Status Quo
None of this matters in the short term. I love my job and my colleagues, and I feel extremely lucky to have been able to work only half time over the last three and a half years. I'd really like to do it for another three or four years, but I don't know that our budget can handle that. Actually, I'm pretty sure that it can't. But full time in my current position isn't presently an option, and I don't have any other options in front on me at this moment, so I will have to make the best of what I have.
The squeaker was very comforting when I told him. "Don't be sad, mama!" he said. "Now you get to spend more time with us!" Which is very true. I had not been looking forward at all to the changes the new position would have entailed; I don't see how I could have been nearly as involved with mothering my little boys. My hope was that I would have adjusted in time. But as it is, the squeaker is right, and for now I get to continue the wonderful schedule I have had, where work stays on the margins of my life and my main job is to love and care for my little boys. My job is so easy, so stress-free, so simple, and so few hours each week -- and yet I get all the benefits of staying in the job market, I get some time to do work that I think is good and important and yet separate from my identity as a mother, and I get enough pay to make it feel worth it. Really, it's an ideal situation -- if I can pay the bills at the end of the month.
I used to think that I had to stay home full time, that anything less than that would be a compromise I'd never make. I remember telling my mother I simply wouldn't have children if I had to put them in day care. I thought she'd agree with me; she was, after all, a stay-at-home mother with seven children. But instead, she told me that was foolish, and that I needed to do what I could to make having a family work without setting out absolute parameters. Sure, staying home might be ideal, but does that mean anything short of that negates the whole experience of having children? Of course not, I now know. And in fact, I don't know that I'd say staying home seems like the ideal anymore, at least for me.
I do think it is important that a child under two spend as much time as possible with his or her parents, or, as a next best option, family members. When the squeaker was born, I stayed home for six months, and returning to work full time was wrenching. But my husband was able to work part time, and when we were both at work, the squeaker was in the care of my sister and, later, the squeaker's grandma. When the squeaker was two, I found my current part time job. When the pipsqueak was born, I stayed home for five months, and returning to work was not nearly so wrenching because of the kind of work I do now and because it is only part time. And again, the pipsqueak and squeaker spend the time when I work with their adoring grandma, so it works out extremely well.
Even now, all these years after that conversation with my mother, I cannot imagine leaving my boys in the care of strangers for 8 or 9 hours each day. I don't know that I could have ever reconciled myself to that; if I had felt forced to choose that, I think I would have struggled a lot with the situation. But I have also learned that the choices are not nearly as simple as full time stay-at-home mom and full-time working-away-from-home mom. One thing I didn't properly appreciate until relatively recently (though my mother had told me so) is that at around three, kids really like to spend time with other kids. A few hours in a preschool is something they LIKE and ENJOY. And the experience is valuable for them in many ways.
Also, while I believe strongly in child-centered parenting, I also think there is a danger in letting your kids be everything to you. Some stay-at-home moms, I think, risk allowing an intense kind of mothering to be what they do, and who they are. Every decision about every small parenting thing becomes fraught with heavy meaning because it is the whole of the parent's identity. This doesn't happen to every stay-at-home parent; I think my own mother was great at caring for us and yet leaving us lots of room to grow in our own ways. But part of the reason for this may have been that there were so many of us. She was able to direct her intense mothering towards the newest baby (and there was always a new baby around the house...), leaving us older kids to develop our independence and individuality. Had I been an only child, or one of only two children, I'm not sure it would have been beneficial for my mom to stay at home with us for the long term. There would have been, I think, the distinct possibility that we would have felt constantly managed, and I don't think that is a good thing for kids. Maybe it wouldn't have turned out that way; some stay-at-home moms have so many hobbies and interests of their own -- cooking, art, music, writing, gardening, sewing -- that they are able to strike a balance that is good for them and good for their kids (my mom had many of these interests, so maybe it would have worked out OK even if she did have fewer children). But I do think stay-at-home moms need to be cautious about making their children the whole fabric of their own lives. Most, I think are all too aware of that and look for other things to engage them.
Of course, the flip side is probably even worse: career women who essentially leave the task of raising their children to stranger-caregivers because they define themselves primarily by their career success. I think this category is pretty extreme; I don't even know anybody who really does this. Most of the women I know are muddling through the gray in-between areas, trying to figure out how to provide the best parenting for their kids but also to find meaning outside of their role as a parent, whether that is an outside profession, a patchwork of hobbies, or a single passion they can focus on. I feel pretty good about my own balance, and maybe it's not such a bad thing that my present situation will not be changing.
