This is probably not the best day for me to write about the
Linda Hirshman-
related posts I've read recently. I'm dealing with serious child-induced sleep deprivation, as Hurricanehead has decided to awaken multiple times during the night after days when he gets a good nap. Rocketboy has been a total pill this week, full of criticism and argument over every aspect of his days. Both boys are going through klutzy, messy stages. We're also in the early stages of potty training; I probably don't need to tell you what that means in terms of drudgery.
So if Linda Hirshman were to appear on my front step this evening and say, "Woman, you are wasting your time staying home," I would invite her in and offer her a glass of wine. Then while she was drinking it I would run out the front door and leave her to raise my kids.
The idea that I am betraying feminism by staying home full-time does resonate with me in some ways. For one, I was not raised to be a SAHM. At all. As a kid, I was expressly forbidden by my mother to take typing or home ec. When I pleaded to be allowed to join the freshman pep squad, my dad laid it on the line: "Why would you want to stand on the sidelines and rah-rah for other people when you could be working on your own accomplishments?" Clever man, bolstering my sense of self-worth while saving $300 on a pep squad uniform.
In college, I briefly contemplated becoming an elementary-school teacher, that most girly of good-girl professions. Dad--a public-school teacher for 26 years--said that if I did so I would have to pay back every dime he'd ever spent on me, "starting with the bottle of wine on the night you were conceived." When I left the pre-med sequence after two years to pursue writing and journalism, my parents were appalled. Staying home with two rowdy boys is about the farthest thing from what they had imagined for me.
Another reason the cause-betrayal argument tweaks my nerves is that staying home full-time is never what I imagined for myself, either. My goal was to opt out of work but continue my teacher-training course until Rocketboy was 18 months old, the age at which he could start attending a toddler program at whichever Montessori school I ended up working for. My plan was to teach part-time so I wouldn't be too worn out from teaching other people's toddlers at the end of the day to deal with my own.
Didn't happen. I couldn't find any Montessori preschools within a reasonable driving distance, 30 minutes or less, that had part-time openings
and hired teachers from my training program. If you think arguments over religion get contentious, ask a few Montessorians from different schools what constitutes 'real' Montessori.
There were other issues, too. A couple of schools asked outright if I was planning to have more children, because they didn't want to hire me if it were the case. It was. I could have taken a job at a regular daycare, but that wasn't the environment I wanted for Rocketboy, nor was it the one I'd spent my time and money getting certified to work in. And part-time daycare pay minus part-time toddler care pretty much comes out to zero.
A couple of fine Montessori schools called me more than once. But they always wanted me to work full-time and they would never budge on that scheduling requirement. I didn't see the logic in spending all week down the hall from my son so that I could take care of other people's kids, and the numbers didn't make sense. So I stayed home.
This was actually a relief to me in some ways. Hombre has long said I have a faulty bullshit filter, which means I am prone to actually say what I think during meetings and conferences. This tends to make me unpopular with deciders. After several years of reflection, I do not think I could ever work for someone else again, at least not in a traditional workplace hierarchy.
When I resume working for pay, I will have to be self-employed, not only because of my tendency to mock Dilbertesque bullshit as I encounter it, but because there is a yawning gap of nearly eight years in my resume now. As I'm homeschooling the kids (for academic reasons, not for ideology), I expect that gap to be the Grand Canyon when all is said and done. And if I really need to work for someone else, say, for the health benefits, or because I lack the collateral to start my own business, that will be a huge problem.
Sometimes during evenings out my mom friends and I talk about what we'd like to do professionally when our kids are grown. There's talk of law school, of putting a degree to use at last, of traveling or doing social entrepreneurship. Several of us have contemplated taking up street drugs when the kids are grown and gone, having lived on the square and narrow for so many years.
"I wanna try that 'ice,' " one very proper mother of five told me. "I hear it's incredibly addictive."
The truth is, I think most of us are apprehensive about what we might be able to do with our talents after we're done with the full-time mothering gig. We're not a pack of dim bulbs, but by the time most of us are ready to re-enter the workforce, we'll have three strikes already: out-of-date resumes, advancing age, and the female status that almost guarantees we'll be viewed as bargain hires at best.
It's a scary thought. I look at my paltry statements from the Social Security administration and compare them to Hombre's, and it makes me glad I manage the money in our household, because it levels the income/power imbalance. It lets me know where everything is and what it's earmarked for. I highly recommend it to any parent at home.
I realize that even having the option of not working and of having money to manage are enormous privileges. And I love being home with my boys when they're being sweet kids, which is about half the time. The boys won't always be kids, and as tired and frustrated as I sometimes get, I recognize that fatigue and obstacles lurk in the workplace, too.
But I understand that by opting out of paid work, I am also opting out of the chance, however slim, to change from within the anti-family bias of the workplace. By the time I realized my original part-time teaching plan wasn't workable, it was too late to do anything else, and
that I was truly unprepared for. Choosing between full-time work with a dozen toddlers or whole days setting the schedule with one toddler was one of life's very few genuine no-brainers. But it blindsided me, and I resent that.
I'll close with the story of a friend who recently gave birth to her third child. She had to work when her first two were little and had long wanted to stay home with an infant. With the third child, she and her husband were in a position career-wise to finally do it. When I visited with her and the baby last month I asked her how it was staying home after wanting to do it for so long.
"Well," she said, looking a little sheepish. "I may not be."
It turns out that when she tendered her resignation at the end of her maternity leave, her boss wouldn't accept it. Instead, the boss created a position for my friend in which she could work two days at the office and finish the remaining part-time work week at her leisure at home. For this she would retain her full-time salary and benefits. Better still, with her husband's flexible schedule he could care for the baby during her days at the office, giving them some bonding time and saving the cost of daycare.
"Wow," I told her. "You really hit the jackpot."
"I know," she laughed. "That's what everyone's telling me."
