I read this recently and loved it... Now that I have two kids in school, Brian and I have tossed around the idea of me going back to work. It is such a personal decision and every family has different needs. Reading this article came at exactly the right time!
Being a Stay-at-Home Parent Is a Luxury … for Your Spouse
The other day, I read an article in the Washington Post about a stay-at-home mother who was having a rather hard time adjusting to answering the ever-popular question, “What do you do all day?” now that the kids were at school.
It’s a topic that has been on my mind lately as I watch in bewilderment as my children seem to insist on growing up at rates that surely I did not approve of when I signed my parental contract. I look at my youngest — my seven-week-old baby girl — and I swear my mind is already flashing to the day (tomorrow, probably) that I will be kissing her good-bye on her first morning of kindergarten.
But back to the task at hand. As I read the article, I scrolled through the comments, anticipating that there would be some doozies in a post about a stay-at-home mom basically proclaiming that she doesn’t feel guilty for doing absolutely nothing all day when I came across this truly remarkable comment:
“I work full time, and my husband is a stay at home dad. We have two kids in school full day (8 to 3). Don’t you realize how much easier it is to hold a full time job when you have someone home with the kids? I can work late and travel when I need to and not worry about the kids. Our weekends are spent relaxing, instead of racing around to get errands and chores done. I can go back to work on Mondays having actually recharged over the weekend. It feels like such a luxury to ME to have a stay at home spouse.”
I was flabbergasted.
Dumbfounded.
Perplexed that in all of my years as a stay-at-home/write-at-home mom, I’ve always been fighting the thoughts that I’m not doing enough or being enough. I’ve always felt I honestly owed the world some sort of explanation for being at home. That I’ve had to throw around the fact that since I stay at home we make sacrifices as a family — like not having cable! I’ve felt I had to bake pies so that the world would know I’m not a worthless member of society. And in the midst of all that mental clutter and guilt it had never, ever crossed my mind that staying at home wasn’t “just” a luxury to me …
But also a luxury for my husband.
And suddenly, when I read those words, it all made sense. Well, of course, it would be a luxury to the spouse who works out of the home to have a partner who stays at home with the children. Someone who is always there to take care of the inevitable days of sickness, arrange the doctor’s appointments, make sure the cupboards are stocked, and heck, to ensure that no one steals the FedEx package off of the porch. And then — goodness! — to have someone to save you the worry of sending your kids into the world, someone to always be there to kiss a scraped knee and take care of the potty training and maybe even have a hot meal waiting for you when you come home?
Imagine that.
I realized, in a rush of amazement, that I had spent all of our marriage feeling just a tad bit guilty for being the one who “gets” to stay home. I’ve pushed away the shame of staying snuggled up in my warm covers in the morning while my husband trudged off to work in the snow and I’ve felt the absurd need to pack a million and ten activities into my day so I could list them off to my husband when he came home in an attempt to convince (who really? Mostly myself …) that I was “productive.”
I realized, for the first time ever, that I didn’t have anything to prove. That I had been working so hard to work from home and always have it spotless and do all my educational activities with the kids because it was my job and I’d better darn do a good job of it if my husband had to work, that I never stopped to consider that my being home with our children could actually be a gift to my husband.
I’m actually writing this very article on a rare morning “off,” courtesy of my husband having the day off of his work. I’m sitting in a café, writing for the two hours between my daughter’s feedings. And, in fact, I just now called my husband, who had volunteered to be me for the day so I could work, to ask him what his thoughts were on the topic and to ask if he would give me a quote to include for the piece.
In the background, I heard my daughter crying, the two-year-old whining at his leg, and the four-year-old singing happily at the top of her lungs, having just returned home from preschool pick-up. I pictured the scene I had left this morning — four loads of laundry left undone from the weekend, the house a complete disaster, eggs still caked on the pan from breakfast. Sweetly, I asked him for a quote — did he ever consider me staying home a gift to him?
“What?!” he asked frantically, desperation creeping into his voice. “I don’t know, do I have to give you a quote right now? I mean, she’s crying and I’m trying to make mac and cheese and if I could just pick her up maybe she’d stop crying and …” he trailed off, seemingly too overwhelmed to finish his train of thought.
I smiled — a bit too smugly, I’ll admit. Because I think I had my answer. Being me for the day isn’t so easy. And having him there so that I could be elsewhere working … well, it really was a luxury. And a gift.
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We woke up on Sunday Oct 5th and it was COLD!
We woke up on Sunday Oct 5th and it was COLD!
I am not ready for winter! We took the kids to church in winter jackets and gave them hot cocoa for the ride. After 3 years of Mediterranean like weather in California, we are such wimps.
