“So, what do you do?”
It’s a cocktail party question that would strike the fear of social exclusion in my heart, if I ever went to a cocktail party ever again. I’ve heard other mom’s say that the answer, “I stay at home with my child/baby/kids” invariably causes the other person to need a new drink, or suddenly see an old friend across the room, or remark “oh that’s interesting” and simply disappear.
I’m not certain why I care about that, although I am kind of afraid of it happening. I shouldn’t worry. I really don’t attend any cocktail parties.
The social events I do attend are full of stay at home moms. We go to swimming lessons and baby signing classes, we meet at the park and sit around breastfeeding together while discussing developmental milestones and which brand of teething biscuits is the best. But ripples in the surface of this peaceful group have started to surface. One woman, who is a dentist, is already back at work. The rest are either planning on returning to their jobs on their baby’s first birthday, or trying to figure out a way to bring in some income that matches their maternity benefits so they don’t have to leave home. But one way or another, most are starting to look for income-generating activity for themselves.
Everyone except me, it seems.
I can’t say I miss leaving home and going to work every day. I never really enjoyed the crazy mornings, the mindless tasks and infuriating office politics. Maybe if I had a job I really loved, that stimulated and challenged me while respecting my individuality, maybe then I would be in a big hurry to get back to work. But right now I am sitting on the porch wearing a cotton skirt, tank top and birkenstock sandals. I have a big floppy hat on my head to cover the hair I couldn’t be bothered to blowdry today, and sunglasses as well. I am covered in the pasty white of zinc oxide sunscreen. And I am basking in the 25C sun, gazing over my laptop screen at the wisteria, which is on the cusp of a massive expolsion of lavender coloured blossoms, which trail all along our deck and fence. The only thing missing is a tall glass of icy lemonade, which I could make myself if I could be bothered to go inside and fuss about in the kitchen, which I am not. Not many workplaces are so attractive.
And yet, there is something that bothers me about the stay-at-home lifestyle.
I registered for facebook today. Joining social networking groups is something I tend to do sporadically, and I log on for about a week and a half before I get tremendously bored and forget about it. But Tom joined facebook a few days ago and already had a massive list of friends and comments on his profile, and I felt compelled to join in compete. And I discovered that the only way you can search for people you know is either through your High School or University graduating class, or through your workplace. The two options when creating your profile are “I am a student” or “I work at a business”. Everybody else gets lumped together in “None of the above”. Yes, you can join in groups of other people who have similar interests, but if you want to search for an individual person the options are very limited, especially if they are not already in your email address book.
Should I care about this? Probably not. But it seems indicative of something bigger.
On Mother’s day I started reading Mommy Wars. I was sucked in immediately, first in horror as I read about the life that some of these working mothers are living. Crushing Post-Partum Depression. Going back to work when your baby is six weeks old. Living in poverty as a single mother, trying to find good childcare. Women who were dealing with the history of their own abusive stay-at-home mothers, who were determined that they were never going to do that to their own children and thus decided that they must work, since everybody knows that staying home with small children is a recipe for mental illness. The self-righteous stay at home mother who says that “the currency of love is time”, which I agree with to a degree. However, beneath all her politically correct platitudes, such as saying every mother must do what is right for her family, etc, laid her obvious judgment that those who choose to work so that they can afford designer handbags and german-engineered SUV’s are heartless and do not love their children. I could see why the book was titled Mommy Wars. There is some serious artillery going back and forth here.
Besides the catty infighting, there was something else about the book that jumped out at me. The woman who compiled all the essays, a working mother herself, said that she found it terribly difficult to actually FIND stay-at-home moms to contribute essays on their experiences and perspective. A woman who has never published anything is difficult to track down. And so I couldn’t help but wonder: What would the book have been like if more stay-at-home moms had their words included? Would it have been lower quality? Would their stories be as compelling as the working mom’s stories? The working moms obviously had dedicated lots of time to perfecting their craft, and they had very high-drama stories to tell. It seems that the story of a stay-at-home mom is often one of either falling into it out of practicality, or one of sacrifice.
My biggest fear about being a stay at home mom is that I will get very comfortable and intellectually lazy, and then when I want to re-enter the workforce I will have lost the salable skills I once had, few as they may have been. I am afraid I will be 35 and working a crap retail job in the mall. Or that I won’t be doing anything at all, eventually just fossilizing at home, getting old and lonely and accumulating cats. And plastic containers, and juice can lids. Perhaps I will get terribly bitter about the reduction of lids in my stash when the nest is empty and nobody is drinking juice anymore.
It is all a long way off, I know. And nobody is forcing me to stay at home. But I don’t want to be forced into invisibility simply because I don’t work or go to school. As one woman in Mommy Wars remarked, (and I am paraphrasing here) “If I told someone I raised chihuahas I would get more interest than saying I stayed at home with my kids. Why doesn’t anyone think that participating in the development of homo sapiens is interesting and worthwhile in its own right?

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