Pregnancy & Baby Index: Parenting: Stay-at-home parenting as a career choice

Stay-at-home parenting as a career choice

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Vanessa Sands

Even when the decision to leave a lucrative career to stay home with your children is an easy one, the transition can still be quite rocky. Here one stay-at-home mom shows how it's all in the attitude.

I can't do it!
Nine years ago, entrenched in a successful, challenging career and awaiting the birth of my firstborn, I'd call my stay-at-home sister from work and ask what she was doing, out of sheer curiosity. I couldn't fathom what it was that made her -- or any parent -- turn her back on all the career satisfaction her intelligence and drive could bring.

Months later, near the end of my maternity leave, a fine autumn night found me bolt upright in bed, sobbing. The feeling had gripped me, wrenchingly and unexpectedly. "I can't do it," I whispered to my husband.

He consoled me as best he could. "Zillions of moms do it every day; it'll just take some getting used to."

"No," I said. "You don't understand. I cannot bring myself to leave her."

"Really?" my dumbfounded husband asked. "Really? You mean you want to stay home?"

He was sure his certified career-woman wife had been abducted and replaced by... someone else. Someone else he liked. Never having voiced an opinion on the subject before, he hugged me and said what seem to me now his sweetest words: "I'm so relieved. I want her to have a parent at home, too, but it had to be your choice. It's your choice."

"We can't afford it," I blubbered, to which he simply responded, "We'll just do what we have to do."

So began the most difficult and rewarding career move I have ever made. So began an arduous journey in self-discovery, at the hands of a boss more demanding and discerning than any supervisor real or imagined.

Growing pains
In the ensuing months, I felt intense and conflicting emotions of which no parent in the SAH camp had warned me. Faced with repetitive tasks that simultaneously bored but often demanded more creativity than any copy writing gig my former employer had thrown at me -- and frustrated by a boss who threw tantrums when frustrated with me -- I felt trapped. I couldn't stay in this field, yet I couldn't leave my baby. Unless... unless! That was it. Like all professional success, mine would depend largely on my attitude. But first I needed to define the problems.

Loss of "power"
Many people equate "career" with "power," and I was no different. Not the kind of power I've seen people wield to control others, but the kind that gave me a say -- in what was spent, when, on what items. In choosing to stay home, I effectively sliced our little family's income in half by switching to a career that offers nothing in the way of tangible compensation. At first, I felt I had lost my hard-won financial independence. I'd moved out of my parents' house soon after college, scraped by in a cheesy apartment, and drove an ailing car, all to prove I could support myself. I entered into marriage knowing it wasn't out of need. But now, here I was, completely dependent upon my husband's income -- and completely distressed.

Loss of financial security
The income on which we all now depended seemed woefully slim. As our savings shrunk, we refinanced the house, sold our boat, cut out the far-flung trips, and for the first time, devised a budget. I hated that I couldn't buy what I wanted or look forward to flying somewhere warm in the winter. I admit it: I missed my stuff.

I was intelligent... wasn't I? Didn't I make the Dean's List most semesters? Didn't I have a history of consistent and fairly rapid promotion? Where were the kudos here, in this new endeavor? I feared losing my intellect, listened in horror as my vocabulary deteriorated, and worried that soon a mouse would mean nothing more to me than a furry little critter. I was mush.(Continued...)

Read more now -- about Loss of respect by clicking here.