thoughts on being a working mom
This is the post that I swore I wouldn’t write, but that has been stewing for the last year. And it’s not the kind of stew that warms you up on a cold day. So here we go.
I love my job. Absolutely love it. I believe I am doing what I was designed to do (no pun intended). Not only do I love what I do, I am also blessed to be able to run my own company, and the arrangement is pretty nice. I work from home, I set my own hours, take the projects I want, and answer only to my clients. Yes, sometimes those clients are just as bad as a difficult boss. But if they get bad enough, I fire them. Right now, I work 8-4, 3-4 days a week, plus some nights, weekends, and nap times. And no, working from home doesn’t mean Miles is home with me, he goes to daycare. There, I said it. THE D WORD. I’m letting someone else raise my child.
When I was still getting adjusted to being a working mom, I admitted to a group of stay-at-home moms that I sometimes feel guilty when I’m not working. They looked at me like I had just told them I leave my child locked in a closet all day. About the same time, there were a few articles floating around in the Momdom, with titles like “Motherhood, a Higher Calling”, “10 Things to Never Say to a SAHM”, and “If My House is Dirty It Means I Love My Kids”. I have had a hard time embracing the Momdom, but I read the articles anyway. And they rubbed me the wrong way. The general gist of the articles was that motherhood is a hard job (the hardest one), the most worthy job, and God himself has ordained us women to be mothers. But the subtext was, every mother should stay home with their children. And if they don’t, they have abandoned their calling, are being selfish feminists, are letting someone else raise their children, and are not willing to make sacrifices. I didn’t disagree with everything, except for the parts that made me feel like shit a bad mother. And it takes a lot to make me feel that way.
Let me just stop here and say that if you are my friend and you are a Stay at Home Mom, I love you and your job. You made the best choice for your family, and I respect that, because it’s not my family.
I could spend the next five hundred paragraphs telling you why I work and why it’s best for my family. How being a working mom makes me a better mom. Or how I do not feel guilty when I drop my child off at daycare. Or that I make sacrifices, too. Or that the days when Miles is home with me feel like vacation days. Or how my house is usually pretty clean. Or why I think it would benefit every child to go to part-time daycare or preschool. But then I would just be doing the same thing that those articles are doing, and frankly I think that’s really not helpful for bridging the massive chasm in the Momdom. I know, those articles were written to encourage their target audience, but do you see my point? Lifting one method up can sometimes mean that you are putting one method down. Can you imagine how that mentality would make a single mom who works 11-hour days feel? Or the family that desperately relies on two incomes to survive? Or the woman who wants to stay home and can’t?
I just want to say one last thing before everyone starts throwing stones. If you’re lucky, the choice to stay at home or work is, well, a choice. If you want to stay home, stay home. If you want to work, work. Healthy children result from both of those scenarios. Maybe we’ll have different struggles, but both are hard and one is not better than the other. At the end of the day, we’re just Moms, doing the best we can at our most important jobs.
