Sitting On My Butt All Day

I would never recommend that another woman be a stay-at-home mother as I was. Never.

Not because I disliked raising my kids full-time. Not because I wanted to have more money to spend on fancy things. Not because I hated housework or cooking.

I can’t recommend it because of the way in which staying at home as a woman forever impacts your career and your financial prospects for the future. I admit that I am pretty cynical now and have come to believe that the patriarchal institutions and men who encourage women to stay at home and who are benefited by them staying at home want them to believe that it is to their own advantage to stay at home. But it is not. Even for women who don’t end up getting divorced at age 52 as I did, it is simply a very dangerous and risky prospect to put all your eggs in the basket of marriage to one single person.

When I look back on what I missed out on, I am gutted. It was less about the joy of labor and more about my sense of self, my identity as a capable and valuable member of society. As a mother, I very, very rarely received feedback on my performance. You might not know this, but children don’t tend to tell you what you’ve done well in the last year. No one gives you a raise if you achieved your goals. Yes, your children will tell you what they think you can improve on, but this is rarely helpful information. It’s simply hard to build a true and balanced picture of yourself based on your experience as a stay-at-home mom.

By the end of my years as a stay-at-home mom, I came to believe that I was pretty stupid about almost everything. You may have better luck dismissing your children’s opinion of you than I did. I hope that you do. I hope that you have friends around you who tell you that you’re awesome. I hope you believe them. I also hope you have a spouse and community who truly value what you do.

The yearly pro-forma “Mother’s Day” insistence that women’s work as mothers is valued is no more than that. It signifies nothing. Because women aren’t paid for their labor, and pay is how society shows that it values labor. Roses and chocolates are not the way that you pay for a service that you value. There is a salary associated with it. And if people think they are underpaid and underappreciated, they can leave and get an offer from a competing company. This isn’t an option for stay-at-home mothers.

So often, I hear divorced men talk about how the courts are biased toward women and that their wives ended up with “everything.” This is a ridiculous distortion of the reality that the court system is attempting to do a realistic view of marital assets at the time of divorce and to equalize the disparity between a woman’s likely salary and a man’s salary after years of support from a stay-at-home wife and mother who has often given up education and all the years or experience her husband has.

This was a painful reality check for someone like me. I thought that I was going to have a good retirement. I thought that my education was worth something. But after thirty years, a degree was worth almost nothing (and in some cases less than nothing). Almost no companies are interested in retraining a woman so close to retirement age. And to be honest, it is frustrating to constantly compare my brain’s capabilities now to what I might have done if I’d gotten a job in the same career thirty years ago rather than taking all that time off. There is no way that I will ever catch up to the people in my career who started so many decades ago.

But even if you set the financial concerns aside, there are many things that I regret not having access to. Feeling that I can put a number on my contribution to society is not the small thing that I was convinced that it was. I am not stupid, and having a job allows me to keep up skills and education in the modern day that being a stay-at-home mom made impossible. I had a hobby that I imagined might one day be a career, and I did get feedback on my skills and talents from that, but it wasn’t the same thing as a full-time job that pays regularly.

I still remember when I quit my last part-time job after the birth of my third child, and the sense of fear I felt, as well as the sense of dependence. I hated that. I’d been financially independent even before I graduated from high school and I hated giving it up. It took years before I felt like I wasn’t “leaching” off of my husband. And then the divorce made it clear that he had thought of me staying at home as “sitting on my butt all day” and not me contributing equally to the family.

I don’t know if women will ever have real equality in terms of division of household tasks, but I sure wish that I hadn’t always been the one on call 24/7 to wake up at night with sick or nursing kids just because I didn’t have a “real job” that was depending on me. I rarely had time off from my “stay-at-home mom” job. And when I did take time to myself, it was often with a lot of prep time to make sure that the kids were well-cared for while I was gone. Phone calls could always interrupt me and make me rush home because the truth was, I never really belonged to myself once I had children.

I know that many people think that being a stay-at-home mom is a “privilege” and will tell me that I should stop complaining about not having to work. But let me just say that being in the workforce isn’t fun, but it has a paycheck attached and no one will tell you that you’re just eating bonbons all day and should be grateful to clean the floor and wipe children’s bottoms with shit. Demanding gratitude for free labor is not a great situation to be in.