The Myth of the Stay-At-Home Mom

Before BJ and I got married we discussed the usual pre-marital topics, for example, we knew from the beginning that I would stay home with the kids when we eventually had them. My husband is a software engineer who has been in the business for about 15 years professionally. I worked in the claims department for a health insurance company. My income was such that most of what I made would just go to daycare if I continued to work after having kids. We agreed, and fully believed the best thing for our family would be for me to become a stay-at-home mom when the time was right. It just didn't make sense, to us, for me to work just to pay someone else to raise our kids. I brought home around $1200 a month at my highest rate of pay after taxes. The friends with whom I worked at the insurance company had their kids in the "in-house" daycare center the company offered. For babies, it was around $800 a month or more for daycare. So, I would have been working 40 hours a week to bring home an extra $400 most of which would go to fueling up my car to get to work, and strangers would be raising my child. We looked at the pros, and the cons, and in the end it just wasn't worth it to us.

This wasn't, and isn't, a judgment for moms who work. My mom always had a job when I was growing up, I stayed with my Grandma Perry, it was what I knew. However, my mom didn't pay for my daycare. Gram just took care of me because I was adorable or that's just who my Gram was, I can kid myself into believing it was the former, but I'm certain it was the latter. For BJ and I, the situation was different. All of our parents worked and were over a decade away from retirement, so grandma wasn't an option

In December of 2007, I quit my job to go to school and plan my wedding. I was getting married the following June and wanted to start working toward a career of my own. I didn't think we would be having kids any time soon, I was only 26 and I wanted to enjoy my husband for a few more years before jumping into the parent trap and I'd been told it would be incredibly difficult for me to have kids. The Universe, however, had something else in mind for me.

The day of my dress fitting, my wedding dress fitting, my bought and paid for, non-refundable, special order, wedding dress fitting, I decided to take a pregnancy test. BJ told me he had a dream that I was pregnant and he has a track record of eerily accurate dreams, I had been exhausted lately and thought "what the hell, I have one laying around, might as well take it." It came back positive. In a few hours, I was supposed to get my Maggie Sottero wedding gown fitted with my mom and my soon-to-be mother-in-law. I had a come-apart. A big one. I couldn't get my husband to answer his phone at work and I was pregnant. I took another test to be sure... Yep, still pregnant... Still couldn't get ahold of my damn husband. I was on MSN instant messenger begging him to call me as soon as possible, it was an emergency! After what felt like an eternity, BJ called me back and I told him. He was calm, happy, positive even. He rushed home from work and told me everything was going to be okay. A sentiment I didn't exactly believe when I was alone, but when he was there with me, somehow I believed it too. Of course I had to tell my mom, and his, asap. That was hardly the kind of news to throw at them at the fitting itself. I mean, I had to tell the seamstress to let the dress expand because it was going to need it. That was April 4, 2008. I was married June 6, 2008. They had to alter my dress twice more before the wedding because I got so big, so fast.

June 6, 2008

August 2008 (4 months to go)

November 13, 2008

November 28, 2008

I gave birth a few hours after this awful picture was taken to a sweet baby boy, Jayden Chandler.

My journey as a stay-at-home mom had begun. There are a lot of books telling you what to do, how to be, and my own experiences had given me an idea of the kind of person I thought I was supposed to be. The mental image I held of the stay-at-home mom, was essentially a selfless superhuman who somehow managed to do everything for everyone without complaint and with a giant smile on her face all the time. She nursed her baby, made her own baby food, had a spotless home, dinner on the table by 5 o'clock, never raised her voice or lost her temper, and felt completely and utterly fulfilled. In my mind, every time I needed a break from the baby, I was a failure. Every time I let the dishes stack up, I was a failure. Even though I had no idea how to cook, every meal I didn't make and have on the table by 5 made me a failure. I was always one of those secretly self-loathing types, but as time wore on it wasn't much of a secret anymore. Those who really knew me could tell. 

My poor husband wondered where his fun, goofy, free-spirited wife had gone. I wasn't much fun anymore. I lost my sense of humor, I lost my sense of self, and I tried to fit a square peg into a round hole. No matter how hard I tried, I just wasn't going to fit into the insane vision I had of a stay-at-home mom. The real me is far too flexible for the rigid square peg I tried to become. 

You could argue the case that I suffered from postpartum depression, it was suggested to me on more than one occasion, especially after Aubrey was born. Perhaps I did, goodness knows I felt pretty low for a really long time. How much was depression, and how much was an impossible ideal for myself, I cannot say. All I know is that I changed, a lot. Jayden was the first born grandchild on both sides of our family, and we were blessed with a village to help us as we learned how to be new parents. In the beginning, we had a lot of help, and a lot of company. I loved the company, I enjoyed the adult interaction and someone to actually talk to. BJ, bless his heart, put so much pressure on himself to be a good provider for our family. He was going through a very busy and stressful time at work so he was putting in a lot of hours. He worked himself ragged for us, and I felt like more of a failure because I wasn't living up to the wife I thought I was supposed to be. Without going into the gruesome details, it was a challenging time for us. 

BJ and I went away for our first anniversary when Jayden was about 6-months-old. A month or so after we returned, BJ had another damn dream. Just to appease him, I took a pregnancy test. It was positive. That couldn't be right, I mean, it was jut a dream... So, I took another one... And another one... I had to be sure! Crap, I was pregnant, again. If I managed to make it all the way to my due date, my kids would barely be 15-months apart. Not long after I found out I was pregnant with our little Aubrey, BJ was laid off. He built an amazing network for his company, helped them move into their new building, and to say "Thank You" they decided to outsource their network support. He is brilliant and incredibly talented, so he was able to find a new job quickly.

