Would you bat an eye at a cement mason sporting a “Mom” tattoo on a husky, hairy forearm? How about if the mason is a young mother, and the fancy-script tattoos — “Eddie” and “Keilani” — are her kids’ names on a slender shoulder blade. Would that make you look twice?

Meet San Diegan Cynthia Rebollo, 25, a first-year apprentice cement mason and member of Cement Masons Local 500. Rebollo is one of the growing number of women working locally in the construction trades. No one knows the exact number of women, reports Xema Jacobson, business manager of the San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council, but estimates are that they comprise between 3 percent and 15 percent of the construction work force.

Neither do any statistics exist on how many of them are mothers; a third to one-half is a safe guess. By all accounts, the number of women — and mothers — is growing in the building business, and they are found at every level of the industry.

Regardless of their jobs, mothers with careers in this quintessential “he-man” industry share problems unique to motherhood and aspirations common to most working people.

Penny Lawlor’s slice of the development pie lies a long way from Rebollo’s masonry worksite. Lawlor is director of business development for Nielsen Dillingham Builders and a mother of three, including two in grade school. Developing new business for her $360 million employer “isn’t an 8-to-5 job,” she says, but one with lots of after-hours potential.

Making sure Nielsen Dillingham is well-positioned for new work, Lawlor says, “means lots of business-social functions like taking clients out for dinner and going to baseball games.” Further complicating the picture are her husband’s rotating shifts as a San Diego police officer assigned Downtown.

She keeps it all together, she says, with the cooperation of her husband, the flexibility of her job and employer, a well-organized home office and her own willingness to work late hours.

“He’s a great Mr. Mom,” Lawlor says of her spouse. “He goes and gets the bad guys on the job, then he comes home and mops the floors. The kids call him their ‘fun parent.’”

Her bosses, she says, “are considerate of the fact that I’m a mom. It’s not played against me. I couldn’t work in a place where I had to be constantly worried about disapproval.” Instead, she says, “they hired me to do a job, and they know they can count on me to do it.”

Lawlor does part of it in her home office, which she has meticulously outfitted to be technologically identical to her workplace in Loma Portal. She also does part of it from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. She has to be willing to work these hours, she says, “because deadlines for proposals don’t change because I’ve gone to watch my kid receive a school award.”

But the effort is worth it, says Lawlor. “When my kids are all grown up and looking back, I don’t want their memories to be that their mom was too busy to see them in the school play.”

Emily Davis knows well the extra demands a career in construction puts on mothers, especially those working on job sites where the day begins at 6:30 or 7 a.m. and ends at 3 p.m. Davis was a single mother in 1977 when she became an apprentice electrician — one of only three women in a class of 50 at the San Diego Electrical Training Trust. After getting the children ready for school, she put her 9-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter in front of the television with a timer.

“I told them, ‘When this goes off, it’s time to leave for school,’ and I went to work. They were latchkey kids.” Davis was able to be at home at the end of the school day, but had to attend class two nights per week for her entire four-year apprenticeship while a neighbor baby sat.

Davis persevered to graduate in 1981. She’s now a veteran journeyman wireman making $27.26 per hour and is halfway through her second term as president of Local 569 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Although it was difficult and often lonely, Davis says an apprenticeship in the building trades “is the best thing for single women with children to do. It’s not easy, but where else can you earn a living where single women can support their children?”

Jim Westfall, director of the Electrical Training Trust, adds that union-affiliated construction trades also are among the few careers where women receive equal pay and benefits for equal work.

Good pay also drew Cynthia Rebollo, a cement mason, to the construction end of the development business. Although married, Rebollo is a single mom when her husband, a Navy chef aboard the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, is at sea.

Rebollo, like Lawlor and Davis, also stretches her day to meet her parental responsibilities. “I get up earlier than my co-workers to get my kids ready and get them to day care,” she says. And she faces an additional career predicament when her child care arrangements collapse, as they recently did.

