EDIT: Because this topic is just so sensitive, I feel I should probably preface this post with the story behind writing it, which is not to tell you which choice to make about motherhood – staying at home or returning to work – and it is not to say that either choice is a mistake but to talk about the feeling I have now of making peace with my path, which was returning to work part-time after my baby was born. It is also a post for those wondering what choice they might make after having their baby, those wondering how mothers returning to work feel about that decision down the track. Beware of choices because it is possible to angst over them a lot, I have found.
After a survey found recently that young mothers long to be full-time home-makers, novelist Kate Kerrigan said: “Luxury is the time to stay at home and decorate cupcakes. We’re not fighting for our right to work any more, we’re fighting for our right to knit.”
Knitting, which is often used as a demonstration of radical feminism, can also be a demurely domestic pastime, like group crochet, cake-offs or joining the Women’s Institute. “We long to put the clock back to the postwar years when life seemed prettier and nicer,” writes another thirtysomething, who, like many of her contemporaries, has nostalgic fantasies about the pre-women’s liberation era when mothers were never expected to juggle jobs and families.
It is understandable that women today, who work long hours out of financial need, might yearn for more time at home. But distance has lent enchantment to that view of the 1950s and 60s. I remember those days very differently. A married woman’s life was easier only in the sense that a prisoner’s life is easy – difficult choices were made for you. Young mothers were not expected to have any job but childminding and housekeeping. Few women, and fewer married women, had real careers. But for every working mother now who fantasises about giving up work, there must have been a “captive wife” then, who felt utterly bored and frustrated by full-time domesticity. I was one of them.
From here at The Guardian, Jessica Mann with “What do you mean, the good old days?”. This is a well argued piece, because, as Mann points out, even when you leave the workforce to have children these days you can expect to be able to re-enter the workforce one day when the children are older, something that was impossible for many mothers in the past.
Few of us will remain ‘at home’ or ‘at work’ our whole lives in this era and consequently we probably shouldn’t be so wedded to those labels. Our careers are not linear trajectories, they are not ‘jobs for life’ as they once were for many men, they are, in fact, about on-ramps and off-ramps and slow-downs and speed-ups and different gradients at different times. There are still lots of institutional factors preventing our careers from being as flexible as they need to be but in general, there is a lot more choice about how you do the motherhood gig these days than there used to be. But some of these choices are deceptive; some of those choices happen even when you don’t realise you are making choices.
I went back to work when my daughter turned a year old. It felt like a very sad way to celebrate her first birthday. In fact, I delayed the return to work by a further week even though we had run out of money so I did not have to spend all of my baby’s birthday thinking about the end of our time together. It always felt like I went back to work a little too soon and for a few too many hours (though I had negotiated a part-time position for my return). Given the choice, I would have stayed home with my daughter until she was three years old. She could have really benefitted from that time, too, being a child who found separation quite distressing. But by then I would have been pregnant with my second child, so I wonder, would I have gone back to work or would I have found it easier to stay home until my next child was three years old? Would I have known I was choosing seven years? What actually happened is I worked right up until he was born and then I took a year’s maternity leave and then I went back to work again, same as with my first baby. And this was not because that was my choice but because our family needed the money. At the time I really resented not feeling like I had the choice. The household never ran more smoothly than that year of maternity leave when I was at home with a baby and a pre-schooler. Like the women in the article by Mann, I developed quite the nostalgia for the stay-at-home thing. I would like to have tried knitting.
Now, my son just turned three last week so this would have been my first week heading back to work. All up it would have been seven years out of the workforce – that feels like a very long time to me. I wouldn’t have been returning to my old job; I would have needed to find a new job. I hope I would have invested in myself over those seven years but I suspect I may not have. How long would it have taken me to find a new job? Would I have still felt confident in my abilities? Would I have found a way to keep my skills up to date? Would I have kept up with contacts in my industry? Just speaking for myself here, I’m a little bit hopeless at pushing myself forward, I’m a little bit hopeless at keeping my confidence up without regular nods of approval, I’m a little bit hopeless at keeping it together. I think I would have really struggled without a paid job for all those years – and I didn’t realise that it was about so much more than money.
Possibly I would have been a lot more adventurous with my career if I hadn’t remained attached to the workforce for those last seven years. I may have decided that this was a time to reconsider who I was and what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to earn money. That would have been nice and I envy other women that head space. I am very close friends with a couple of feminist mothers who identify principally as ‘stay-at-home’ mothers and who have done very well with this path.
