Sometimes I read these threads and realise that my parents were the biggest slackers in the world. I don’t think they’ve read a single childcare book ever and my early childhood memories are of my mom throwing us out of the house at 8 to run around with the neighbourhood gang till 5 in the evening with an occasional break for lunch (and by “gang” I mean assorted kids riding around on banana seat bikes), making us fold the clothes and do chores where we couldn’t injure ourselves. And then came the school years where both of us were off to school for umpteen hours a day and my mom went from randomly bored to extremely depressed and started sewing us these jumpers out of tablecloths and curtains and stuff. I can’t remember a single complaint about too much housework, mostly just about how there wasn’t enough to do and how she hated living in an area where the language barrier kept her from working in her profession (sales). Then again there are only 2 girls in our family and we were extremely tame kids and back when we were still living in India my grandmother moved in to our house to help raise me and my sis. But my mom still worked back then when I was an infant…albeit only about a 15 minute walk from our house.
Son’s asleep, so I throw out a remark in the opposite direction.
I think that probably one extra benefit to women such as yourself, Dangerosa, having kids (even though you say you don’t have the temperament for full-time small-child mommying and choose to be a WOHM) is that someone like you, who is obviously extremely bright and successful, is exactly the kind of woman who ought to be breeding!
By contrast, someone such as myself, who has admitted to being a failure in the corporate sense, has the temperament for this task. They’re different skill sets. Apples and screwdrivers.
Another answer to the OP - It’s human nature to be of the opinion that whatever we’ve decided to do HAS to be the best choice; otherwise we wouldn’t have selected it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. But I’m here now so what the heck.
As a single mom I am sick to death of this “debate”. There’s no need for anyone to feel “less of a woman, or more of a mother”. It’s not an if/or thing. I’m still as much of a woman if I’m a SAHM parent and as much of a mother if I’m a WOHM.
My definition of a mother is a woman who has a child (or more) biologically hers or not, who makes sure that the child is healthy, safe, educated, happy and well-loved. If you need to work to accomplish part of that so be it - if you can stay home and get it all done, go right ahead.
My definition of a woman is a female who has lived past the age of 20. I don’t see how working or not working could make you more or less of one.
:sigh:
Yeah it was wrong for me to enter this thread. I’ll leave now.
fessie, close, but I only bred one of mine. The other one is adopted. He seems to have pretty good genes despite them not being mine. I’ll take it as a compliment though.
There was a study that said girls in particular that had mother’s who worked outside the home in fullfilling jobs they loved did better (higher self esteem, less likely to have problems with drugs or teen pregnancy, better grades…that sort of thing) than girls whose mothers didn’t work or worked in “wage slave” jobs. Boys did no worse or better if their mother had that sort of job. However, most people aren’t lucky to enough to work in that sort of job.
Don’t give me too much credit yet! I haven’t got any children, so although I do have the demands of the house and my job, I don’t yet have the demands of young 'uns running around. Keeping track of the house, my business and my husband is quite enough as it is, especially since I’m here most of the day (unless I’m meeting with clients) and most housework, maintenance and even home improvement (like installing the new toilet, tiles, occasional plumbing projects, doing necessary repairs and painting) often falls to me. Not to say that my husband’s a bum - he does what he can and I’d never be able to keep the house half as clean as I do without the help he gives me, but his dirt threshold is a lot higher than mine is. And then there’s working at home when you rarely see anybody else, plus, even though I do own a business, many friends assume that since I work from home, I’m probably not doing anything and have all the time in the world to watch their kids or do favors for them, but that’s a whole other thread. 
However, in the next year, my husband and I hope to start adding to our tiny family. I do plan to be a stay-at-home mom and I can only hope I’m up to the task. I have several friends who were SAHPs for quite a while, then decided to go back to work at least part-time, not because they needed the money (though it was nice), but because they wanted the adult interaction. I have still other friends who never intend to be SAHPs, and who think that people who are SAHPs are lazy or have a very relaxed lifestyle.
I don’t have time for a long reply right now, but I want to make sure to post that this is a misunderstanding. On the contrary, I am in awe of this couple for their ability to set their priorities and stick to them. If we had been the kind to outsource all these duties before the kids I could only hope that we would have continued after one of us chose to stay home. But we’re not, so we don’t.
