I’m not currently feeling massively pissy about this topic so this is probably a good time to write this post. Let me state emphatically, for the record, that being a stay at home mom is not the problem no matter which problem it is that you (general you) think I should fix. Let me explain why.
When I was teaching I worked 60-70 hours a week. I was chronically underslept. I was rather unhealthy because I had no time to exercise and we ate out constantly because when in the hell was I going to cook? My house was a disaster and keeping up with laundry was a nightmare. I was lonely (doesn’t anyone remember my angsty whiny posts from that time period?!) because I never got to see my friends and students don’t count as personal time. I loved my job, please don’t get me wrong. It was wonderful. It was deeply fulfilling for me on a personal and spiritual level. But it had a very high cost to my health, social life, and sleep schedule. Granted, I quit after only three years of teaching and everyone says it gets easier. But when they say it gets easier they mean it goes down to 50-60 hours of work per week. Grading papers takes a lot of time. In addition to the mandatory 35 hours/week of your contract time of which most of that is teaching/passing periods/breaks during which you have to deal with students you have very little time for prep work or grading. It pretty much entirely has to happen outside your contracted hours. And that’s not including commute time.
So, for those of you who believe I would suddenly have more ‘personal balance’ if I had a job–exactly when in the day do you think that would happen? When on top of an already stressful job I had to also take care of getting two children ready in the morning and try to add their needs on top of grading in the evening? What, you think I would have more time for myself on the weekends when I was trying to frantically do laundry, clean house, and pay attention to the kids who missed me all week? That’s fucking mental.
And between daycare costs and the increased amount of eating out and commuting costs and needing a better wardrobe for work and buying my own school supplies… I think our noticeable income would go up by about $400/month. Well that sounds like a bloody stupid ass trade to me.
Why being a stay at home mom is a good decision for me personally:
-I get plenty of sleep. Without sleep I am not a pleasant person for anyone to deal with. I went through the whole first year of Shanna’s life very well rested despite the fact that she woke up to nurse a lot at night because I could go to bed whenever I wanted and sleep in as much as I wanted. There were no constraints on my time.
-I have a better diet than I have ever had in my life. (Ok, pregnancy is kind of making this one harder but it will come back.) I eat a wider variety of vegetables than I even knew existed I shit you not. I had never heard of many of the vegetables I’ve eaten this year. And I am mostly eating a local, seasonal, organic, humanely raised diet. I feel really good about that both from a personal health point of view and from the point of view of my impact on the planet. That is just awesome.
-I really believe in Attachment Parenting and it is pretty fucking difficult to do if you are away from your kid 55+ hours/week. I believe strongly in nursing on demand and child led weaning and I am a shitty pumper. I honestly would not be able to keep up pumping at work for years so that my supply stayed present. I know this about myself.
-I believe very strongly in homeschooling. I have done the research. I have worked in education. I have 5,000 reasons that I will not ever put my kids in public school and private school isn’t much better. Kind of hard to do with two working parents.
-I get a lot of downtime to do shit I want to do. I do house remodeling projects (which while stressful also make me very happy) and read and get more exercise than I have gotten in years. I have had a blast baking. I love learning how to cook more interesting foods. I really love my weird hippie quirks and they are rather time consuming.
-I see friends during the day quite a bit and I still get to devote tons of time to my family. I really enjoy spending time with Noah. He’s my best friend. He’s funny and fun and interesting to me. I really appreciate that our time as a family together involves very little stress about cooking and cleaning. (Ok, pregnancy and the first six months of a kids life are more stressful but that would be 5,000% worse with a job.)
-I like the challenge to meet our financial goals within restraints. That is totally how my mind works. I feel very good about the many ways in which I am frugal. It’s like a game. I don’t do this in the ways that other people often do–I’m not trying to find name brand purses for cheap or anything like that. I’m trying to pay off our mortgage as quick as humanly possible while still having a really high quality of life. Given that we were able to decide to go to The French Laundry and up and go in less than a week means that I am succeeding really flippin well.
Every life choice carries with it challenges. I whine more about the hard things than I post about the things that make me happy. This is true of a great many people who journal online–it doesn’t mean awesome stuff isn’t going on offstage. If you (generic you) have an ounce of respect for me, my ability to make reasoned choices, and the best interests of my family you will never again tell me to get a job because it will cure what ails me. You are just fucking wrong and I’m getting really fucking sick of that stupid lecture.
The most amazing thing about this post to me is that you felt the need to say it at all.
Go you.
*wild insane applause*
there is not enough YES in the world for this post.
and I ain’t even a parent yet but gods know I get where you are coming from.
Some kinda idjit tellin you to get a job, is what I’m saying.
you’re doing it right.
meta-question, if I may…
There are people who thought it was OK to offer personal advice to you on a subject like this without you asking for it??? ??? ??? Really???
Re: meta-question, if I may…
People offer me advice on all sorts of shit. I think I have totally lost my reputation for being a hardass; no one is afraid of me anymore.
Re: meta-question, if I may…
Hey! That’s not true! I’m mostly still afraid of you. But I’m getting better.
From my experience working in academia….when my coworkers had kids, they were making $100/month TOPS after daycare expenses. It is crazy.