Thank goodness we have a wood burning fireplace in this house-
Tate has been learning about important Americans in social studies. One of them is Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought it might be good for him to watch MLK's "I Have a Dream Speech" one morning before school. He was SO into it. I was shocked. It is black and white, MLK has quite an accent and uses a lot of vocabulary that Tate has never heard, such as "negro." But Tate really enjoyed it-
A couple weeks ago my neighbor Tiffany asked me to go paddle boarding, or SUPing (stand up paddleboarding) as the cool kids call it, with her. I agreed. It was a beautiful fall day- crisp autumn air, leaves starting to change color- you know that kind of day. So I thought "who cares if I fall in? Who cares if I can't stand up? It'll be better than doing laundry!"
We have a marina in our neighborhood that rents all kinds of equipment- from stand up paddleboards to kayaks to paddleboats. Tiffany had taken a class this fall and wanted to get out there again with her instructor. She assured me it would be simple.
And I am happy to report that while I didn't look like either of these two ladies-
So picture this... It's picture day at school. Macy chooses a tank top dress to wear and has a nasty old temporary tattoo on her arm. The bus is coming in 3 minutes and I have no time to scrub her arm raw trying to get that thing off her arm. And I am out of baby oil. Well, here is my PSA- olive oil works too! There you go people. One more great use for olive oil!
Not sure if I have mentioned these before... My friend Hailey made these cookies for me a couple years ago and I fell in love with them-
Have a told you all about this?
Anyway... Another great article below that I recently read. To sum it up- can't we all just appreciate each other and STOP judging each other?? My dad and I got into a debate the other day about my volunteering in the classrooms. He hadn't realized that I am not just working with MY kids in the classroom. More often than not, I'm working with other kids and not mine at all. Those other kids may have parents who have to work, or are without a car, or have other little kids at home. There are a billion reasons why not everyone can volunteer in the schools, but please don't think I am doing it only for the benefit of my kids. Any time spent there by anyone- dads and grandparents included- benefits ALL the kids. Sorry of my rant. Here you go-
Not a ‘PTA Mom’
I used to make terrible judgments about what it meant to be a “PTA mom,” which stood for “Perfect Type A.” I envisioned a carefully coifed, cupcake-baking beast of a woman whose pastel capris never bore so much as a smudge of child-effluence, all with a polished smile. These PTA moms of my imagination not only prepared five-course bento boxes full of nutritionally balanced meals, they also pulled off school functions like Martha Stewart on steroids.
When my son came of school age, I tried to shake myself free of my parents’ former hippie mentality toward the PTA as a hassle at best, and at worst, just another part of The Establishment trying to squelch creativity out of learning.
It wasn’t until I attended the welcome meeting for parents that my prejudices about the PTA. blew up like a cake in the microwave. For one thing, PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) in my son’s school is called H.S.A. (Home and School Association), which just sounds friendlier. Here, I found a much wider array of parents than I expected: A mom who had to bring her groping toddler along, hair frayed at the edges in a shirt half-arranged from breastfeeding. A mom who was there on her lunch break from work at a local grocery store. A former schoolteacher who wanted to stay involved. These moms (and a few dads) were a lot more diverse than I had expected. Even more, as the H.S.A. president revealed, exhorting us to look at one another, “These parents are single-handedly responsible for outfitting the formerly straggling, half-broken computer lab with new computers from their own pockets.”
The new website, which made it easier to sign up volunteers and inform parents of important information? H.S.A. funded that as well. And all the events the school puts on throughout the year, from the anti-bullying “Unity Day” to the exercise-encouraging “Panther Prowl”— H.S.A. staffed and funded. It became clear that PTA/H.S.A. is synonymous with “volunteers who get it done.”
Further, my hushed conversations at events with other H.S.A. moms quickly made clear that we parents weren’t in the classrooms just to keep our precious babies on the college track, but to supplement shortfalls created by increased classroom sizes, overworked teachers and budget cuts so severe they would make bankers cry.
Every Tuesday I volunteer for an hour in my son’s first-grade classroom. And this isn’t about pinning up puppy pictures while the teacher reads stories. Mrs. P, a 30-year veteran in the teaching trenches, puts me in front of the white board with sight words and sentence construction, while she pulls underperforming children for small-group reading. While the children wiggle in their seats and chatter to one another, I get firsthand experience of how intense an effort is required to hold the attention and interest of 24 first graders. This is way more than baking cupcakes, this is teaching support. And I’m proud to do it.
I didn’t know pre-child what I know now: That without parents, many public schools, and the hardworking, often burnt-out teachers, would flounder. That classrooms would be sorely empty of many simple supplies like watercolors and colored paper. Or that most PTAs are comprised of people exactly like me, and nothing like me, who still share goals in common: to see our children thrive.
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