I absolutely hate being a Work Outside The Home Mom (WOHM) at this point in my life. I hate it. If you’ve ever been to my blog, or ever seen a single tweet of mine, this will not come as a huge shock to you. So I’m going to spend this post bitching about something that has crawled under my skin, laid eggs, and hatched a giant, frothing, green-eyed monster that is unapologetically jealous and pissed off.
I will not make any apologies for however irrational my feelings are about this. This is my view of my world as I know it, and my feelings are about ME, not about YOU. This has all been building up since the day I realized I wouldn't be able to stay home with my first son - like we planned. Plans? Oh yeah, we had plans. Smart, well-thought-out plans. Then the economy happened. I’d also add that the stress I’ve been feeling lately, combined with the partial cessation of breastfeeding and whatever hormonal changes may accompany that, seems to have aggravated the post-partum depression that lurks beneath my surface, which makes TFB crankier than normal.
So here are two things I’m absolutely sick of right now:
1. SAHMs acting like they have it as hard as WOHMs.
2. SAHMS telling me it’s my “Choice” to be a WOHM.
Now, I have zero judgment about whether someone is a SAHM, WAHM, or WOHM. Let’s get that part out of the way right off the bat. I could not care less what somebody else does. There’s no “war” to me. Whatever works for your family is Coolio with me. I will never attempt to say that any one way is the “best” way to go about it – I don’t think there is a universal “best” way.
But when either of the two aforementioned things come up, I am flat out insulted. And that insult adds to the injury I already feel being in a situation that depresses the living shit out of me every day. It’s a slap in the face – so I’m gonna talk about it.
First of all, being a SAHM is NOT as hard as being a WOHM, and I’m going to give you a list of reasons why. Perhaps this will make those who’d complain about it recognize what a sweet position they’re actually in.
#1 – Being SAHM is absolutely a full-time job, but going to work doesn’t mean you have a DIFFERENT full-time job – it means you now have TWO full time jobs - or more if you're like me. That means you have to go put up with other people’s shit for 10 hours a day, then come home and do all the things you couldn’t do because you weren’t home all day (like cleaning, spending time with kids, meal planning, etc. etc.) Those chores don’t just disappear because you’re not there!
#2 – Nobody will fire you for having a bad day as a mom. I mean, unless you have a “somebody-call-Child-Protective-Services” kind of day, nobody is going to take that gig away from you (cause frankly, there is no 22 year old recent college graduate eyeing your job as a mother.) I’ve seen some pretty crappy-ass moms who still don’t get fired for the lousy job they’re doing. You don't live in fear of the moment you'll get called into the boss's office because your performance standards have slipped after being up all night dealing with two sick children at home.
#3 – Okay, being a SAHM is a job, but you don’t have to shower for it! Yes you wake up early, but so do I. And you don’t have to wake up at 6 am, rush around making sure the kids are taken care of/shipped off to daycare/whatever WHILE trying to shower, look presentable, and get into the appropriate business attire. You can stay in your fraking track pants all day long if you want to. If I show up looking like a Mom, HR will have a “talk” with me.
#4 – You don’t have to pump breastmilk at work, or worry that you’ll lose your job if you do. Enuf said.
#5 – Not everyone who works for a living has a corner office and an assistant who will bring them lattes all day. If you think all Working Moms look like the women on the cover of Working Mother Magazine, go visit a production plant and talk to the barely-minimum-wage factory workers who stand on their feet all day and have to ask to take a bathroom break. Quit romanticizing the Working Mother role. About zero percent of us have that corner office. I bet your home working environment is a billion times better.
Now before you get all "but-some-women-have-no-choice-but-to-stay-home" let me say I'm not even going there in this post because I KNOW some women have no choice in that respect. But that's not what this is about, so let's focus here people.
Secondly, I am so sick and tired of people telling me that it’s my “choice” to be a working mother. It shouldn’t even make me mad. I should find it hilarious. I should think it’s funny that they live such stable, middle-class lifestyles that they cannot even fathom how it could be necessary to have two incomes to survive. And I am outright insulted, deep in my core, when any person suggests that I’m leaving my kids every morning because I want to. I could write, so, so much more on this, but I think I have to sum it up in with this:
NO, it is not my “choice.” NO, we cannot afford, not even by the most creative budgeting known to man, to live on His income. You don’t live here. You don’t know how we got here. You haven’t walked a mile in this family’s shoes. You don’t know how poor I grew up. You don't know what I've had to do to drag myself out of poverty. You don’t know how badly I don’t want to be there again. And if You want to take a look at my balance sheet and figure out HOW I could “choose” to stay home, then you are 1000% welcome to do that. But if you can’t – seriously shut the f*cking f*ck up because you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not stupid, and if I can’t figure out a way to make something work, then it cannot be done. Not here. Not under our currently unchangeable circumstances. And to assume that everyone is in the same situation you are in is incredibly short-sighted.
This reminds me of the time the “Feminists” on the Ivillage board told me it was my fault I got Post-Partum depression because I didn’t plan my life better, and also because I didn’t anticipate that having a baby would mean having a cesarean. Oh we silly women… always misplacing our crystal balls. Boy, maybe, just maybe, if I had been raised in any sort of stable environment I would have had another woman around to tell me what to expect when I had a baby. But since I have no mother and no siblings, and had to endure that pregnancy without any guidance, perhaps I couldn’t have known what to expect? It’s pretty difficult for those who “have” to understand anything about those who “have not.” And they don’t even try.
And here’s where someone will say that it’s a “choice” to feed my kids. Well, to me, letting my kids starve and losing the roof over our heads is NOT an option. Not. An. Option. If it’s an “option” for you, then call me when your kids are starving and you have no place to sleep – because until you’re in that situation, you have no way of knowing whether you really believe that’s an “option.” You have the luxury of not having to make that "choice."
And the fact is, I have it way, way better than many Americans. Having a child is the #1 cause of poverty spells in the United States. I wouldn't even have health insurance if I didn't have a job - so what happens if my kid gets sick? Now I've "chosen" to have a sick child that I can't get treatment for? Clearly, my family is not the only one facing these situations. We’re not in dire straits right now – but if I quit my job, that will change fast.
And that pisses me off. I’m trapped. I’m sad. I want to be home with my kids. I don’t want to work two jobs and go to school full time at night for the next 6 years anymore. I’m angry because I ended up exactly where I didn’t want to be. I’m flailing. I’m trying everything I can think of to change my situation. And at the end of the day, I still can’t make it go away. But on the average day, I deal with this fairly well. I get up and go to work until 5 pm. I get off work and sit in class until 10 pm. I get out of class and go home to make cakes until 2 am. And I pack every second of family time in where I can.
But then someone tells me their life is soooooo hard being a stay-at-home mom, and I want to fracking scream. And when I scream, they tell me that I could be a stay-at-home mom if I just “lived within my means” or planned a little better – and then, I want to break down crying, because those people are so out of touch with what my family/many families go through to try to provide the very basics for their kids. Those familes have no idea what my down-to-the-penny Excel budget looks like each and every month.
And because they’re so out of touch, they’ll never understand. So here’s where I stop trying to make them.
*exhale.*
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