Tag Archives: stay-at-home-mom

A low key celebration

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Today my last baby turns 7. She wants clafoutis for breakfast and green soup (potato/leek) for dinner.

She is delighted that I won’t ask her to do a single chore today because it is her birthday. That’s the rule. On your birthday: no chores.

I miss Noah. I miss him in every second and it is hard to not freak out all the time. I’m actually being pretty stable. I’m keeping my shit together. I’m not yelling. I’m not being overly harsh. I’ve definitely snapped a few times and been sharp. It’s all about degrees? I am being patient. I am wrapping my babies in cotton wool while they figure out what this damage means.

I am making sure that I am not the problem.

I’m figuring out how to get my needs met and how to get support. I’m having difficult and uncomfortable conversations. They are good and important though. They are necessary. I have to learn how to talk to people other than Noah again. It’s been a lot of years of only turning inward to our pod and I can’t ask my kids for support. No parentifying in this house.

My old lawyer told me that I had to make myself happy. I can not pour from an empty bucket. I have to do stuff to make me happy. I have to make that my priority or I have nothing to give my kids. I don’t have babies anymore. I don’t have to put other peoples immediate demands above my need every minute of the day.

I will fail if I continue to try.

My limits weigh heavily on me. I’m getting more kinds of support in. I am trying to lurch towards a new normal that has elements of our old normal but with a lot more support. With Noah, we could muddle through ok with just us. I can’t alone. I am trying to find ways to ask for support but it’s hard. Asking makes me vulnerable and that scares me. I am trying to make small adjustments. It’s hard that I am making in-house adjustments and out-of-house adjustments at the same time but it is necessary. It is all necessary. Necessary doesn’t mean fun or exciting.

I’m building in places in my week where I step out to be me. Thursday mornings I am going to yoga classes then I meet some buddies for a cuppa and a blether. It’s fun. I don’t even know where I get all the pieces of language I pick up. They all feel like mine because people have spoken to me using them. They were gifted to me.

I feel Noah’s loss as a stone in my chest. It weighs me down and makes me want to cry and scream. I want to be hiding in a dark room screaming for days. I won’t. I will go take a shower. Then I’ll make a birthday girl a fancy breakfast. Then I’ll go to yoga. Then I’ll talk to my friends and I’ll smile and laugh. I hope I will feel it. I might fake the whole thing. Do the things until the things feel real. Do the things until you can accept that this is your life now. Then learn how to enjoy it.

Not.The.Problem.

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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.