Honestly, I am terrified my life will be like you describe if I stay in academia, even without kids. I have a little celebration I do (usually it is called ‘breakfast’) any time I actually get a full nights sleep. The past two or three weeks alone I’ve hallucinated a handful of times during classes due to sleep deprivation, and I turn into a foggy headed blob with no mental filter on what comes out of my mouth. It can be downright embarrassing.
I love my work, but I really hope that someday I can be as content as you sound.
I really like being a stay at home mom. It’s fun and I have tons of flexibility. Let me put it to you this way: if I had never had children teaching would have been a wonderful career and I would have done it for a very long time if not forever. But I am not sure I would have found ‘balance’ ever. That’s a lot of why I think no one should be a teacher if they aren’t passionate.
I know you hate advice and all, but… well, here goes 😉
I was raised by a stay-at-home mom, homeschooled up through highschool, and fed a healthy, crunchy, fresh-local-in-season diet, and while I griped like hell, I feel bad for all the kids that didn’t get that. I say you’re making a grand decision, and here’s to enjoying it.
P.S.
Lemme know if you ever want to bend the ear of a life-long homeschooler. As the eldest of 4, I’m Legitimately Qualified to point you at some damned nifty resources, one of which happens in my own god damn back yard in Sacramento every year. Several others live in the Bay Area. Others still pop up every so often at nifty camp grounds full of nifty people.
P.P.S.
From what I’ve seen of your kiddo so far, she’s shaping up to be a primo mensch.
There is a homeschooling group pretty close to me that I am going to join at some point but it seems slightly premature to call us ‘homeschooling’ before she is 2. 😀 I figure 3 is a great time and I’ll be done with the breeding business. I will happily ask you for resources on homeschooling stuff.
If I remember correctly you were largely Unschooled–is that correct? That is very much the direction I am interested in going but I am still working on convincing Noah. He’s not sure he entirely believes that works. 🙂
You’re totally right on waiting ’till she’s 3 or so. So many people are convinced that if their kid can’t read by the time she’s 2 she’ll never get into Harvard. I didn’t learn to read ’till I was 8 or so, and didn’t get fluent ’till I was 12, and I’m applying to PhDs. My younger brother didn’t learn ’till he was 13, and didn’t get fluent ’till 15, and he got a fine art degree:P
Unschooling- unschooling is a politically loaded term. It can mean anything from “we don’t use textbooks” to “we don’t teach at all, the kids just learn by themselves whatever they want, and if they come to us for help we’ll do that.” What I had was a combination of guerrilla education (“helping” dad re-roof the house, and being tricked into figuring out how many sheets of plywood he’ll need with basic multiplication, etc) and tutoring- sitting down with mom or dad and working with them for a half-hour a day on various subjects. Typically one subject at a time for a couple of months, then onward. That may or may not have included “homework” (like “Here, read this chapter sometime before Tuesday, and then come tell me about it”). It totally varied, but was neither unschooling in the extremist sense, nor was it ever really sit down and hear a lecture.
I’m aware that unschooling is a loaded term. 😀 From what I can tell at this point there is a sharp divide between the unschoolers and the Radical Unschoolers. I’m completely and totally uninterested in Radical Unschooling thankyouverymuch. I think children need some rules in life. 🙂
So it sounds like your parents kinda fell into the eclectic/casual camp. That’s where Noah is pushing me. He thinks that even if we dont sit down and do formal ‘lessons’ all day there are topics that Must Be Taught. I don’t really agree but this parenting gig involves compromise. 🙂
For me unschooling means child-led learning. No enforced curriculum or textbooks.
We certainly did a mix, and I think that mix was a good move on my parent’s part. I hated math as a kid, so when I hit 14 and starting looking toward college, we started drilling math pretty hard- homework, work books, the whole nine yards. I even ended up auditing a remedial math class at Fresno State to get up to speed. It sucked, but because I’d avoided math for so long, it was the most efficient way to catch up.
On the other hand, I saw some friends of mine come out knowing very little about a subject, because it wasn’t enforced- while they’re still great people, I sometimes wonder if life couldn’t have been easier for them with a little more “Sit down and do your damn multiplication tables, kid!” early on:P
Then again, many, many kids develop interests in different subjects through the years, so I wouldn’t worry about it.
Oh, and books! Leave books out. Seriously- a kid who’s allowed to pull an anatomy textbook off the shelf might well end up reading it three times through by the time they’re 13- I did:P
Ok, I’m bored, so I’m rambling. Long point short- you obviously know what you’re doing. Really, the only thing I’ve seen consistently give twitchy results in homeschooling is a determination not to do things a certain way. Kids are weird, adults are weirder.
The thing is, because of moving around all the time (25 schools before dropping out in the middle of Junior year of high school) *I* have huge gaps in my education. I didn’t learn multiplication tables until I got to Algebra. I didn’t learn them until I felt personal motivation to learn them because having to do work the long way got really fucking annoying. I really only learned stuff I wanted to learn because if I didn’t like a subject I just stopped showing up at school while they did that project. I was going to move soon, what the hell did I care?
