This is going to be a long post, but trust me, I threw some good links in. Enjoy!
In response to the fuss brewing over
Linda Hirschman's article, allow me to jump in with both feet and wallow in the fray. In the past I would have stayed away, clinging to the comfortable reasoning that I didn’t have kids, therefore I would have no idea what I was talking about. Now that I’ve been a mom for roughly 3 ½ months and back at work for 7 weeks, I have completed all of the necessary requirements for bitching loudly about the state of Mom-dom in the US. I: A) had a SAHM for the first 7 years of my life. B) Was a “latch-key kid for the next 10 years, C) Watched as my sister became a SAHM for a few years, then a working mom since 1998, D) stayed at home with Chloe for 2 months and finally, E) went back to work.
In a nutshell, like most choices in life, there are things that are good about it and things that really suck. From close observation, and my own experience, here are things that are great about being a SAHM:
• You don’t have to commute every day.
• When the child is asleep or otherwise incapacitated, you can get some work done.
• You can get all the errands done, stress-free, at all the places that are not open on weekends.
• You can go grocery shopping without needing Zanax.
• If you are really good at space-time management, you can actually do some of the things around the house that you read about in women’s magazines, like cook.
• You are there for every gurgle, coo and crying fit.
Here are the things that suck:
• Because there is no need to rush out of the house to get the kid to daycare and get yourself to work, it’s very easy to let the day get away from you. One minute it’s 9am and you’re thinking how great it would be to plant some geraniums, the next minute, it’s 5:30 and you’re elbow deep in soil and you hear your husband’s car in the driveway.
• It’s hard not to get sucked into watching daytime TV.
The Style Network should really come with a warning label.
• People look at you differently when you are an adult walking around your neighborhood in broad daylight. Sometimes it’s a good different: (You must be a stay at home mom! Aren’t you lucky!) sometimes it’s weird different: (You must be a stay at home mom! What’s the matter? Couldn’t hack it in the “real” world?)
• So many parenting magazines visually reinforce the image of the “Have It All Mom”, that you can end up feeling like
Edith Bunker all the time.
• You miss all of the in-fighting, scheming and BS of working at a “real job”.
• You are there for every gurgle, coo and crying fit. Mostly every crying fit. The crying fit will usually start about 10 minutes before the Dad comes home from work. As he walks through the door, exhausted and stressed out after commuting home, and sees you standing at the kitchen sink, trying to jiggle a screaming baby and mix a bottle of formula at the same time, sometimes he can’t help but shoot you a look that makes you feel like
Andrea Yates.
But enough
kvetching and kvelling about that for now. I think the elephant in the room in this situation is the fact that, in most families, both parents NEED to work. I can now say from experience that, unless you are very lucky and have relatives close by that can step in, trying to find acceptable, affordable childcare on two average incomes that has hours of operation that you can actually fit into a nine to five work schedule is, to put it mildly, friggin impossible. I looked and looked and if it was “affordable” (okay, CHEAP) then the facility smelled like cigarettes. Anything that looked like a place I felt safe with was either over $300 a week (part time!) or only open from 7:30am at the earliest, to 5:30pm at the latest.
Pretty much the only other mother I know that works outside the home is an RN who does in-home visits with patients a couple of days a week and is able to do her paperwork while she’s at home. I used to think my sister was very lucky that she was able to stay home with her two children while her husband worked, but when I was pregnant she was the first to tell me that it’s a bad idea to make one parent the sole bread winner. Having one person making the money puts them under twice as much pressure and before you know it, the stay at home parent is forced to petition the working one in order to buy so much as a hair clip.
I had seen her put her own children into daycare when her separation meant the end of her SAHM status and she was soon forced to take them out when another kid knocked my 3 year old nephew into a bookcase, badly bruising his back. As far as leaving your kids home alone while going out to work, my own mother had been forced to do it back in 1978, before the evening news became a
Horribles Parade of feral children and armed gangs of child pornographers that supposedly prowled every suburban neighborhood. I was given a key, my sister was told to come straight home after choir practice, and probably the worst thing I did was try to make M&M marshmallow krispies without using a double-boiler. Then again, I was a fairly nerdy child.
I vaguely remember my mother staying at home with us and I think I got into more trouble with her there. I managed to eat strawberry scented incense when I was 2, stick my finger into an outlet when I was 3 and also tumble down 3 flights of stairs while wearing my first pair of bellbottoms, and nobody pointed fingers, whispered over the fence or called DSS. It was all chalked up to being a normal kid and I have spent the past 37 years (mostly) therapy-free.
As far as the idea that the best and the brightest are abandoning their hard-won careers to suckle and cuddle and burp their offspring, here is my two cents: If these women are so well educated, then isn’t it sexist to assume that they don’t know what the hell they are doing when they choose to stay home? My gut instinct is that they probably know exactly what they are doing and, having had the luxury of a choice, they are probably much happier doing it. An added bonus is that by nature of being better educated, these women may have the advantage of being able to stay more informed and will probably make better choices about raising their kids than the last generation. Of course, I’m not saying that being better educated
automatically makes you a better mom (item #43), But, I personally knew a girl when I was growing up who had a stay at home mom that left a good academic career to raise her and she ended up scoring 1600 on her SAT’s and getting a full scholarship to an Ivy League school.
In the end, I think that if someone wants to stay home with their children and they can safely afford it, then good for them. If they want to pursue their career, and they can place their child in a situation they are comfortable with, then that’s fine too. And as for the idea that women are usually the ones who stay home because childrearing is considered “women’s work” let me say just two things: If you take the term “women’s work” to task for being demeaning, then who is being the sexist one here? 2) Have you ever seen a grown man try to change a diaper?
It’s the giant piece of the population pie that lands in the middle that we should really be worrying about. If politicians feel the need to legislate my reproductive organs, then I think I have the right to demand legislation to increase my maternity leave and decrease the rates that most day care centers charge.
Extrapolated Data Relating to the Conventional Cultural Zeitgeist AKA “Dammit, just let me change that diaper myself” Syndrome
1 week
