Stay-At-Home-Moms
Thanks to a link posted by BossLady, I discovered a brilliant writeup in the Post on people’s inability to comprehend what stay-at-home-moms do all day long !!! Carolyn Hax attempts to answer the question: “Why don’t moms have time for a call or e-mail?”, and succeeds admirably, I might add…
When you have young kids, your typical day is: constant attention, from getting them out of bed, fed, clean, dressed; to keeping them out of harm’s way; to answering their coos, cries, questions; to having two arms and carrying one kid, one set of car keys, and supplies for even the quickest trips, including the latest-to-be-declared-essential piece of molded plastic gear; to keeping them from unshelving books at the library; to enforcing rest times; to staying one step ahead of them lest they get too hungry, tired or bored, any one of which produces the kind of checkout-line screaming that gets the checkout line shaking its head.
It’s needing 45 minutes to do what takes others 15.
It’s constant vigilance, constant touch, constant use of your voice, constant relegation of your needs to the second tier.
It’s constant scrutiny and second-guessing from family and friends, well-meaning and otherwise. It’s resisting constant temptation to seek short-term relief at everyone’s long-term expense.
It’s doing all this while concurrently teaching virtually everything – language, manners, safety, resourcefulness, discipline, curiosity, creativity. Empathy. Everything.
Read the entire post. It hits the nail on the head!
Thanks so much for sharing this 🙂 Brought a smile to my face and felt like some validation at the end of another typical SAHM day 🙂 !!
Good One!!
Good article indeed for providing validation to the SAHMs out there.
But frankly, if this was a choice, why is it such a big deal about selflessness, sacrifices and all ? If you make a company from an idea of yours, that becomes like your child and you can make everything in your life secondary so you can make the best effort in making the company a success. This is just expected, not martyrdom. Yet when it comes to the effort raising a kid, it gets put up to a high pedestal, all the time.
Too much expectation, too much work is spent raising a kid now. Why, because the world is screwed up. Looking at the current situation, the world population has to shrink to half of what it is now, to afford everyone some decent quality of life. From that viewpoint, every new kid that is born now is only going to make the whole society pay. New humans are huge liabilities to the world now. Decades ago Isaac Asimov said that babies are enemies of the human race (page 17 of the book ‘The Baby Trap’ by Ellen Peck). Sad but true.
No offense to the parents out there, but I think it is high time the baby craze stops the world over. It costs everyone.
* Editor’s Reply *
Thanks, Aparna and Sukanya.
Thanks also for your detailed comment, Joy.
I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again… it’s not an RoI thing. It’s a personal choice. And, no it can’t be compared to working for a project or an organization “like your own baby”. Until you have a baby of your own, you really can’t understand why. I couldn’t, myself!