Strollerderby

I fought stopping work.  I was a geologist and loved my job.  I resented staying home and was jealous of my husband.  Now it is 5 years later and another daughter has joined us.  I am so thankful I did stay home and love it now.  It is a lot less stressful doing one job, being a mom,than two.  It still falls to the mother to do the lions share of the parenting, housework, household budget, grocery shopping, etc...  I am only one person and I can only do one job at a time.  The time away from work has also given me the chance to review my career choices.  When I do return to work in a couple of years when my youngest starts school it will be in a different field.  I am lucky we could afford for me to stay home with my daughters and I will never regret it even after my initial reluctance to do so.  

I work as a legal administrator for a private adoption agency.  I had every intention of returning to work before I had my daughter, mostly because we needed the income. Once we had her, we decided it was important for one of us to be home.  I proposed to my boss that I work from home, coming into the office only one day a week.  Luckily she agreed and that is the arrangement we have now.  I feel like I have two full-time jobs which is very hard, although there is no question for me that being a mom is the most important job of the two. I do wonder sometimes, if I could quit and be a full time mom, would I?  I think I would, but there are definitely days when it is nice having an identity and role that doesn't involve bodily functions...so maybe I would just choose to go part-time?

I wish I had a choice. I'm the breadwinner in my family - better job, more money, better benefits, very established career-wise - so when my baby arrives in January, I'll be going back to work M-F 8-5 after a few weeks. There is zero flexibility in this. I'm lucky that my husband will be able to stay home during the day to care for our child, but it really isn't an option for me. I'm glad I will still have the challenge and stimulation of my job, but I know I'll miss the time with my child. We'll see how it goes!

I work as a corporate lawyer, and like my job. I'm good at it, and I get on well with my colleagues. I had always planned to keep working after I had my baby, and believe strongly that moms should not have to give up their careers. Although I'm still on maternity leave I went back to work for one week to cover for a colleague while my sister looked after my 3 month old baby. Come the end of day one I was a blubbering mess, and broke down in tears when I got home because I missed him so much. Now I'm feeling so conflicted - it was so comforting to be back doing something I know I'm good at (as opposed to my life as an amateur mom who gets it wrong at least half the time) and enjoying adult conversations with my colleagues, but I don't want to leave my baby for such a long time every day.

This is timely for me. I just returned to work part-time, teaching ESL in the evenings, after three years at home with my daughter.

There were a lot of factors, but one of the big ones was that my daughter had really intense separation anxiety for a long time. From the time she was just a few weeks old until about 2.5, she would literally cry the whole time I was away. It didn't feel right to leave her. Also, the $ just didn't add up.

Now, she is over the separation anxiety, and after three years I'm ready to be at work again. Also, while we scraped by on one income, it wasn't easy.

Most mothers I know have worked and stayed home at various times, or worked PT. . .I think the intensity of the debate is more about our own ambivalence than anything else. I also thing that the anger is misplaced. Why aren't we directing it at the government and corporations, who could do a lot more to support families so that the choices weren't so impossible.

I stay home with my kids, because my husband and I both felt it was important to have a parent at home.  Since his earning potential is greater than mine, he works and I'm the stay-home parent.

Sometimes I really like it, and other days I hate it.  The hardest part for me is how intensely lonely it is.  To make up for the lack of adult contact, I blog about everything from my kids to food to current events, and I'd love to turn it into a job, but have no idea how.

I work from home as a technical writer, and I have to say, just as Mr. Almond did in his piece, that it is not the dream  some think it is.  It is hard to concentrate when my daughter is babbling and laughing while my husband is playing with her in the next room. It is even harder when she walks past the door and sees me.  She cries.  She wants me.  All I can do is wave.  If I go to her I know I'll lose at least 20 minutes if not an hour of work.

It would be nice if my husband didn't have to also work,  but he works 45 hours a week at one job and runs his own business at night.  So the hours I try to work (when he doesn't have something to do) are from 6 p.m. into the early morning hours and then on weekends.

Another complicating factor is breastfeeding. It is one thing to want to be in the next room.  It is another to be needed in the next room. My daughter would not take a bottle, no matter what we tried.  So, when she wanted to nurse I had to drop what I was doing, no matter what.  Now she is on solid foods and old enough that she doesn't need to nurse. She just likes it.  I'm pretty sure she will be weaned in a couple of months, so that will help.  

Of course,  I am more than happy to be able to work from home. But it stretches me thin, and to be frank, I do most of my work after my husband and my daughter are both in bed.  I usually work until 1 or 2 a.m., unless I am up against a deadline and I have to work through the whole night, like tonight.  It isn't easy, but I love what I do.

I work 3 days a week as a hair stylist. One of those days is a saturday so my husband watches the kids. It works great because I only need care for 2 days out of the week. It also helps me miss them a bit so when I am home I appreciate every moment.