I am not saying that being with children is boring and insignificant work, because I have loved my time at home with my children and overall, mothering has been a hugely creative, satisfying and thoughtful time for me. I am not saying that paid work is always hugely stimulating either. I am just saying that, for all the problems I highlight on this blog with being a working-outside-the-home mother, my satisfaction with this path seven years into it has taken me by surprise.
I want to say to those of you who don’t yet have kids, who are maybe pregnant and trying to make a decision about what you want to do over the next seven years, that sometimes good things happen in the long run out of bad things in the short-term. That muddling through, as I did, with a little bit of a broken heart and a lot of chaos at home turned out to be the right thing for me in the long-term. So, just be careful with choices.
blue milk 
I quit my job, fairly recently, so I could have a social life. It is a big luxury. But it’s something people are not really able to hear, because: I was doing all of the “important” stuff. My kids special needs were being met. We were eating food and wearing clean clothes and getting all our paid work done and keeping the house from falling completely apart and meeting our family obligations.
But that was all we were doing. There was no time for friends (I worked school hours + after dinner hours, and parented in between; my partner worked office hours and after-bedtime hours and parented in between.) There was no time for political or neighborhood involvement. There was no time for exercise or much sleep. There was certainly not time for knitting – monthly craft night with my friends was one of the first things I started up again.
And you know what? Getting to have friends and exercise and freaking knit is important. It’s not the only important thing, but it is still important. I remember my mom being a stay at home mom who didn’t have the option of going back to work – she was unhappy, she was trapped, but she got to have actual discussions with other women, which led to lifelong friendships and a support network when she went back to work and eventually got divorced. That’s something I didn’t get to do, when I was working nearly full time and parenting nearly full time. My support network was falling apart, and rebuilding it is not trivial.
The thing I can see being nostalgic for is the sense that you could do it “right”- i.e., there was a way to mother that pretty much everyone in society would approve of. Now it seems that no matter what you do, someone is judging that you’re doing it wrong. That gets so tiring, I can understand wanting to go back to a time when you could conceivably avoid the judgement.
That said, though, the “right” way back then would be completely and utterly wrong for me, so I don’t really feel nostalgic at all. I just wish we could get it through our thick heads that there is no one “right” way and dispense with the judgement.
One of the few (very, very few) advantages of our lack of real maternity leaves in the US is that for most of us, the separation occurs before the baby hits the separation anxiety phase. 9-12 months is the peak of the first (and in my opinion worst) separation anxiety phase. It seems almost crazy to send mothers back to work right then! Surely, we could let them wait until 13-14 months, when chances are things will be easier.
But, of course, it is also beyond crazy to sends moms back to work at 6 weeks or 3 months (the two most common return dates in the US, I think)- both big growth spurts, which seems almost designed to make it harder for moms who want to pump. I could barely keep up with my babies at 6 weeks breastfeeding fulltime. I shudder to think about trying to pump to keep up with a baby during that spurt.
I went back a little more than half time at 3 months, full-ish time at 4 months (I’d negotiated a 35 hour work week), and truly full time at about 11 months, when I switched jobs.
That wasn’t my ideal, but it was the best I could do from the options I had, and I liked it well enough that I did essentially the same thing the second time around, without the stint at 35 hours/week, which wasn’t an option at the job I had then. My ideal would probably be 6 months off, 3-6 months half time. That horrifies some people, who think we all need 12 months or more, but it is the truth. I’d still support giving all women the option to have 12 months, even though it would probably mean that day care arrangements would be harder for women like me who don’t want that long. And, of course, that we’d get even more judgement for mothering our way. I love my kids to bits, but I personally do better as a mother when I have my work, too. I’ve helped a couple of women come back in after ~5 years off to have kids, so I know that it could be done in fields very close to my own, and we could have made choices that would have made it financially feasible for me to stay home- I just didn’t want to do it.
I catch some flak on my blog now for allegedly not acknowledging how hard it can be to balance motherhood and a career like mine. I don’t think I gloss over the hard bits, but I can see that the hard bits may be less acceptable to other women than they were to me. I know for certain that if people went back and read my posts from when my first child was a baby, they’d find a lot more angst. Like you, I got to the right thing for me long term with a little bit (a lot?) of angst in the short term. And I guess the flak I get goes to show that no matter how you write about being a mom in the workforce, you’ll piss someone off.