My point is exactly the one you distilled from my example: Child care is a full time job in itself, yet the criticism of sahp often includes comments about how it doesn’t take long to do housework, implying that the ‘parenting’ job is easy. I disagree and posit that one has nothing to do with the other. However, the real fact is that there is a significant amount of ‘housework’ that comes attached to raising children in your own home all day. I’m sure the woman in my example finds herself doing a lot more swiffing and swiping throughout the day than she used to, despite the fact that she’s retained her 10 a week cleaning service.
Our inability to separate child care from wifery is part of the respect problem that sahm face and if it weren’t we’d all be able to agree that it sometimes sucks to have to keep working long after you’ve punched your time card at the end of the day…even if your day job was doing exactly what you continue to do in the evenings.
This whole thread reminds me this discussion at Making Light
I don’t have kids, but it seems the gist of it is that no matter what you do, somebody is going to think you’re wrong and a horrible parent, so you might as well do what you feel is right anyway. The reason that SAHM and working parents are both looked down upon is that everybody has an opinion when it comes to parenting–even people without children–and everybody is certain their opinion is right.
For my family, it was definitely a straight-cost consideration. My mother was aware that she could not work her job full-time and keep the house up to the standards she wanted while being the kind of mother she wanted to be. However, when I was four (and my brother was two), she went back to work full-time, and hired a full-time babysitter/housekeeper. She made more money than the housekeeper and she loved her job, so it made sense.
She was there for every school play, every afternoon I was sick etc. Even when she started going to school (doing her MBA in 4 years) while working full time.
And to this day she would DIE if she served her family a dinner she bought and microwaved.
Amen to that. And my job(RN) demands endless patience with unreasonable adults that you can’t send into time out or the principal’s office!
Nursing is just like mothering, w/o the cute stuff and the naps. Believe me, I am at the beck and call of an entire unit–16 adult pts–to whom I must deliver prompt, courteous, compasionate service. Difference is that there are 3 other RN’s there to provide back-up and support when it gets rough. Not true for the SAHM. Oh, there is the GF network and the playdates for SAHMs-but it is not the same. It is not the same b/c there is that underlying competitiveness, and also the constant concern of being found short of the mark. I found the whole Mommy contest incredilby soul destroying. Luckily, I found some women who felt as I did and do; we are very good friends and I left all that “you know, she doesn’t put Billy in time outs/gotten a tutor/seen a specialist or whatever” talk far behind.
Random thoughts-
I have been a SAHM and now I work PT. Being a SAHM was the hardest thing I’ve ever done–pyschologically and emotionally. I was overwhelmed and horribly bored at the same time. The lack of mental stimulation was terrible. I became depressed-it was awful. I felt like I had lost me in the submersion of my needs to the babies’. To be brutally frank, it sucked. I love my kids, but I could not do it. The sense of inadequacy was huge–but I know it is shared by alot of women, both WOH and SAH.
My husband helps out (and I hate that phrase, b/c it implies that the final responsiblity does not lie with him) alot–alot more than I ever gave him credit for, actually. I couldn’t see how much he did, until that infancy-pre-school phase was over. IMO, it is unfair to expect the working partner to do exactly half of the needed chores etc–but the SAH partner should not be dumped on, either.
Working PT is an answer for many women. I am not thrilled with my job, but I have made the decision that PT is where I am at until my youngest is older (he is 6). Because I am PT, I can still do the little things which are important to me --the hand sewn Halloween costumes, the home made choc chip cookies etc. Plus, I can be home most days to help with homework etc. The days I do work, I work a 12 hour shift–those 2 days/week are considered black holes in this house-because I cannot get anything else done.
Other thoughts:
I know plenty of SAHMs who don’t do volunteer work, who lunch at the club, who hire sitters so that they can go do x almost daily. Sometimes I wonder why these women had kids–they spend so little time with them, but that is from the outside view. And then I get a bit angry, because no-one would really question the above, if it were a man…
When I was a SAHM, my house was not really any cleaner than it is now. But I had fewer late library books/videos etc. And my dry cleaning was picked up promptly!
Last thought: why the need to justify either position? Surely, we are all doing the best we can? Some need to work for finances, some for personal fulfillment etc. Some consider the SAH part their job and their kids “success” is a bonus on their personal resume. Others just want to be with their kids.
Maybe we need to recognize the different paths that can lead to healthy, happy, independent and productive people in the end–isn’t that the purpose of having kids?
I don’t really know that I agree with that, and for the first 8 years of my son’s life, I was a working single parent. My house was clean, my kid was happy, and we got along very well.
I didn’t clean my house during the week until after my son went to bed. I cooked large meals that were enough so that some could be frozen for quick meals for times when I was tired.
