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.

The path to freedom...

I've never made it a secret that my house is a cluttered disaster. I have way too much stuff and nowhere to put it. Even if I had a place for everything, I still have too much stuff. My kids have grown out of clothes and they sit in bags in my crawl space, I bought toys on sale to give later and never gave them out, I bought and bought and have only succeeded in being a few boxes away from an episode of hoarders. When I look back at my decisions over the past few years I generally feel like I was an idiot. That's all there was to it. I thought I needed or wanted so many things, but really, I neither needed nor wanted them. They did nothing to make me happy, they didn't make my kids happier. Worse, I feel like I did them a disservice by getting so much crap. They never learned to value or respect their toys. Now I not only need to dig myself out of my own personal hole, but I have to reclaim my house. In essence, I have two giant chasms to climb out of.

The good news, as I see it, is that my kids are still young enough to be retrained if you will. It's not too late for them to learn the value of their possessions, to learn to respect their toys, and to begin taking care of the things they still get to keep. Goodness knows, I don't want them to continue down the path we are currently on. It makes me so angry when they destroy a toy or a book, when they color on the wall or basically act like destructive children. I know it's my own fault, which probably makes it worse. No one wants to actually admit that their kids failings are really their own. I need to teach them to do better, to be better. In order to do that, I need to do better. I need to be better.

I started this process recently, I took my first steps on the path to freedom. After my evening walk, I seem to have a lot more energy and I generally want to clean something. A few nights ago, I walked in the door around 10:45pm after my walk, (we are night owls around here) and I remembered I needed to change the sheets on my daughters bed. See, the night before, Aubrey wet the bed in the middle of the night. Being the awesome mother that I am, I took off her wet clothes, wiped her down with a towel, put on a pull-up, put a towel down on the wet spot, sent Aubrey back to bed and went right back to sleep myself... Like I said, I'm an awesome mom. Anyway, I decided to change the sheets on both beds. When I pulled up the mattress and saw the pile of crap under their beds, I made an executive decision. We were going to clean their room... And by "we" I mean "they" were going to clean their room and I was going to supervise. I moved Aubrey's bed out from the wall first, brought in a big white garbage bag and a big bag for toys. The instructions were simple. Garbage in the garbage bag, toys to in a toy bag to be put away later, and clothes in the hamper.

It is rather embarrassing to admit that I hadn't cleaned their room in a very long time, and it was ridiculous. There were bread crusts, bread sticks, half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches, crackers, water bottles, fruit-snack wrappers, the disgusting garbage list goes on. See, embarrassing, but I promised to be real, so there you have it. Then there were the toys, I mean honestly, it was crazy how much crap they fit under a toddler bed. I made them do it all. They were even excited about it! They had to pick up the garbage, clean up the toys, the only thing I did was provide new toy bags when the old ones filled up and vacuum when they made the floor clean enough to do so. We spent a little over an hour the first night cleaning their room, making it about midnight when we finished up. The kids were really proud of themselves, and I was really proud of them. The next day we did the other half of the room. Jayden wasn't quite as excited to do the rest of the room, in fact, when I told him it was time he replied with "you've got to be kidding me?" Hmm, I wonder where he heard that line! Regardless of his attitude, he cooperated with only a small reminder about losing his video games for the rest of the day if he didn't cooperate... It's amazing how well that works for motivating him! Aubrey just likes to be my helper most of the time, so motivating her is less of a struggle when phrased that way.

The room isn't spotless by any stretch, but it is much better than it was. More importantly, lessons were learned by myself and the kids. For the kids, they learned that they prefer to have a clean room, they learned food on the floor is gross and they haven't even asked if they could take their peanut butter sandwiches upstairs since that night. They learned that it really sucks when a toy they liked gets thrown away because its broken and it's broken because they didn't take care of it. They learned that momma isn't just going to do it for them. If I've taught them anything through my stubbornness in regards to their playroom and bedroom, it is that if they make the mess, they are going to clean it up or they have to suffer in their own filth. I learned that they are ready to have that responsibility. I learned they are perfectly capable of cleaning their own messes themselves with only a little guidance on my part. I learned a little more patience with them and to make cleaning their messes kind of fun.

Now I just need to apply those principles to the playroom. It is a disaster and has been for over a year now. I have refused to touch it since the day they destroyed it. If I'm honest, I've actually tried to clean up a little a few times but each time I only last a few minutes before I'm so angry I have to stop. I'm not very pleasant when my temper is unleashed. I don't like that personality trait in myself, I have quite a temper and controlling it seems to take a lot of work again. In my attempt to be better than I have been or to keep myself from behaving like an irrational tyrant, I shied away from trigger situations i.e., cleaning the playroom. Yes, I know the room is ridiculous. Yes, the mess makes me angry, but the kids made that mess and they will be the ones to clean it up. They are finally old enough to be able to do it with minimal assistance from me. I don't expect everyone to understand or agree with my approach, like I've said before, I have to do what works for me and so far this seems to do just that!

I've started my thousand mile journey to freedom and I'm finally making progress one step at a time.

Here are some pictures of BJ's birthday party at his parents house over the weekend. It was a great night.

Kids thought they could climb the mommy tree at BJ's birthday party

Happy Birthday Daddy!

Awe we like each other... And then there's the "special" brother Matt... 

Temper temper

I have a temper. I was always a little spit fire. I worked for a long time to overcome that temper, and for quite a few years I managed to successfully tame the beast. Unfortunately, the beast resurfaced a couple years ago and was out of control last year. I can be loud, mean, and pretty much crazy. It is a part of me that is really embarrassing and rather shameful. Anyone who knew me growing up knows a side of me that I wish didn't exist. Pretending it doesn't exist hasn't been all that successful.

Establishing an overall sense of peace is my goal. I want to behave like one of those people who never raises their voice and never says an unkind word. It's a rather worthy goal, and one I know I can attain with practice and meditation. Celebrate my victories and learn from my mistakes. I'd like to share a small victory with you.

Victory: once again my son has pooped his pants, (have I mentioned my disdain for potty training?) a few days ago when this happened I behaved badly and flipped out. Today, I did not raise my voice. I did not get mad. I calmly cleaned him up and let it go. I didn't guilt him. I just tried to show him love. This is a little victory for me. I didn't even feel anger inside. I felt only love and calm.

Another victory: when Jayden squeezed a bottle of shampoo onto the bathroom floor while I was on a Skype call, I didn't even feel upset or angry. I just cleaned it up and showed him the difference between the shampoo and the soap because I think he was trying to wash his hands.

I was true to myself. When I stay calm, I am true to myself. The spit-fire monster within, is not my personal truth. It is not the real me. Keys to happiness? Live true to yourself and do your best to live in the present moment. I try to remember that my only power is now.