The most expensive decision of my life I made alone. There was no realtor, no car dealer and no travel agent when I chose to leave the paid workforce and become a stay-at-home mom. There was just me looking at my husband, my children (both those inside and outside of my body) and the chaos that was our lives.
At no point did I calculate the lifetime impact of diminished earnings and prospects.
I looked at the year we were in and the following year, and I bolted. No part of my brain sat itself down and thought, what is the price both in this year’s dollars and my lifetime earnings, to leaving the workforce, and is it a decision that a decade or two from now I might regret?
At no point did I examine the non-monetary cost which would loom just as large. I just looked at the lives we were leading: two demanding careers, two small children and a third on the way, resulting in two adults feeling hopelessly out of control.
One day I was on the trade floor and the next I was on the playroom floor and became a housewife
One day I was working on the massive trading floor of a London bank, the next I was on the floor of my children’s playroom. And while it meant I would forgo this month’s paycheck and the next, not once did I think of what the job market would look like for me once these small children were launched into their school lives and then their own lives. And therein lies my most expensive mistake.
I stayed home with my kids because I wanted to be with them. I had a job that allowed me very little time with them on weekdays and I felt our time was short. I left before they woke up in the morning and came home to children who had eaten dinner and were bathed and in their pajamas. I often wondered who was raising them. I did not stay home because I believed they needed me or that the nanny I had hired could not do a great job.
Now, on the downslope of parenting, I have misgivings about my decision to stay home. It would be far too strong a word to say I have regrets. I don’t know any parent who regrets time spent with their kids, especially kids who have moved on to their own lives. Although I am fully aware that being a stay-at-home parent was certainly a luxury, staring at an empty nest and very diminished prospects of employment, I have real remorse.
Here are the regrets I have about staying home with my kids
1. My world became very narrow
During the years at home with my children I made the most wonderful friends, women I hope to know all of my life. But living in the suburbs among women of shockingly similar backgrounds, interests and aspirations, narrowed the scope of people with whom I interacted. In the workplace my contacts and friends included both genders and people of every description, and I was better for it.
2. My husband and I slipped into a more traditional marriage
Before I quit working, my husband and I did the same job. We left in the morning together and came home together to stare at each other and at our small children through a blinding haze of exhaustion. In every way my husband sees me as his equal but in the years that I have been a housewife, our partnership has developed a faint 1950’s whiff. He doesn’t ask me to run to the dry cleaners or fish store, but let’s be fair, they are both closed by the time he gets home.
3. I became outdated
I worked in banking on Wall Street in a technologically cutting edge department. Just as I mastered every new computer or system it would be whisked away and replaced by newer faster models and programs. I was au fait with software the public wouldn’t see for years and anything I didn’t understand was explained to me by MIT-trained analysts. In my world I often use my young adult kids as tech support and endure their snide remarks and eye rolling, knowing deep inside that at one time it was very different
4. I let down those who went before me
In some cosmic way I feel that I let down a generation of women who made it possible for every young girl to dream big even though I know the real goal of the Women’s Movement was to be able to dream anything. One summer I read The Feminine Mystique curled up on a couch in my grandparents’ home. The book spoke to me, and my mother and grandmother spoke to me warning me not to tread the path they had taken, leaving the workforce after their children were born. But the book and my mother spoke to a young ambitious preteen, not a young mother.
5. I used my driver’s license far more than my degrees
I got my driver’s license after a short course and a couple of lessons in 11th grade. My post secondary education took six years of hard work and yet, for years, I used my driver’s license far more than my formal education. And on one level I felt like I was short-changing myself, those who educated, trained and believed in me had prepared me for more than driving carpools.
6. My kids think I did nothing
They saw me cooking, cleaning, driving, volunteering and even writing, but they know what a “job” looks like and they don’t think I had one.
7. I got sucked into a mountain of volunteer work
Some of this work was deeply meaningful and some of it trivial in the extreme. It is very easy to feel as though you are doing something whether it is sitting on a hospital board or raising funds for a nursery school. Volunteer activities involve a flurry of activity but, at the end of it, those who are running the organization carry on and your job is over.
8. I worried more
Being around my children so much of the time gave me the chance to focus on them at a granular level. And I feel fairly certain that neither they nor I benefitted from the glaring light it shone upon us. Helicoptering takes time, and I had the time. If I had worked outside our home I would have still worried about them but might have confined my concerns to more substantive matters.
9. I lowered my sights and lost my confidence
But far and away my biggest regret about my years at home was that I lowered my sights for myself as I dimmed in my own mind what I thought I was capable of. I let go of the burning ambition I once held because I didn’t feel as though I could hold it and three babies at the same time. My husband did not do this, my children did not do this, I did this.
In the years that I was home I lulled myself into thinking that I was accomplishing enough because I was. I was raising my children and, as any parent who had spent a day with a child knows, that can fill all of the hours in a day. What I hadn’t realized was how my constant focus on my family would result in my aspirations for myself slipping away. And despite it being obvious, I did not focus on the inevitable obsolescence that my job as mom foretold.
If I could what would I do differently?
If I could wind back the tape, have a do-over, what would I have done differently? Looking on at my grown and nearly-grown sons, I am grateful for the gift of time we had. Yet, I wish I had tried to keep a finger, a toe or a hand in the working world to ease an eventual return.
I wish I had kept the pilot light lit under a career so that when I was ready to return, when my teen’s lives were more their own, I could turn things back up again. I did not have a job well suited to part-time work, and work at home was technologically impossible at the time. But, the solution required imagination, not capitulation, and with hindsight, I would have recognized that, over time, my parenting and career would both ebb and flow, but neither would–nor should–ever end.
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