In fact, for an entire year while I lived away from my family, I didn’t go out more than three times without my son - and once was for surgery.
It’s difficult, but it can be done. However, I much prefer having a husband.
I forgot to mention that I am now a stay-at-home mom. Matthew is 11 and pretty self-sufficient, but Jimmy’s only just four months and needs me all day. I get a three-hour break daily (sometimes) when he naps, and that’s when my housework gets done.
I think the responses to my previous post illustrate perfectly why SAHPs are looked down on–the perfectly natural human tendency to think that anyone who doesn’t have your exact same set of challenges has it soooooo easy. It’s just human nature to say “well, it must be nice” when someone doesn’t have to face one of our own particular challenges, forgetting that they almost certainly have an entirely different set of challenges that we ourselves don’t have to contend with.
(And for the record, I don’t get to drink my coffee or go to the bathroom at work without interruptions. There’s always someone standing at my elbow or outside the door with a question or a task that has to be attended to right now, and the fact that that person is an adult instead of a kid doesn’t make it any less of a PITA. No, wait, I take that back. On Saturday I nuked a cup from a cold pot and it was lukewarm enough that I could chug it. Nobody bothered me during that 45 seconds so I did get to drink that cup without interruptions.)
:grumbles: Must be nice to get to drink fresh, hot coffee. :/grumbles:
See, what’d I tell ya? Everybody does it.
I don’t get the hostility though I know it is there. Even if it were dramatically eaiser and nicer to be a SAHP than it is to be part of the rat race, why would I care? Wouldn’t it matter more how the child is that how much inconvenience the parent faces? I think it is better for children to have a SAHP than to go to daycare, but it is better to be in day care than have a SAHP that is not cut out for it. I can’t imagine being upset because my husband did not want to go back to work when my daughter is five. Would these men dump their wives if they could not work outside the home for some other reason like disability?
I know that my friend a SAHM with one kid in college and one kid moved out is still busy. She helps with costumes for one kid, and maintains the family home, from hosting the parties they have every year to just being there through thick and thin she has plenty to do and doesn’t seem bored. Mind you she retired from her job after having a child, and she is near or at normal retirement age now. Funny, she doesn’t seem that old. She seems happy and busy when I talk to her.
I think I’m not being clear, or else I’m not understanding you. Let’s say you spend 40 hours a week home with your pre-school age children, the same forty hours a week I spend out of the house for work, say M-F 9-5 . During those forty hours, your children create more laundry, dirty dishes, spills and messes than mine do, because mine aren’t at home. Presumably, you do at least some (if not most) of that extra laundry and dish washing during those forty hours, and certainly , you clean the spills and messes shortly after they occur. I would be shocked if you told me that you did nothing but childcare during those 40 hours, and let the laundry, dishes and messes pile up until after 5pm. .When you are cleaning the oatmeal out of the heat register, you are providing both childcare and housekeeping. Iif it takes you an hour, you aren’t working two hours, one at child care and one at housekeeping. It’s still only one hour. When 5 pm comes. it seems to me that you and I are in similar shape- sure, you’ve got some recent dishes and spills that you haven’t gotten toy yet , but I’ve got some dishes and laundry left from the morning. But from 5pm on- it’s pretty much equal. You’re spending the next 6 or 7 hours cleaning messes as they occur, responding to " Mommy, mommy", bandaging scrapes - and so am I. When you are cleaning the oatmeal out of the heat register, you are providing both childcare and housekeeping. But if it takes you an hour, you aren’t working two hours, one at child care and one at housekeeping. It’s still only one hour.
You said in a later post
I’m not even necessarily saying it sucks- it’s certainly what I expected when I decided to have children. I just want acknowledgement that what I do after I’ve punched my time card is the same as what you do after you’ve punched yours.That your job as a SAHP doesn’t take 50,60 or 80 hours a week, while I spend the additional 10,20 or 40 hours relaxing without a care in the world, but rather , that we are both mothers 24/7, and simply spend 40 hours a week doing different kinds of work.
Someone else mentioned context, and I have to agree that context is important. My kids went to grade school in some sort of time warp where most of the women were SAHMs ( it was a parochial school in a working-class neighborhood), and I occasionally heard a man comment that he wished his wife would work. ( My husband heard them way more often- I mostly got looked down on for letting someone else [ my mother] care for my kids while I worked) Never heard it from the men with young kids. Never heard it from the men who worked 40-50 hour weeks at one job. Only heard it from the men whose children were all in school, and who were working two jobs or massive overtime themselves. And in that situation, I can’t say I blame them.
