I could be the poster child for the confusion currently reigning over whether or not it is a good or bad idea for women to “opt out” of the workforce in order to stay home and raise children. The problem is, I’m not sure whether I’d be pictured wearing a smile or a scowl.
The roughly six years since I left the workforce without a plan other than to drop off and pick up my kids from school have been rough ones. And I say this sheepishly since I am one of the lucky ones whose family income allowed for me not to have to bring in too much. I was free to bake those cookies, organize those closets, be a patient homework-helper, serve up those gourmet dinners I made almost every night pre-kids.
Ha. The loss of scheduled productivity and self-sustaining income was a one-two punch that has taken its toll on my self-esteem. And my marriage. And my parenting.
I have been fairly shocked at how hard it is to stay motivated and focused outside the framework of a specific structure, without the rigorous demands of a weekly magazine, without the threat of a boss’s ire. I always thought I was self-motivated, since I was able to work well on the two days I worked at home for the first six years of motherhood. But that was with deadlines looming and someone expecting something, and something good, by a specific time.
I volunteered a lot that first year or two, co-chairing the library committee and spending hours and hours scheduling classes for the mobile library when the school’s own was being renovated, and then helping the school librarian put the library back together and get it up and running. I helped plan some great events.
I sat in cafes and drummed up ideas for freelance stories of the kind I’d always wanted to write. But getting up the gumption to pitch them after a call from the teacher about my son standing on a chair? If I couldn’t even get my son to behave if I wasn’t working, what right did I have to advise other parents on parenting? Turns out the Container Store gives me hives so I never did get to those closets. We eat out a lot, and homework has gone undone unless the kids took it on themselves. I guess I’m not at all smarter than a fifth grader, or even a fourth or third grader.
But then, the time spent making close friends out of other struggling-to-figure-it-out strangers in cafes, taking long walks in the park to figure out myself and the dreams I’d barely been able to dream, the extended showers where I’d stay in long after turning off the water to write my thoughts in my robe, that time has been priceless to me. I have written drafts of novels and started playing piano by ear, things I wouldn’t have had time for or made time for while working full time.
My kids look at me strangely if I threaten to go back to work.
“No,” they’ll say definitively, a sign they do like having me around if only for fresh popcorn after school, and the only ego boost I’ll get all day besides a good parallel park.
If I sound blasé about this subject, believe me, I’m not. It is an issue that, sadly, has no right or wrong answer.
It is a muddy path. The choices that were so hard won are not nearly as glorious as Gloria Steinem might have predicted. But they have to be made, and we have to look forward and say, “What now?”
I’ll ask the lawyer I’m talking to in a few minutes on my latest mom-preneur business idea what he thinks I should do. After all, it was our accountant who suggested I quit way back when. I think his words were, “Why work if you don’t have to?”
I couldn’t answer him then, but I can now.
Read Fearless Parenting every other Thursday on BrooklynPaper.com.
