I recently read a blogpost a friend had posted that was written by a father supporting stay-at-home moms. He had written it after he had a few comments that week from women who wondered what she did all day. It was well-written and was very supportive of women who stay home with their kids. Here is the link if you would like to read it:
http://themattwalshblog.com/2013/10/09/youre-a-stay-at-home-mom-what-do-you-do-all-day/
This article has bothered me. I certainly feel the sentiment was supportive and loving but I feel the message was incomplete.
Firstly, I respect parents that choose to stay at home to raise their children. Keith and I have said many times how lucky we are that we can afford to have Keith stay home. I also tell him all the time how much I appreciate his sacrifice and extraordinary amount of time and effort everyday being the primary parent around day in and day out. He makes the meals, he does the laundry, he takes the kids to their classes, he takes them to the park twice a day, and he cleans the floors. He is amazing. I know that he is amazing but also when people, especially women, find out my husband is a stay-at-home dad they tell me how amazing that is. They tell me their husbands could never hack it, would never choose to do it and that I am amazingly lucky to have found such an unbelievable diamond of a guy. Keith is a pretty amazing guy and I am very lucky to be married to him but the fact that he stays at home with our kids is only part of the reason. When I come home and tell him, yet again, how another woman told me how lucky I was to have a stay at home dad and how amazing/incredible/unbelievable it was that he stays at home his response was "I'm doing everything stay-at-home moms have done for generations, I'm just doing it with a penis." For some reason, having a stay-at-home dad seems to be a radical feminist act.
But despite the fact that we have a parent staying at home in our house we don't fall into either feuding tribe of stay at home mom or working outside the home mom. The fact that these are often feuding factions seems ridiculous to me. A good friend and I had our babies around the same time in different provinces and around the time we were both thinking about going back to work (6 months for me and 12 months for her) we were chatting and trying to figure out how to ask each other about it without sounding condescending. We are so happy for each other that we could make the choice that made sense for our families but it was a bit of an awkward first-date type conversation to get there. That is because it is a minefield to ask a mom about her plans. There very well might have been a condescending tone to the women who asked the blogger about if his wife was going back to work but people often ask about future plans when they are visiting and so it's easy to see how "Is your wife going back to work?" would come up. For both of our children I spent the first 6 months of my parental leave at home and Keith took the last 6 months. This worked really well for us because we could both understand how unbelievably hard it is to stay home with children. It's really hard. I went to medical school and endured a 5 year residency and in a lot of ways stay-at-home parenthood was harder. I have never been under the illusion that staying at home was easy. Maybe I should say "Are you going back to the workforce?" but the sentiment is "What are your plans?" not "Obviously you haven't been working until now..." Also I can tell you that as a doctor/mom the comments fly the other way too. The offhand comments of "You put in so many hours, I just love my kids so much I couldn't be apart from them that long..." or "You're children must miss you so much", etc. etc. It doesn't happen from a lot of people but it still stings when I hear it and that's with having a stay-at-home parent. I think these comments come out of people not doing what they truly want to do. Working when they want to stay home or staying at home when they'd prefer to be working outside of the home. I think that's where the negativity comes from and maybe we could work on the barriers to choices for women (ex. universal day care or extended maternity leave) rather than taking it out on each other.