All of which is a really stream of consciousness-y way of saying “I like this post”. And I agree- choices have consequences, so make them carefully, ideally based on what really works best for you and your family, and as much as possible ignoring the judgmental “mommy wars” crap. Someone will think you’re doing it wrong no matter what you do, so you might as well just do what you think is best.
“Someone will think you’re doing it wrong no matter what you do, so you might as well just do what you think is best.” Yes. This.
Thanks Mindy, finding that relevant for a lot of thoughts today!
Nothing takes the pleasure out of something more than HAVING to do it. As someone who does knit and sew and bake, I can imagine few things less appealing than being required or expected to knit the family socks, do the mending and darning and sew out of necessity rather than pleasure. I have zero nostalgia for ‘the olden days’ as my kids would call them.
I took 12, then 14 then 16 and lastly 18 months off with each respective baby, returning to work part time (3 days) in between each birth. I had a 5 month stint of full time work when pregnant with my fourth and another stint of full time work last year for a couple of months and found those times incredibly difficult, but very rewarding professionally. Rosa I do so agree that getting out to exercise, see friends or knit is freaking important and I found that those were the first things that went by the wayside.
Each time I returned to work my confidence had diminished and it took a while to re-establish my professional self. I have great respect for people who return after a lengthy absence.
My choice about the length of maternity leave (and I was very lucky to have such a choice) met with equal measures surprise – ‘such a long time, obviously not serious about career’ – and horror – ‘such a short time, sacrificing baby’s wellbeing for selfish career’.
When colleagues are expecting their first child and talk about what they will do, I try to refrain from giving them advice, but suggest that they keep their options open, that things might not be how they anticipate (‘I’ll be able to work from home 2 days a week while the baby sleeps’ is a common pre-baby assumption). If they hate being at home full time, that is okay, if they hate the idea of ever leaving their baby, that is also ok.
A wise older colleague told me to take as much time off as I could on the basis that if I really wanted to come back early, that was easier to wangle, than trying to take longer if you’ve committed to an earlier return date. She also reckoned that the start of high school can be a time when kids really need you to be around and available (even if they might not realise it themselves). She went from full time work when her kids were young, to part time work when in early high school. She’s now a judge with grown up kids.
We are a long time in the workforce, and these early childhood years are relatively short, even when they don’t seem so. There is time enough for change and variation and no need to commit to one path the instant you fall pregnant.
One of the things I missed most, when I was home with a toddler full time (I’d returned to work when my son was a baby, and then was unemployed for a while) was the commute. When I lived in the city it was the walk to work, now it’s a train trip with knitting or a book or chatting to other women. It’s time when I don’t have any obligation to anyone except that I keep travelling in the right direction. I can think or make or read or stretch my legs without feeling so conscious of all those other things I could be doing. When I’m at work there is the thought that I could be at home parenting, and when I’m at home I know I could be out earning a living, but the commute is just mine.
This really speaks to me, BM, reminding me of the fluidity and unexpected outcomes of the choices we make. Looking back over seven years of chopping and changing part-time, full-time and mat. leave, and now entering a time of really powering up, work-wise, two things stand out for me: 1. My partner and I are always moving in our parenting, and everything has been a series of choices, revisiting and recalibrating what we do, and never one big choice that meant an end to uncertainty; 2. Our choices have worked best when we’ve chosen options that gave us time rather than money (we’re very privileged in being able to make these choices, within constraints)- Rosa’s comments resonate with me, even though work is unambiguously productive and enjoyable at the moment.
Right now I’m unemployed (well, my nonrenewable faculty contract is about up and I’m on medical leave through the end because of this tough pregnancy), between careers, and very pregnant with our second. I am therefore going to be ‘home with the baby’ full-time but not by ‘choice.’ My partner is also an unemployed academic trying to find work & a new career. So I won’t have to deal with what I would if I were keeping my current job (in the US)–going back to work full-time after 12 weeks when breastfeeding and so forth are really important to me–and we’ll have the luxury of both parents at home for at least a while. But on the other hand we’ve got no savings or future income and will have to do whatever we can to make ends meet, which means any ‘choices’ we make about which of us works what hours and who cares for our children will be based on what opportunities we can find (fingers crossed), not on our preferences or values really.
Affordable high-quality childcare for part-time working parents, universal health care, and the availability of professional work on part-time and/or flexible schedules would make actual choices a *whole lot* more available to our family, but oh well.
So yes, you’re so right that we need to be less attached to all these labels and more aware of how they’re fluid and contextual and not always chosen. Thinking of me as a “stay-at-home-mom” and my partner as “unemployed and job-seeking” (as people will tend to do) is problematic in a lot of ways.