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I have a post up right now about this exact thing. I work from home, thank God and any other deity you choose. I think this is really a feminist issue --and also if we had truly family-friendly policies in this country this would not even be a debate. Most women don't want to give up their careers forever and ever or even the five or so years it would take until their child is in kindergarten (and for many of us with multiple kids it's longer. I am thrilled to bits to be expecting #2, but also realized my careers goals all moved back by two years or so). Lots of peple blanch at the idea of sending a little three-month old baby into a daycare situaion--and this generation of child rearers  is lucky to have THAT. It used to be six weeks, if you were lucky.  For some people, the chcoices are clear and the support exists to make it easy. I have one friend whose parents and inlaws are both retired and they care for her son for free during the week. Another has that Holy Grail--really good, ON-SITE daycare. I know a couple stay at home dads. Everyody else? The choices are shitty.

I went back to work full-time when my first child was 4 months old and I'll be doing the same with this one.  I must be the world's suckiest mom, but I never wanted to work from home.  I just don't multi-task all that well, and my job is computer programming, which for me at least requires the ability to concentrate intensely.  I can't imagine how I'd do that while also trying to take care of a baby.  I hope my way of doing things isn't screwing my children up (it helps that I have excellent child care on-site at my husband's workplace) but as for me personally full-time work in a family-friendly office is just fine.  I just hope that now that there will be two of them, it doesn't feel like they're both getting shorted time-wise with me.  

Hmmmm.  Unexpectedly, the important job with the title and the great office was gone when we returned home from China after adopting PunditGirl.  I had struggled with how I was going to manage it, and then I had to manage the damage to my ego.  Finally, I found a way to combine work and motherhood in a way I never thought I would -- freelance writing.  And, interestingly, it is a much more rewarding career (tho' not financially!).  But whatever we choose, I agree -- enough with the Mommy Wars, already.  But I know from watching the moms at school who work full-time in offices, that won't happen.

I used to make six figures at a job that I was at 16 hours a day.  The stress was high, the time with my oldest was very little.

When we sat down and did the math, we put a lot of value on the time I would have with my son (now we have two), and decided we could do without a lot of stuff so I could stay home.

Once home, I got bored easily ~ it's my nature.  So I created an online business (then soon joined a similar firm rather than have the overhead) and started writing freelance here at Babble.

I wouldn't change it for the world.  It works for me.  But I have friends who like to go out to work and that works for them.  It's all in how you want to juggle - because no matter the situation, we're all juggling the same decisions in parenting and it does us no good to judge each other.  

Great post Redsy!

I work from home as a writer so I can spend time with my child. I wouldn't have it any other way.

 I count my blessings every day that I can stay home full time with my baby.  I never really liked the jobs that I had (jobs not careers, huge difference) and I never felt fulfilled as a person doing any of them.  It makes me very upset that so few of my friends have been able to stay home with their children due to job inflexibility or the fear that they will never be able to get back into their careers if they've been gone for awhile.  We, as a society, have to stop thinking that once a woman or man leaves the workforce for one to ten years to be a primary caregiver, that he or she is  automatically unemployable.  In the whole scheme of our working lives ten years isn't very long.  If we work until say we're like 70 then is five years a long time to be MIA?  No, but they (corporations, universities, schools, government) dismiss you without even giving you any credit for doing something incredibly important.  

I work two jobs -- a part-time teaching job outside of the home and a part-time internet job that I can do from my home office -- and I juggle two volunteer jobs because they benefit my kids.  While I love my work -- all of it -- it's tough.  And quitting isn't a financial option for us...  So I do the best I can to make things work.  It seems like I'm the one that gets the short end of the stick -- not enough sleep, not enough time with friends, not enough time for a hobby outside of cleaning the house.  All of my friends think that I have the ideal situation -- rewarding careers AND time to be a mom -- but nothing is ever ideal.  Trust me.

I work as a lawyer for a big law firm, on a reduced hours basis.  I love what I do, but bluntly I work with a bunch of assholes.  I'm basically treated like a waste of space cause I only put out 1200 hours per year, versus the 1950 that regular associates work.  So I'm looking for an in house job. I just want to feel appreciated, and I'm not sure that's possible working part-time at a law firm.  

Redsy, how glad I am that you work at Babble and can bring your Redliciousness to me. Indeed, this is such a testy topic. What's so interesting about it all is how we validate our own choices. Because I work (albeit it part-time, editing, and blogging for Cookiemag and for myself at Crabmommy--stop that plugging!!), I tend to look at the non-working mothers with a critical eye.  And I even gravitate to reading material that vindicates my position, because we all like to feel we are right in our choices (reading Arlington Park right now by Rachel Cusk, a gawd-awfully miserable yet funny novel about upscale stay-at-home suburban Britmoms, miserable in their cavernous kitchens). I'd love to say I don't judge but truly, I feel most moms are better off doing some sort of work, or at least, not "losing" themselves in their kids. That said, I can think of a handful who disprove my own notion, so there it is...I guess what I'm saying is that it's so deeply personal, this work/not work choice that it seems to me virtually impossible not to judge the other group, because they will always reflect what you are not [doing].  

I remember Sunday evenings as a kid... Listening as my parents moved around in the kitchen assembling a meal of some kind while we kids cozied up and watched "Wonderful World of Disney." Sunday nights were a time of relaxing family togetherness