I believe my role as a mother is important but so are my roles as a physician, as a wife, a daughter and a friend. I took vows with my husband and out of that love and commitment we brought two beautiful children into this world. I also took an oath to my profession and to my community and lots of love and commitment came from my teachers and patients to mold me into the physician that I am. I take both of these commitments very seriously and I don't think they need to be mutually exclusive. It's true that when I leave the medical profession that I will be replaced by other doctors. Hopefully, I will have helped mold them into kind and caring physicians as my mentors have taught me. To say that because you will be replaced in your job doesn't mean that you don't have an impact there. I agree that impact might not be felt by generations but that's really a retrospective diagnosis. Marie Curie had two daughters. Her Nobel prize winning work was very important and she may or may not have known that while raising small children. Who knows what children have been and will be inspired by the public work of Hillary Clinton, Indira Gandhi or Emily Murphy. Or who have been inspired by the more personal wonder of the teachers, professors, artists, researchers, entertainers and scientists they see or read about, some of whom might also be mothers. To suggest that the career work of women might be less meaningful than motherhood also minimizes the enormous contributions of women who don't have children, through personal choice or not. Their contributions to their communities might not run through the roots of their children but may extend out through the branches of their friendships, their community work and the love they have for the children around them. This love might not come from parenthood but it is just as important for other adults to nurture and foster interests in children to help them grow and I truly believe that love will also be felt for generations.
I completely agree with the glorification of busy. I thought that before I had kids and continue to think that now. I thank my friends in Malawi for teaching me that. I think that quantity time is important with kids and the more time you can spend with kids the better. I however don't think you need to completely lose yourself. For me, my quantity time with my kids comes out of leisure activity time. I don't do much outside of work and home except for occassionally going to the gym. For some people that might mean that they've cut out their job with a paycheque so that they can continue doing their yoga/art/basketball/etc and still spend time with their kids. I also think that the glorification of busy and the whole stay-at-home parenting argument is a luxury reserved to people of a certain socioeconomic status and to say it's not a classist issue is a bit naive. Most single-moms and/or moms living with less financial means are not glorifying their busy-ness they are just busy. To all single parents I know or don't know if no one has told you today (or for weeks or months) you are incredible. There are many days in my life that I think about how much harder my situation would be if I was parenting on my own. And I am not the only parent who has a partner who thinks that way. If you think we are judging you for being a single parent we're not - we're judging ourselves trying to imagine if we could walk in your shoes.
Touting a stay-at-home mom as the ideal is limiting. Any "ideal" in regards to family is limiting in my opinion. Families are amazing entities with all sorts of configurations. Some have a stay-at-home parent and some don't. Some have two moms or two dads or one mom or one dad. Children also are just as broad a kaleidoscope of individual needs and abilities. Some might work best with a stay-at-home parent and some might flourish in daycare with a different kind of caregiver or with their grandparents or other relatives. My mom stayed home with my brother and I but there were times she worked and I spent that time with my grandparents - a relationship that was stronger for decades because we had that time together. I also remember a certain narrow-minded individual who blanketed my first year med school group with the sweeping statement that "clearly we all came from two-parent families to have gotten this far <in our education>". This understandably upset my friend sitting beside me who's father had left them when she was young and who was lovingly raised by her mother and aunt. Keith's mom stayed home with them when they were young but I would venture to say that it was his parents partnership when his mom went back to nursing that fostered the quiet but strong belief in gender equality in my spouse. The women in our lives certainly influenced the people we have become but so too did the examples of the men who loved these women. Who created strong examples of marriages with them. Who washed the dishes and rubbed our mother's backs. My dad tried to curl my hair with a curling iron when I was 7 (and burned my face) and listened to the lyrics of Ani diFranco and the prose of Alice Walker. Keith's dad's would leave out the paper to a space-related article he knew Keith would enjoy and has never made a whisper of a comment or a gesture that he is even remotely embarrassed that his son chose to stay-at-home. I think this was one of the biggest points missed in this article. The was no mention of the importance of fatherhood and how that impacts generations. I respect that the blogger was making a statement in support of his wife and I applaud that. I would also though like to see more men see their roles as fathers be just as defining in a child's life as their mother's. Just as my husband's view of gender equality was shaped by both his parents I hope my children's views are influenced both by my work inside and outside our home, by Keith's sacrifices and influences as a stay-at-home parent and, most of all, by our relationship to each other as we create our family life. If our children see us as partners in our family, if all of our children see us as partners in creating their world, maybe we can truly make headway into the societal pigeon-holes that weaken us all.
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