“I’m not working until my new day care setup begins,” she says. In other words, Rebollo had to lay herself off until she could find compatible child care. She suffered a triple penalty for her absence: she was without income, she was falling behind in accumulating the 600 labor hours needed for her next raise and she had to pass on an unexpected promotion which would have increased her hourly wage from $11 to $15.

Her future is bright, however. Her husband returns from duty at the end of May. He’s enthusiastic about her career, she says, and has promised to pull lots of “dad duty” so she can make up for missed work. And her former employers have called during her layoff, asking her to return, so she knows she’ll have a job when her new child care kicks in.

The premium pay afforded to working mothers in the construction trade’s segment of development does not seem to extend to women whose work — even in construction — keeps them behind a desk.

Linda A. Litle, account manager at Dynalectric Co. of San Diego in Clairemont Mesa and president-elect of the National Association of Women in Construction, answers a flat “no” when asked if single moms in traditional office jobs can swing a family on their income.

Litle, who has 11 years in construction support, tells of a single mother who was a heavy equipment operator. As her friend approached 40, Litle says, “she put her days in the sun doing grueling work behind her” and took a more traditional job in a construction office. Her income was halved, Litle says, and now she has a hard time getting by each month.

Litle thinks sex-based pay discrimination is a possible reason. “The ‘good old guys’ in some places think the parts women play in their company are minuscule, and they pay accordingly,” she observes. “I have seen women with the title of controller who make $10 an hour, yet are in charge of the company’s entire finances.” The male-dominated construction trades pay more precisely because they are mostly male, she believes, not because they are partially unionized.

Litle’s own sons are grown. One, in fact, is a Dynalectric journeyman electrician in charge of the prefab shop. She’s proud that he works well with the women electricians and thinks that her involvement with NAWIC broadened his horizons about the workplace.

Not all working moms in construction and development have felt held back by their gender or parental duties.

Cindy Ecker directs customer service for William Lyon Homes. She was first recruited by a male neighbor, a construction superintendent at Watt Industries, who was impressed by her diligent attitude toward her own yard work.

Ecker started her customer service career two weeks later, knocking on new homeowners’ front doors and asking if they had problems. She taught herself how to hang drywall, install baseboards, adjust cabinet hardware, do plumbing and window adjustment. Now, she says, she drives her 4-Runner with a full complement of tools in the back.

“People are quite surprised sometimes when I go to their house and ask about their problem. They tell me, I say, ‘Well, let me go get my tools and we’ll take care of it.’”

Ecker confesses to occasionally opting for job duties over baking cupcakes for classroom parties. She remembers creating tiny concrete roads in the backyard for her sons’ Hot Wheels cars. Still, she says, “once my son asked me to stay home from work and play checkers with him. He said, ‘Just call and say you’re sick.’ I should have. I should have stayed home. But you can get awfully focused in construction.”

Her sons, ages 30 and 21, however, did not seem to suffer from her absence. “I’m very close to them. I don’t think they love me any less because of my career.”

Patty Baker of Roel Construction avoided the conflict between career and motherhood altogether by delaying work “until my baby was 18.”

Baker, administrative assistant in the field for the Renaissance Project on Front and First streets, is the wife of the project’s general construction superintendent. Although she feels fortunate that she didn’t have to face the “juggling act” of working parents, she believes that raising kids is good preparation for working in construction.

“It’s loud and it’s dirty. And there are many different types of people there and they all have to play nice.”

All this sacrifice and difficulty might make it seem that to have children and a career in construction or development is not worth pursuing. Carpenter Kate Mapother would beg to differ.

Mapother has been a carpenter for 15 years, starting in framing and moving on to interior finish work. She and partner C. J. Lucke are raising John, age 4, and she revels in the idea that he is growing up “with a different opinion about who can do what.”

Mapother tells the story of building a shade structure at John’s school, then overhearing one little girl insisting to a male playmate that “only girls could be carpenters.”

She acknowledges that a construction career and motherhood is a tricky combination. But Mapother advises any woman considering the combination to go for it.

“Do it. If that’s what you want, do it. I have no regrets because having a child has enriched my life. They require a lot, but they give back a lot. I don’t think it’s any different for anyone else with a job and a child.”