I don’t know what will happen–as long as we can survive financially, any of the possibilities should work out okay–but I do know that these choices are not exactly choices and certainly not identities (let alone stable identities) for a lot of people.
This is pretty much exactly what I needed to read right now, bluemilk. Thanks.
What a timely post, Blue Milk. Thanks.
I have three pre-school aged children and am currently working two days per week. It feels just about right to me in many ways – I’m home more during the week than not, my two days are split by a day at home so we all get a chance to recover from the manic frenzy that is getting-out-the-door-with-up-to-three-different-drop-offs-before-I-even-get-to-work! On the other hand, there may be an opportunity for me to go up to three days very soon, which would be a good career move, and would mean more money. But oh, the angst! I think my elder two would be ok, but my littlest… she’s my baby still. Plus, I’m also worried about how I will cope – taking an extra day’s work would mean so much more planning and preparing from home (I’m a teacher) and I’m worried about having enough time and energy for my kids, let alone continuing to meet my own needs such as exercise and ‘time out’.
This post has helped me to consider what will be better in the long term for all of us. Thank you.
“I hope I would have invested in myself over those seven years but I suspect I may not have.”
This line really resonated with me. I have friends who have been able to leave the work force to raise children and still stay focused on keeping themselves prepared to re-enter it, but I don’t think I would be that person. People always comment that I have it all together because I’m able to do a lot (work, school, mother) at one time, but the truth is that I need that busy schedule to keep me on track.
I know from experience that I don’t handle the pieces of my life well when they fall into an unstructured territory. I really think that if I hadn’t gone back to work full-time after my daughter was born that I would have have neglected my professional identity to the point that it would have been very hard to return later. I know that’s not the case for everyone, but I think it would have been the case for me.
“I hope I would have invested in myself over those seven years but I suspect I may not have.” That line resonated with me too! I keep reading advice for women on how to get back in the work force (network, keep skills current etc..) but 90% of my SAH-friends did NOT do that and can’t get back in. I suspect I would be in that 90% too.
It’s funny you know. I always find this topic odd because I feel like my childhood was a generation behind in many ways. my baby boomer parents did the traditional breadwinner dad/stay at home mum model for most of my childhood (in the 80s and 90s). so like the writer of that article, I do not get the nostalgia. My mum had too much to do on one hand – in terms of housework – and not enough on the other – in terms of stimulating activities. My mum finally got part time work when I was 15 (VERY part time – 4 hours a week) – and then took on running a small business, when my brother and I had left school. It got to be too much for her, so they sold the business and she had a break from paid work again, and now she works nearly full time in a less demanding role. I know she was very unhappy for much of this time, but she has said since that she saw running the house as her job, in order to support me and my brother through the end of high school.
Her being a stay at home mum was also partly because we lived in a regional area growing up (and partly because my dad had some traditional ideas about women being at home that Mum had to get past). There simply weren’t many jobs, let alone jobs that were suitable for part timers. I remember in my small primary school, most other people’s mums were stay at homes too, and I remember being surprised when I went to (much bigger) high school and lots of people’s mums worked outside the home. I couldn’t imagine how it worked. It wasn’t the greatest for mum but I felt really safe knowing she was always at home. Of course, if she’d been at work, I could have just rung her there, but I didn’t know that 🙂
and someone said above – knitting out of necessity doesn’t sound that fun. my mum sewed clothes for us because she is good at sewing, but it helped save money too. she gave up sewing for years because she was tired of it – she has just recently taken it up again for fun (she sews things for my friends’ kids, and fixes dancing costumes for me, lol).
so anyway. my choices? I think bluemilk you have said it before. the secret to life is part time work. I would love to be part time NOW, before I have kids, because I feel like I’m already devoting a large chunk of my life to work. I don’t know what I would do when I got to actually having a kid; I suspect I would want longer off than I think, but don’t really know. I can’t imagine myself just kid raising and house running for 7 years though – I always have so many activities, I think I would probably want a couple days of work a week.
I *loved* working part time when I wasn’t a parent. I got to do so many things! But I’m not sure I would recommend it to people who do want to have kids in the future, because it made the shock of working & parenting at the same time much worse (my old company downsized by 80% around the time I had my baby, so I when I went back to work after a year, I ended up full time plus, because that was all I could find. I transitioned to part time at the new company after a few years, but it was 30 hours a week with a lot of pressure to work more.)