My pregnancy with Aubrey was difficult, not only because BJ lost his job, but I was so sick throughout the whole pregnancy. I had a baby who was just starting to crawl and needed enormous amounts of my attention, and I spent a good portion of my time in the bathroom. I was even less able to fulfill my role as wife and mother. I had just enough energy to take care of my baby, but cooking and cleaning... I didn't have it in me. Which made me more of a failure in my mind. I was a stay-at-home mom. I was supposed to be able to handle pregnancy while raising another child. I was supposed to be able to keep my house clean and cook meals every day! There must be some fundamental defect in me. Women had been doing it for more than a millennia, I was supposed to be able to do it too! 

Jayden playing on my giant, pregnant belly

The day I hit "full-term" which was February 3, 2010, I went into labor. We went to the hospital that evening and a few hours after midnight, on February 4, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Aubrey McKenna.

Aubrey Mckenna 6lbs. 6oz

Me & Aubrey

Me, Jayden & Aubrey

So tiny..

The first day he actually acknowledged his sister existed

Jayden couldn't even walk yet, but I had a new baby to care for as well. For the first few weeks of her life, she was an absolute angel (most of the time). When Aubrey was a month old, she got colic. She continued to have colic for the next 10 months. She needed to be held ALL THE TIME. The only person who could hold her was me, and I had to hold her in a specific way. She seemed to cry, although cry feels far too mild a description for what she did, scream would be more appropriate, non-stop. She could break glass with her scream, (a trait she still has to this day). Somehow, I had to take care of my son who was barely considered a toddler, and I had to do it with a colicky baby in my arms at all times. 

If I thought I had it bad before, in terms of being a failure as a stay-at-home mom/housewife, oh that was nothing compared to now. I had to do everything while holding this child. You may read this and say "surely that's an exaggeration, surely she could have simply put the child down and let her cry it out" and to that I would tell you to ask anyone who was there back then. If we wanted peace in the house, I had to hold her. When Aubrey was about 3-months-old or so, I left BJ, Aubrey, and Jayden at my dad's so I could run to the store quickly with my mom. I figured it would be fine since my dad, step-mom, husband, and brothers were all there to help with the kids. I didn't make it 15-minutes before I started getting phone calls asking me to come back because Aubrey hadn't stopped screaming since I left. Everyone had tried holding her, feeding her, anything and everything they could think of, but nothing could calm her down. I made it back in about half an hour and she was still screaming when I returned. As soon as I held her in my special way (basically folded in half, legs by her head, held tight to my chest), she stopped crying. It wasn't that any of them did anything wrong, it was that for her, they couldn't do anything right. They weren't me. There were times even I couldn't soothe her or calm her down. Times when I had to hide in the farthest corner of the house with her to try to give BJ a chance to get some sleep so he could work the next day. 

I was sleep-deprived, frazzled, and undeniably depressed at this point. My house, and my ability to keep up with everything, had gone from bad to worse. I was pretty sure I was the world's worst stay-at-home mom. I looked at my friends on Facebook and saw how clean their homes were in pictures, saw how happy everyone was and I made a giant mistake. I compared myself to them. They say comparison is the thief of joy and I can attest to that. I became more and more withdrawn and negative. I was grumpy all the time, my temper was out of control, I was snapping and yelling at the kids, and my husband. The end result was a disaster for a house and a crazy person in control of my body. 

This craziness continued until recently, when I hit the proverbial rock bottom. I reached a point where I honestly felt like my kids, my husband, hell, the world would be a better place without me in it. I felt like I was such an epic failure in all things that I should just do the unthinkable. In my twisted mind, I truly believed I would be doing them a favor, that they deserved more than me and more than I could give. Somehow, I woke up and I thank God for that. I guess you could say I decided to live. I decided to change the way I look at things, one step at a time. In so doing, I have learned a few things. One of the biggest is acceptance of my personal best. To take things one day at a time, sometimes even one minute at a time. I can only do my best, which may or may not be less than your best, but that has to be okay with me. Another lesson I've already mentioned. Comparison is the thief of joy. 

Last, but not least, is the myth of the stay-at-home mom. It isn't a walk in the park to stay home with your kids. You don't necessarily have more time and sanity than a working mom. Each has their challenges. It is easy to think a stay-at-home mom should have a perfectly spotless home, it is easy to think they have more time on their hands than they know what to do with, but often that isn't the case or at least not with me. As a stay-at-home mom, it's easy to beat yourself up for everything. It is easy to think you should be doing more. It's easy to lose the Now.  

Most days, I'm lucky to get a shower, I'm lucky to go to the bathroom without my kids walking in and wondering what I'm doing. I'm lucky to get a minute to myself, and usually it means staying up most of the night to have one. By staying home, I lost my sense of self and it has taken me 5 years to start down the path of rediscovery. It has taken me 5 years to accept that I'm not less because I chose to stay at home, and even if I chose to remain a housewife for the rest of my life, it does not make me less. Staying at home to raise your children is both a sacrifice, and a blessing. If you focus on the blessing, instead of the sacrifice, it makes the experience a lot better. For some of us, like myself, who tend to learn everything the hard way, it takes hitting rock bottom to remember that.