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I should’ve bowed out before I accidentally insulted Dangerosa’s adopted son - these Motherhood pissing match threads always wind up depressing me. Maybe 'cause I’m a particularly pissy one? I try to be confident about my arguments and wind up doubting my assumptions.
However it was very interesting to read all of these observations and opinions. Tough issue.
One thing I wish is that more people would cut more Moms slack. I’m given a Special Exemption: “Oh, you have twins, well then you can’t be expected to xyz”. Sometimes I think geez, one baby isn’t that much easier, don’t expect any Mom to necessarily xyz. Unless, of course, it’s an xyz that I particularly believe in myself, in which case they should snap to ::ironic::.
What’s really sad is how lonely the whole thing is. There are so many options and every decision feels so ponderous; you never run into anyone who really agrees with you, who’ll bolster your shaky confidence.
I always enjoy reading your observations, CrazyCatLady. The grass really is always greener on the other side.
I’m sort of scared to have children of my own. Not necessarily because of the actual raising of the children (though that in and of itself seems more harrowing than anything I’ve been through so far), but because there are so many theories about the best way to do it, who’s right, who’s wrong, and so many people out there just waiting to lay a guilt trip on you for not conforming to their standards of what’s appropriate and correct. For example, a friend of mine recently sent me a copy of a couple threads she read on another forum, one on co-sleeping and the other on breastfeeding. The amount of vitriol in those posts, like that mentioned on the discussion at Making Light that pepperlandgirl offered, was just incredible. I guess you just have to do what works for you, but shit, there are a lot of people out there who seem to delight in making moms - SAHM or working in or out of the home - feel as inadequate as possible.
Oh, honey, those folks delight in making everyone who isn’t them feel as inadequate as possible. All you can really do with them is to tell them to fuck off or just ignore them entirely.
And the main reason I know all about the “it must be nice” thing is that I see it at work every single day, between the emergency staff and the daytime ICU folks. The day staff looks at us and snots that it must be nice to get paid for 40 hours when you were only scheduled for 36, and to get to leave an hour or two early when things are slow. And then we snot right back that it must be nice to actually get a lunch break every single day and to never have to stay 4 hours late or get called in three hours early because things are slammed. Trust me, I know all about “it must be nice.”
It was the liberal feminists who made it one of 26 political planks at the National Women’s Conference in 1977 to secure Social Security for homemakers:
No feminist that I have ever personally known in 35 years in the movement has ever said anything in my presence or within my hearing that has put down the role of homemakers and mothers. I have heard conservative women and men claim that such things have been said.
I worked in a very liberal and predominately female environment for twenty years. We had enormous respect for good parenting and hard work. Most of us did those jobs ourselves when we went home at night. Why wouldn’t we respect someone who did that all day long?
The most recent study that I read – and that has been at least a couple of years – said that what seems to be best for children in general is having nurturing parents that are happy in the roles that they have – whether they be outside of the home or working at home. I don’t recall if this study focused specifically on women or if it included both sexes.
If I had had a choice, I would probably have been a stay-at-home mother. But I didn’t have children of my own. At 61, I’m adopting my 39 year old step-daughter, but she won’t let me stay at home with her. Now that her youngest is a teenager, she’s in law school.
When was the last time you heard a man ask this question? When is the last time you heard a man be asked how he manages to juggle career and a family? Women either need to cut themselves some slack, get their husbands fully involved in doing their fair shares, or get the husbands to work out an alternative. Have you, as a woman who works outside of the home, ever told your husband that you’ll be happy to “help him” with the housework? Sounds funny, doesn’t it?
Precisely
And that’s quite a bit different from “I do everything you did all day but I have to get it done in a couple of hours after work.” that sahps get from working parents in this debate. (not here, mind you…this discussion has been sort of a relief, although I still hate even getting into this snare.) The fact is, working parents don’t do everything a sahp does – it’s simply not possible. That’s not a judgment. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just the way things are until we find a way to manipulate the laws of space and time. Until then, working parents will continue to pay others to do this full time job. However, once one suggests the possibility that working parents don’t/can’t do everything a sahp does, there is a flurry of defensive b.s. and cries about how difficult it is to work and juggle a family. Sahps come up against this attitude all the time from people who think it ‘must be nice’ to have the whole day to do what they do in a couple of hours after the kids go to bed, and that’s where the lack of respect lies.
I couldn’t have said it better 