So I have skewed perspective. 😀
So my ‘determination to not do something a certain way’ mostly consists of something I did while I was teaching too. I’m not the authority on all subjects and I really get angry at adults who try to pretend they are. That’s my really big issue. I am not going to pretend I have all the answers–that is what the internet is for. 😛
I kind of see my role as a homeschooling parent as more like a guide. I have more life experience and I know how to learn. I need to teach my kids how to go out and find information about things that interest them. And luckily, living with Noah, they are going to be constantly around someone who is obsessed with a ridiculous variety of subjects and they will always see random research going on. I’m less good about that than he is. 😀
And we know cool people who do cool things. I don’t really worry about my kids not having a broad exposure to different topics. 🙂
Interesting, you may be the first public-school-educated person who’s ever told me they felt they had gaps and were homeschooling to avoid those gaps:P
I think a lot of the problem you’re talking about is teacher attitude. Back to the math* example- basic math my mom taught us- we had math problems, she explained things, pretty straight forward that way. Once we hit the edge of her math teaching experience/what she remembered from college years earlier, there was a bit of a lull (we were actually ahead of some of our school friends at that point) until we fell pretty far behind. At that point, my parents did some research and found a math text book and curriculum, read the curriculum, kept the bits they liked (not much) tossed the rest (most of it), and my dad worked through the book about two lessons ahead of us. He made it very clear that he was doing this, and that we were always welcome to ask him for help, and that if he didn’t know the answer he’d help us find it.
The really important thing there was having someone to go to if it got tough- someone who could look at it and say “Yup, this is confusing” or “see, you forgot to solve for Y.” It made it much easier to learn, but it also meant that we could question dad’s solutions, and occasionally prove him wrong. So in my experience “I can’t teach my kid X because I don’t know X” is bunk. Anyone can tutor (really, that’s more what it was) anything, as long as they know just a little bit more about the subject and know how to do research 🙂
So yeah- might work for you, might not, but it worked for me. Every so often my dad’s guilt complex rears its warty little head and he feels the need to apologize for not having drilled us harder and with more structure in certain things, and I need to explain to him that it worked and we’re all happy and things go back to normal.
As I’m writing this, I’m starting to realize just how much of the “teaching” my parents did really is more like tutoring in the sense that they asked questions and helped us look up answers, even if it felt like being lectured at as a kid.
*being offspring of an former school teacher and a man who worked for years as a carpenter, math was seen as an important life skill that nobody really liked but you had to learn anyhow.
I’m not actually saying that I am homeschooling to avoid the gaps in education. I’m saying if gaps appear I won’t think they are a big deal. 🙂
I absolutely think that I can help someone learn about stuff I don’t know. They will reach a point eventually where I will have to go consult experts, but that’s different. The skill of learning is completely teachable and it doesn’t matter what you are learning. 🙂
Amusingly, I am starting to have an interest in learning more math than I currently know. I’m thinking about getting my hands on a trig textbook and working through it with a little help from Noah. We’ve been talking a lot lately about how my early math problems were because I transpose numbers really easily so arithmetic is deeply frustrating but conceptual math is fairly easy for me. I got so frustrated with being beat over the head with arithmetic that I never wanted to go further. He’s such a nerd that he is inspiring. 🙂
If you want my current math text, online access (which lets you go through problems and tells you if you get ’em right or not, and will work them step-by-step for you) and a copy of my notes when I’m done, you’re welcome to ’em. (Though I’m never clear where the ‘trig’ line is.)
Woah. I’m kind of shocked in two separate directions. First that people think it’s appropriate to tell you what to do, and secondly that they seem to think that not being a SAHM is a *better* choice than being one. (It’s just a different choice, that preserves for different values. Anyone who thinks that you’re not quite clear on what your values are …. have they met you?)
Well, you know how I like to bitch? (rhetorical question!) When folks who are making different choices see me complain about things that are not a problem for me they think, “Hey! She could solve that problem!” The thing is, they usually don’t stop to think about all the real ramifications of making a different choice and they don’t know what my life priorities are. So it’s about projecting. They are happy with their choice therefore if I act more like them I would be happier. It comes from a place of caring (I think) but it’s still annoying and not particularly helpful.
thanks
You’re a model for the kind of parent I want to be. Hearing about your choices inspires & motivates me. (Not to sound like a creepy stalker or anything. =) )
Re: thanks
Awww shucks. I don’t think you sound creepy stalker-like. I think you sound kind of vaguely fangirlish in a super sweet way. 😀 Thanks!
Oh, and Happy Birthday again. 😀
Re: thanks
thank you! I am at the lab, sigh, but I think I saw a cake in the office, so that is okay!
I hope to have your life just as soon as the bus passes get delivered in the mail and I stop being a lazy fuck about meal planning. lol
I think it is totally awesome that you chose to be SAH. (Part of wanting to have a choice is that it is right for some people to not make my choice. Duh. From what I can tell, you are an epic mother.) While I often question the motives of home schooling, I think anyone that questions an *educator*’s choice to home school is totally mental.
My mother was SAH until my baby brothers were in grade school. I am dutifully massively impressed that you are able to put energy into healthy meals for your household with such a wee one.