Why I Work: Lulu’s Ramblings February 12, 2008

There’s a Jackie Kennedy quote that I have been thinking about lately, perhaps a little too much: “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”

While I have to remind myself that this is the same woman who said, “I don’t think there are any men who are faithful to their wives,” there is a lot of truth to the first quote. (I hope I don’t have to say that the second quote is complete crap.) 

I take our/my job of raising Elsie very seriously.  So, why do I work?  Why is raising my child not my full-time job, and so, why am I not a stay at home mother?

I have had people express their views about this topic to me as we came close to getting our referral.  Some were understandable since they came from people like my 80-year-old uncle who could not imagine that we would “ship our child off to have other people raise them.”  Because, um, that’s what daycare is, right? Anyway, other comments came from more credible sources, like my cousin (the gay Republican, how does that happen?). He expressed himself well, and his statement was “You want this child so much and you’ve waited so long to get her, I’m just surprised you aren’t planning to stay home with her.”

There’s something to that statement, yes, and I think even my own mother was a little surprised I didn’t take more than 12 weeks off from working.  So, back to the question, why am I still working?

It’s a little more complicated for me than it might be for some families.  The biggest technical reason that I cannot stay home is that I make more money than my husband. He is self-employed and his income is quite variable, but even so, I outearn him by enough to make me the primary wage earner (unlike Coco, my job is well-compensated, but short on meaning/impact in the bigger picture). An adjunct reason is that my husband is self-employed, and I am therefore the link to benefits. Story over, right?  In fact, before we brought Elsie home, there was a part of me that resented the fact that I had no option to stay home, even if I wanted to.

But really, after 12 weeks of leave, I knew I didn’t want to stay home.  I knew that I would not be happy staying at home. And in some ways, it was nice to not even have the option.

I don’t think I am less of a good mother because I don’t want to stay home.  Like Coco, I was a strong student, and I went back to school in my late 20s to get a graduate degree. I have had a successful career, with growing responsiblities, and I enjoy corporate life (it feeds my need for achievement and an overall competitive nature).  I was raised being told that I could do/be whatever I wanted to.  It never occurred to me that it might mean “oh yeah, until you have kids, then you need to stay home and be a full-time mom.”

As Coco wisely states, no one asks this question of men. And it’s not 1950 anymore. So why do I get defensive when I discuss this topic?

I have a few friends who have decided to stay home until their kids are in kindergarten. But I’ve had other moms say that they found that their kids needed them MORE as they got older. Being home after school when kids were pre-teens and teens was equally if not more crucial than being home when their kids were toddlers. So is that it? Is the only good choice to give up your career for 18-20 years to be at home with your kids?

It’s easy to say of course not, but it is a little less obvious than that for me. If one parent is not going to stay home, what are the “must dos” to make sure you’re not selling your kids short?  It’s different for every family, but here are ours:

1.  Find great daycare. Easy to say, very hard to do. We lost a slot at a great, small center, but were fortunate enough to find a wonderful, nurturing in-home situation near our house. The hours are not convenient, but we will move mountains to make it work since Elsie adores it there and clearly looks forward to it every day.

2.  Try to be flexible at work. Again, easier said than done. I work in an office where many people are here by 7 a.m. and stay until 6 p.m. or later. I can’t and won’t do that. And I don’t think it has to limit my career.  I am always available if someone needs me, and I squeeze in additional work before Els is up and after she is in bed.  Even better, I work from home every other Friday when we don’t have daycare.  That’s mom and Elsie time, and we make the most of it.

3.  Share the load. Unfortunately, I don’t have the advantage of Coco’s husband who seems to really share household duties equally. My husband is not particularly organized or able to multi-task productively, and he doesn’t always seem to know what to do to help without my asking. But he is always willing to do what he can, so I make sure I ask often.  For single mothers or those with partners who are busier than they are, there are other solutions too.  I have started leaning on take-and-bake dinners, and they aren’t bad (and I don’t make them myself, I have them do it for me).  We have people who come clean our house every other week. And I’ve simply let go some of my standards (probably a bad choice of words since I’m not a huge neatnik anyway) in terms of having a tidy house.  It will get better as Elsie gets older, right?!

4.  Have a backup plan. This is the hardest, and one where we don’t feel 100% certain that we have it in place at our house. There are some children who, for whatever reason, need more than a daycare situation. They need more parental care. It might be a special needs situation, or an attachment concern, or an extended illness. You need to know what you are going to do in that situation. When I went back to work after 12 weeks of leave, my husband took 12 weeks off to stay home with Elsie. So, we didn’t do daycare for six months, and even then, we transitioned her really gradually.  And it paid off.  It was a significant financial sacrifice for us to do this, and we will be paying that debt for a while. And we had decided that if Elsie had attachment issues and wasn’t ready for daycare, my husband would have stayed home with her. But could we/would we really have done that if push came to shove?  I don’t know, but it felt good to at least talk about a plan.

We have neighbors who have five children (she had two kids from a previous marriage, and they have since had three more), and they are constant reminders of how I do not want to parent. They both have highly demanding jobs, and you almost never see them with their kids. They have a nanny, and relatives who help out as well, but those kids always seem a little sad, a little less adjusted, and a lot more needy. In warm weather, the other parents in the neighborhood (including us now) are out in our front yards after dinner, watching our kids play together.  But we never see those parents. The kids are out, running around and playing, and if one gets hurt, an older child will run home to get the nanny or someone to help.

At our block party this summer, the father of this family said to my husband that he loves having kids, and he’d love to have more, but his wife has said that five is enough. Loves having kids?  From my outsider’s view, it seems like “having kids” means spending an hour a day with them and passing them off to other’s to raise. Unfortunately, most people know a family like this, and I think it is this type of situation that gives working moms a bad name.

We are all guilty of judging other working parents at some point.  The Sr. VP of my area at work was here at headquarters on Halloween.  Someone commented that her kids must be sad that she won’t be trick-or-treating with them, and she said “no, I haven’t been home for trick or treating in at least three years, so they won’t miss me.”  Of course, her husband was there, so why did I suddenly think a little less of her?

I think that’s why I get defensive on this topic — I do judge others in terms of their commitment to parenting. How do we reconcile our vision of good parenting vs. others’ expectations vs. reality?

For me, as in almost all things, it is about finding balance. Am I going to have the career I would have had if we hadn’t adopted Elsie?  No, certainly not, but should we assume that people cannot have amazing/demanding jobs and parent successfully? If Michele Obama was running for President (my dream, FYI), would we judge her ability to parent and be president as well? At what point are we sacrificing our careers, and at what point are we sacrificing our kids?

Are we all destined for the mommy track?  How have other people tackled this issue?  I’d love to hear about it!