I loved this post…It’s so honest and just speaks to me. I’m in the U.S. with the horribly short 3 month leave, if that! I think I had 2 months with my kids. I really believe in one year to coincide with breast feeding because the way it’s set up now makes it very difficult to pump/breastfeed. I think at my job I could have managed to pump but I’m 100% sure I wouldn’t have done it for long. I also hated leaving them so young and crying through the night. I now know that babies / young kids still don’t always sleep at night but it’s more do-able for me and many at a later age.
I think part-time would be the best solution for me.
You seem to have hit the nail on the head as usual, I was trying to say a similar thing here http://thenewgoodlife.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/the-childcare-dilemma/. I’m just about to start leaving my nearly one year old in childcare so I can work and I’m not sure either of us are ready. (My three year old already goes a day a week and really needs that.) The choice about working or not is a funny one, for most the choice is not always a choice to be freely considered and taken. There is a financial/career/intellectual NEED to work which might over-ride any option of staying at home longer.
I agree with lots of others that these choices would be easier and more like an actual choice if there was far more flexibility in both work places and childcare (I can’t get half days of childcare so the option of working half days was taken away). I would really love to see flexible work arrangements become standard practice that is discussed regularly with employees and easily changed to suit changing circumstances. I mean that this should be for men and women, those with children and those without. This 9-5+, five days a week thing seems antiquated and outdated, stuck in a time that is no longer relevant (perhaps like our current nostalgia for the ‘housewife era’).
I read your blog post, Barbara. Dear God. I can’t believe you can’t get a half day of childcare (I shouldn’t be surprised though).
:sigh: the five days a week 9-5 thing is DEFINITELY outdated! for everyone!
You can get 1/2 a day of childcare – you just pay for the full day and pick your child up at lunchtime…which is of course not what Barbara meant at all.
thanks for this.
my sprout of a girl turns 3 today(!), and this post resonates with me in deep and powerful ways. i returned to work F/T when she was 4 mos old (the US and our painfully short parental leave). i’ve been conflicted in every possible way about working F/T this entire time. somehow, i kept expecting to be granted a magic wish to be able to stay home with my baby as i’d planned in the life before children. i never stop being surprised that this is how our daily lives are constructed.
i have roughly 3.5 hours/day to be with the sprout during the week. choosing to use any of that time for independent endeavors (like exercise, time w/adult friends, etc) is almost impossible. logistics, practicalities, and simply missing her make all of that so endlessly challenging. part-time work isn’t really available given my field, but i hold it up as the idealized dream of a balanced life.
we’re now considering a major relocation, and i find myself strangely offended to have to find a new job out of financial need. however, i’m also 100% aware that i would not be well positioned to find another job if i had not been engaged in F/T work these past yrs. that counts for something. it really does.
I really wish I could go back in time and tell Previous Me: here are some professions that allow part time work with respect and decent pay. PICK ONE. (my list currently is nurse, doctor, accountant. Maybe there are more.)
Software engineer and some other techie jobs allow part time work. Really! But you have to be willing to be an independent contractor. And you have to be careful about the places you work, and avoid the places with stupid work cultures. We have some part time coders contracting for us now. Some of them have other contracts. Some don’t. We have one woman who may be starting for us soon who is coming back from an extended break with kids, and will be working part time from home.
That’s good to know, Cloud. My partner is a Linux coder and all those people seem to work insane hours. It’s gotten better but 10 years ago it was like they had all joined a cult, not gotten a job.
What a wonderful post! I’m returning to my casual job soon for 5 hours a week (I had 18weeks leave), it’s not a lot but I need to do something else. I had idolised the stay at home mum model imagining cupcake decorating etc. I forgot to factor how bad I am at doing one thing at a time, work hasn’t been about a lack of stimulation just a need for a change of pace every so often.
I like how you’ve suggested that regardless of an ideal path there’s happiness in whatever path is right as you go. (sorry if that’s not what you meant at all) being very, very early on down the path of parenting choices I found this post very encouraging
It’s been exactly three years since I last went to work. Being a stay-at-home mom was never one of my goals in life and I’ve often struggled with finding satisfaction in it.
I especially appreciate this part: “Possibly I would have been a lot more adventurous with my career if I hadn’t remained attached to the workforce for those last seven years. I may have decided that this was a time to reconsider who I was and what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to earn money.” I loved the career I pursued before having kids, and I think I’d like to do it again one day, but I also enjoy being in a place and head space where I can contemplate doing many other things one day as well.
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