“Do you work?”
We’re sitting at the pool. The boys are swimming with their daddy, but I’m sitting out with my four-month-old and this still-broken-but-almost-healed foot. A woman has just counted them all up and laughed about “all boys.”
The youngest smiles, because he’s joyful like that.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m a writer.”
“Oh,” she says, and it’s not a condescending sound, more of a surprised-mixed-with-wonder sound.
So I break the ice. “I need my work so I stay sane,” I say, and we spend the next ten minutes laughing about how we can only handle so much and how work feels like a vacation sometimes and how we are both better mothers for our out-of-the-home pursuit.
The truth is, my out-of-the-home pursuit is not just for me. It’s also for my family. For our finances.
My family needs my contribution to stay above water, so even if I did want to stay home, I couldn’t.
I wasn’t always okay with this reality.
///
Just before my first son was born, I took a job producing a newspaper for one of the Methodist conferences in Texas. It didn’t pay a whole lot, but it was steady and it took care of the electric bill and the water bill and the Internet bill and the grocery needs and the gas expenses.
And then my son crashed into our lives and the whole world turned upside down, and I just wanted to spend all my time with him. I didn’t care about promotions, didn’t care about accolades, didn’t care about anything except being present with my amazing little boy so I wouldn’t miss a single thing.
Except my husband didn’t make enough money to pay our bills on his own, and we needed two incomes. So I had to work. I had to keep my job.
I arranged a compromise with my boss: I would work part of the day in the office and part of the day at home so I could still hang out with my boy.
I had the best of both worlds, watching my son in the morning while working on the pieces of my job that didn’t require complete and uninterrupted concentration and letting my husband hang out with him while I went to the office in the afternoons.
We made our trade-off work. We divided chores. We supported each other in every way we could.
And yet something still felt wrong. Something still felt suffocating. I thought it was because I was still working. I was still a mom who had to work, and I was not made to work. I was made to raise my child.
A bitter ball settled in my throat.
///
We are mothers.
We can convince ourselves that the best thing in the whole world would be to stay at home with our babies and raise them to love reading and teach them how to write in journals and shape them into people we actually want to hang out with when they’re older.
This is what mothers are supposed to do, after all. It’s our duty. Our calling. Our inheritance.
Sometimes it’s possible to find a way to stay at home, if we look hard enough. Sometimes it’s just not, because health insurance premiums went up too high and the cost of food has increased outrageously and the car needs some unexpected repairs we didn’t anticipate in the budget we made last month.
And when the finances fall short and we realize we can’t stay at home because more than one income is necessary to care for our family, we can sometimes get wildly bitter about it.
If only our circumstances were different. If only our husbands had chosen a different career. If only he made more money.
If only…
It’s not easy to pull ourselves back out of this if-only pit.
///
Six months ago I was laid off from the job I’d had for nearly nine years. We found out about the layoff a few months in advance, so I spent the last months there feeling sad and out of sorts and terribly unmotivated. I wanted to finish well, but how do you finish well when someone doesn’t want you?
In the meantime, I was searching for a new job, because my income was still necessary for our family. The old bitterness was rising up to meet me.
There was a day, close to Christmas, when I came home from work especially drained and sad and maybe a little angry, because the bad news about the layoff had been repeated in different terms. I could practically see the walls shaking as I walked up to my door.
I put the key in the lock, and I could already hear the world falling apart into hysterical laughter.
Then I opened the door, and there was my husband, in the middle of all my boys, except the one I still carried, doing “The Robot.”
“Dance party!” he said.
I just stood in the doorway watching my boys giggle and rearrange their daddy, watching them all dance, watching those faces that glowed with such happiness I could hardly handle it. An overwhelming wave of gratitude knocked all the bitter from its stronghold.
They might have missed this, I thought.
They might have missed sharing such a sacred time with their daddy if I weren’t a working mother.
They might have missed.
It was the first time I really felt glad that I had worked all these years. Glad that my income was necessary to raise my growing boys. Glad that my husband had THIS time with them.
Just glad.
///
We don’t have to feel guilty or bitter or angry about working outside the home, because our working gives a gift to our husbands.
It gives them the opportunity to be present with their children, to play with their children, to share in the raising responsibility of their children that will change lives forever.
I think I need to say that again, mostly for myself: WE DON’T HAVE TO FEEL GUILTY. WE DON’T HAVE TO FEEL SHAMED. WE DON’T HAVE TO FEEL BITTER.
We are letting our husbands be intentional dads, letting them take their important place beside us in this journey of training up a child in the way he should go.
That’s the picture I got, all those months ago, when I walked into my house with bitterness in my hands and saw why the walls were shaking.
It’s not unusual, today, to see dads who stay home with their children. And while many shake their heads and say it’s just another way women are taking over the workforce, I can’t help but think that a generation of involved dads is so much better than a generation of disinterested ones.
It means we get a whole generation of children who grow up with present dads, not absent ones. It means we get boys and girls who know who they are because their moms AND their dads have spoken it into their lives with not only words but also time. It means we get little ones who recognize how valuable they are to their moms AND their dads and, by extension, the world.
This is a worthy shift.
So today I am thankful for my split-down-the-middle day. I am grateful that I get to work.
Most of all, I am glad that my husband gets the privilege of speaking into the lives of his children in ways that mean life and freedom and love.
I’ll go to work any day for that.
