366 Days with My Little Buddy: Day 117: What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

If you would have asked me 15 years ago if I was I was going to be stay-at-home mom, I would have looked at you like you were crazy and told you absolutely not; I had career plans.

If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I was going to be a stay-at-home mom, I would have eyed you and then told you, grudgingly, that I would probably take one year off to stay with the baby and then go back to work.

If you would have asked me 5 years ago if I was going to be a stay-at-home mom, I would have sighed and told you that I would probably take the first year off to stay at home and then work part-time until the child was old enough to start preschool.

Isn’t it crazy how priorities change?

As I sat at lunch today with Little Buddy and two of our friends and their children, it occurred to me that, though I never saw this path for myself, I have no regrets about doing it. In fact, I love that I have this opportunity and give thanks every day for it.

It is amazing to me how our society can sometimes socialize girls to despise the idea of staying at home with their kids. When people ask us what we want to be when we grow up, we are not expected to answer “a mommy.” If we do, we are normally patted on the head and told, “Well yes, but what do you want to do?” The obvious implications are that being “just a mommy” is not enough, that if we want to achieve our potential we have to set our sights “higher”.

Now before I go any further, I want to make something clear: I am not idolizing stay-at-home moms (or dads) and I am not villainizing working moms (or dads). In fact, I am working on my doctorate degree right now because I do want to go back to work in a few years. But I also don’t naively question the decision of women who don’t want to go back to work, which was something I did question in my youth. I get it now. What I do want to say is that sometimes our society puts unreasonable expectations on women, telling us that our fight for equality in the workplace is jeopardized if we “succumb” to caring for our children or that our relationship with our children will be weakened if we decide to “focus” our lives on our careers. There is something extraordinarily wrong with that. I thought our fight for equality was so that we could have the choice of doing what we wanted to do and having the opportunity to adjust our lives in a way that worked for our individual situation and for our family. Without criticism.

And still, many of us don’t have that choice. I realize how lucky I am to be able to do what I want to do. I have several friends who are strong, independent women with good careers that desperately wish they could stay home with their children, but their financial situation doesn’t allow it. Sometimes they are lauded for going back to work and not “throwing their education away” and sometimes they are degraded because they are “letting other people raise their kids.” Seriously society? What is wrong with us? Why can’t we just be supportive of what each of us need to do for our families and recognize that sometimes people have to make tough choices in order to provide for their families? Why can’t we just realize that some people are called to do different things and that does not affect how much they love their children? Why are we so polarized on this topic?

As for me, my parents both needed to work to provide for my brother and I. It wasn’t easy, but they wanted to make sure that we had every opportunity available to us. In order to accommodate this, they worked opposite schedules: My dad worked days, going in at some ungodly early hour so that he could be home by 3 to meet us when we got off the bus from school and my mom worked midnights so that someone would always be home with us during the day. We never had to worry about daycare in the summer or latchkey after school or who would watch us when we were sick. There was always someone home for us. They made their situation work for their family; isn’t that what all of us are trying to do?

When I was a child, I just accepted this. I just accepted that fact that the world worked and I saw my mom and dad all the time and someone was always home with us. That was life. I never appreciated all the behind the scenes work that went into it, all the sacrifices that they had to make. My needs were being met, so how would I notice that my parents rarely got to see one another, sleep long enough, or pursue interests of their own? They built everything around making sure my brother and I were taken care of, and we just took it for granted. But that’s how it is supposed to be as kids. Everything is supposed to appear so seamless and stable that we don’t know how much planning and stress our parents go through to turn pure chaos into something (slightly) manageable. It isn’t until we are older, and have kids of our own that we are strapping into carseats and chauffeuring to sports practices that we even think of the Herculean effort our parents made. So thank you, Mom and Dad, for the sacrifices you made to make my childhood seem so effortless. I didn’t appreciate it enough then, but I certainly do now.

Because that is what good parents do, regardless of whether they work or stay at home, they make childhood easy and effortless. Little Buddy just woke up in the middle of his nap with a full diaper and, as I changed it, he sent an endless stream of waterworks all over me and the nursery. Will he know how I changed all my goals for the day in order to quickly clean his room while he finished his nap? No, he’ll lie on his dry, clean changing table and continue his day, oblivious to the two extra loads of laundry I had to do and the carpet I had to scrub. That’s how it is supposed to be. All he needs now is to feel loved. But one day he’ll know. And he’ll appreciate it that much more because he’ll understand.

And if anyone ever asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, and he answers, “a daddy,” that will be enough for me.

But for now, he's just content playing in a big box.