On the other hand, my motivation for work is now more complicated. I don't think going to work is any more of a moral or societal good than working in the home is, though it definitely has more status in our society. Do I really want to go to an office all day to work for The Man when I could instead be home with my snuggly, giggly baby? My family is definitely more important to me than a job. It's so weird to me that housework and being a parent, which is really the work that makes up a life, has become labelled drudgery while going to work for someone else's enrichment is a good thing. It's moral and right, while staying home is quaint and a bit unreasonable. What the actual fuck has happened to turn that all backwards?
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| Why wouldn't I want to stay home with this little nugget? |
Then there's the ever-fraught question, do I really want to miss out on these early years? I did my time, working full time right after my first was born. Despite the fact that she was fussy and didn't let me sleep longer than four hours until she was more than a year old (and still woke up twice every night then) I dutifully went back to work ten weeks after she was born because I couldn't afford to take any more time off. My husband was in school again, a venture we could afford because my job paid his tuition and just enough to pay rent and eat. (Don't worry, I still got asked if I'd be going back to work. I might have stared at those questioners as if they'd grown second heads.) Now I can afford to stay home, or not. We're in a different place entirely and suddenly I have options!
On the other end of the spectrum, from birth to death, I also have my mom to think about. She'll be moving into a care facility soon, because she needs 24 hour care and her health has begun to decline at a more rapid pace since my dad's death. Just as it's important for me to be here for my kids when they're little it's also important to be available for my mom at the end of her life. It is so, so painful to be around her now. In many ways she's reverting back to being a child, with her current state being in the zone of a young toddler. She's forgetting how to dress herself, even how to talk and feed herself. As my kids grow more capable it throws into stark relief the fact that she gets less and less so. Despite how painful it is, though, I don't want to regret that I could have done more for her, been more available. If a job ever gets in the way, guess what I'd choose.
Not only my family is important to me, however, but my own interests and mental well-being need to be taken into account. There's not much time to yourself when you're a parent (not even bathroom breaks!) so what little time I have to myself is precious. Other moms are probably nodding, because we all hoard that time to ourselves the way a dragon does treasure. I will breathe fire on anyone who gets in the way of my down time!
Keeping up with a home and family is hard work, even with a supportive spouse pulling his own weight. It doesn't help that our four-year-old does things like deliberately flooding the bathroom, so nearly every day I have extraordinary work to do on top of the usual. I spend so much time on the kids, and the chores, and if I give some to a job then where is the time for me? Time to workout, time to read, to garden, time with friends. These are important to me. I don't want to stress myself out trying to fit in a little bit of relaxation time. That defeats the purpose, clearly.
My job will just pay me enough to cover childcare, healthcare, and a little bit to put in my retirement fund. Is that worthwhile to me? This is more than a lot of women get, so I'm grateful, but it still seems like a lot of hard work to do for not very much reward. I don't even mean that my job is hard, but that all the scheduling and coordinating for me to be able to work--meal planning, childcare, getting to and from work, looking professional instead of rolling with the fact that the baby spat up all over me, pumping milk so the baby can spit up even more--is work in and of itself.
I realize this is a privileged position. We always talk about when women entered the workforce en masse in the 70s, but that ignores the fact that poor women, and particularly women of color, have always worked. They had no choice. I read The Feminine Mystique last fall and was utterly turned off because it was so classist. All the jobs Friedan wrote about were white collar, with no examination of the fact that the nannies and housekeepers she advocated hiring were also working women, frequently with families of their own. The fact that I get asked if I'm going back to work is a mark of my privilege.
The fact that my husband has never, to my knowledge, been asked if he's going back to work after Baby shows that sexism is still alive and rampant in our society. Yes, it makes sense to have (breastfeeding) moms stay home more, but it honestly makes the most sense to have both parents at home for a while after a baby is born. HusbandX got 30 days of leave and that was wonderful, more than most men get, and still it wasn't quite enough. It flew by and gearing up for him to go back to work when I wasn't even fully recovered from my c-section, and we hadn't fully acclimated as a family to the new dynamic, was rough. We need to have better parental leave laws if we're actually going to be "family friendly", and they need to encompass fathers as well. They are just as important as mothers. A good first step will be setting the expectations of who works on its head. Men don't have to be "the breadwinner", they can stay home too! I've heard of plenty of men who'd love to stay home with their kids but didn't because the stigma they faced for such a decision was crazy, even within their extended family. The idea that a father shouldn't stay home is what seems crazy to me.
