One of my contacts sent out this piece on the Forbes website — Who are you calling a stay at home mom? It’s yet another rehash of the tired question, Should women stay home with their kids or go back to work right away? In this case, though, they do mention the middle option, mothers who work part-time or from home.
But the thing that these pieces always miss is all the grey area, the most interesting stuff!
Perhaps they need to talk to some homeschooling moms. Of course, there are many homeschooling moms who are the epitome of the old-fashioned stay-at-home mom in many ways. Most Christian homeschoolers, for example, believe that it is the mother’s place to stay at home with her kids. Of course, the Bible neglected to say anything about how you’ll have to re-learn calculus right ahead of your kids if you’re planning to send them to college!
In the case of most homeschooling moms I know (no matter what religious bent), staying at home with the kids is as rigorous as getting a PhD, as demanding as running a corporation, as creatively fulfilling as being the artistic director of a small theater group. The big difference is that you get to decide what to do, where to work, and whether or not you want to get out of your jammies.
My thinking has come full circle on this. When my husband and I decided to have a baby, we discussed what we had as kids and what we knew of the research regarding those important first few years. We decided that we did want one of us to stay home, and that I would have to be that person given our comparative earnings. It wasn’t a huge change for me in some ways: since I met my future husband at a corporate job in 1986, I’ve made a point of avoiding corporate jobs. I taught at colleges, so most of the work I did was at home. Then I became a graphic designer and publisher, working again mostly from home. So staying at home wasn’t a change of great proportions.
The big change didn’t even come when my son was a baby. I had then some friends I’d made through graphic design and poetry, and babies are portable. I hauled that kid to cafés and restaurants, readings and art shows. Yes, I was a bit more isolated and I didn’t really know any other moms, so I felt frustrated sometimes. But then we decided that what our very sensitive, very attached boy needed was a bit of preschool, so we signed him up for two mornings a week. I started to get back to work, much as the moms mentioned in the Forbes piece who work part-time from home.
Through this time I guess I was what most moms would call a stay-at-home mom. I was primarily doing “childcare” — not education, though I know now that all that I did with them, all the reading, art, and playing in the sand, the singing and the dancing, exploration and conversation, was education in the truest sense.
It wasn’t until I started homeschooling that I started to appreciate what I was really doing: I was changing and growing, just like my kids except the growth was not in height or (mostly!) in pounds. The change and growth was in the way I saw the world and my ability to see past what I’d been able to see as just plain old me. “Staying at home with the kids” changed me in a fundamental way that can’t really be explained to a woman who is satisfied with her choice to go back to work. I know this, because I can hardly explain it to my pre-kid self, who planned to suffer through the early years, then get back to her real life once the kids were in school.
Other homeschooling moms and I chat all the time about what we’re learning. You may think that an adult homeschooling kindergarteners would just be in kindergarten again, but we are learning so much more. In schooling our kids, we’re learning curriculum and pedagogy, but we’re also learning psychology, time management, and crowd management. We get so much more done than many traditional stay-at-home moms I know because we’re motivated by our job.
So yes, I do think the old argument is very tired and really not worth discussing. There are women who want to go right back to work. They make the decision, they’re happy with it, and they make it work. Their kids turn out just fine.
And there are women who choose to stay at home and be the mom they had or wanted. They run the household and bake cookies and hopefully do lots of volunteer work as well. Their kids turn out just fine.
And yes, thanks for noticing that there are lots of women who keep feet in both camps, who do want to continue their careers but also sacrifice in order to be with their kids during the young years. And you know, their kids are just fine.
But those categories are superseded by the legions of moms who use this time to educate themselves and perhaps their children. We aren’t separate from those three categories above; we weave ourselves in so that sometimes you can’t even see us. We’re not stagnating; we’re not even sacrificing. We’re here, we’re growing, we’re happy, and we’re not just sitting around watching soap operas.
Though if we can find some educational value in watching soap operas, you might find us doing that, whether in our pajamas or not.
