp;#039;s how it should be. The amount of time mothers spend with their children has increased a lot over the past 40 years, even as more and more moms are in the workforce. I think the idea that working moms need to be so involved in their kids&amp;#039; extra-curriculars to meet the burden of &amp;quot;good mom&amp;quot; is one of the things that is holding women back from achievement\u2014and making mothers feel a lot of needless guilt that they shouldn&amp;#039;t. It&amp;#039;s great that Wendy Davis found the time to do these things for her daughters. But it&amp;#039;s an unrealistic expectation that most parents\u2014male or female\u2014running for governor of the second largest state in the union should be able to hit the field every day. This article originally appeared on Elle.com. Photo Credit: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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