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| If I don't work I can do fascinating things, like figuring out the most efficient way to line-dry diapers. Woo. |
After taking all of this into account and weighing my options, I've decided that I am, in fact, going back to work. Not because I think I must have a job because I'm an Upstanding Citizen, or because I'm a feminist (I totally am) and feel the need to represent, or out of loyalty to the company. I'm going back because I find my job interesting. It's stimulating in a way completely different from being at home with my family. I get to talk to other adults about things that sometimes have nothing to do with home, and I really enjoy my coworkers. I even like the company I work for. It's employee owned so we're treated like humans rather than Workers and the work is worthwhile. It's a large enough company to have multiple offices in multiple states but small enough that the CEO knows my name when he comes by. I've also hit the sweet spot in employment: I only work three days a week. The 20-hour workweek that was envisioned by Keynes is farther away for most Americans than it was when it was first thought up. I'm lucky to be able to work just enough but not too much, which I am able to do in an expensive city mostly because we don't consume like most Americans. We're frugal weirdos.
If I'd had a different baby, if she'd been more like my first, I made up my mind to quit. There was no way I was going to put myself through that level of sleep deprivation again and still hold down a job. Then Little Miss Sunshine was born and she's such an easy baby. She already sleeps through the night (which, for a baby, means six hours at a stretch, but sometimes we get more) and she got herself onto a schedule that works for all of us. She smiles and laughs all the time, and--illness aside--she generally lets me get things done. I've been able to garden. To read. To go to my book club and cook and bake and dream up other projects I want to try. (Soap making? Quilting? Both??) She even sleeps in her crib! I got more alone time in the first month with her home than I did for the first six months after our Munchkin was born. I don't even have to hurry through my showers with the background noise of screaming baby! In some ways it makes me want to stay home with her more, because she is so easy and so joyful to be around. She lights up the moment our eyes meet. But I also know that if I don't go back to work I'll end up unhappy with my choice, feeling stuck at home and without anything interesting to think or say or do. I do not want to become the person who can only talk about their kids because that's literally all they have going on in life.
Working will also allow me to regularly get back to doing something I love: biking. My body changed so much when I was pregnant that it not only became uncomfortable but also dangerous, as the shift in my center of gravity made me wobbly. Now I have no way to bike with a kid who can't sit upright on her own, and since I'm breastfeeding that limits the time I can be away from her. I mean, on her end I can supply milk in advance. That doesn't help my end of things, however. Since I'll be doing all that I need to do to be away from her for a full work day anyway I can ride my bike home and enjoy that time to myself, doing something I love.
This decision doesn't come without its reservations. As the date nears I'm getting a little anxious. Will she really be okay without me for three full days in a row?! ...Will I be okay without her? She's still so tiny! She'll be four months but, still, so little. So dependent on me above anyone else. Then there is, as I mentioned above, all of the coordination. I'm going to spend the week before I go back getting meals and snacks worked out, so that the days I work will be as hassle-free as possible. It's not a negligible amount of work, but at least I know what I'm getting into.
My brother has agreed, for the short term at least, to be our 'br'au-pair'. He wants to figure out the next phase of his life so we only have an agreement through the summer, and after that we'll see. I've become a big believer in taking life in short increments now anyway. We'll get through the next six months and then see what changes, what works for us then. It's a huge shift from my old method of trying to plan life, and it works much better. None of my plans ever fully came to fruition anyway. The entire time I was pregnant people kept asking me what my plans were for this or that--delivery! childcare! to work or not to work?--and I answered that I generally didn't even have the next month planned out, let alone these big issues that aren't completely in my control. (If you think anyone gets to plan out their delivery, you've obviously never talked to women who've given birth.) I think this frustrated the people who were asking, because why wouldn't I have the big things sorted out? It's taken me 35 years but I finally realized that life does not care about my plans, big or little. It is so much easier if I roll with whatever happens, and I am so much happier when I'm not stressing myself out trying to stick to a plan. So I will be going back to work, with the caveat "for now".
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