I worked until my first was 2.5 years old and then retired from my job to be a stay at home mom. One of my best friends (and my daughter's godmother) agreed to nanny for me for those years, which was amazing, since my husband was in grad school and I needed to work for us to have insurance (and money beyond grad school stipend). Yes, I was wildly stressed and overworked.* But in a very different way than now, when I'm a stay at home mom.
When I was working full time, leaving in the morning was such a stressful rush, get dressed, nurse the baby, change and dress the baby, clean the pumping parts, pack the pumping parts, pack lunch, hand-off to nanny, walk to work, work had its own intense stresses plus making time to pump (I highly recommend the book Work. Pump. Repeat. By Jessica Shortall to any other working, pumping mom), and then the normal, what's for dinner, have I run the laundry, when will I ever get to shower?
As a stay at home mom, the children are *always* with me. Which makes me realize, when I was working, for those 8+ hours, I could go to the bathroom whenever I wanted, I could write or type sentences without being interrupted, I could have uninterrupted conversations and meetings with adults, I could think about work solutions without getting interrupted, and *no one was ever touching me!!* (I didn't think I could ever be touched out until I became a stay-at-home mom. Boy howdy, now I get touched out all the time.) I wasn't responsible for the health and safety of my child for that *whole* work day. I didn't have to be vigilant to make sure my child wouldn't do something dangerous and hurt themselves. Waaay different!
I feel blessed to be home with my kids now! A young new mom asked me for advice about being a stay at home mom of a toddler, and I said, actually, in some ways, I'm going through this stage (with my second child) for the first time. I wasn't home all day for my first until she was two and a half.
I wouldn't trade being home with my kids for anything, and I'm proud that I did what I needed to for my family when I was working. I'm also proud I've learned (at least a little) about human limits, and that some of my overwhelm in life when I was working was from not having healthy boundaries and saying, "Yes!" to opportunities when saying, "No," would have built more margin into my life.
*Eventually, in my working mom girlboss I-can-do-it-all era, I had a mental breakdown, when my husband was on internship for five months across the country, and I was single parenting, working one full-time engineering job and one part-time job at my church, and auditing a grad school course... And didn't feel like I could ask for help, because other people had it worse. My goodness! I was insane. Therapy and Adoration and short term disability leave and a literal miracle from the Lord and I found healing and came out the other side. I'm in a much healthier place now. Praise God.
Great post! I agree, when you're home with littles, it's 90% the 'caring' work and not the household chores work. I do *sometimes* try to combine the two. Today I made pasta from scratch with my 3 year old since it's very simple and tactile and takes forever anyway. I have to keep reminding myself it's the process, not the end product.
This book has kept coming up here and there - it looks great!
One thing that's been interesting as we had 3 kids in 3 years, is seeing how my in-laws have come to understand at least a bit more about what being home and caring for them entails. My MIL worked full-time since my husband was like 8 weeks old, and was an only child to boot..... so some of that "same exact responsibilities, and ALSO work" mindset seemed to be there when I stopped paid work to do the homemaker thing. Like you said, people just don't know what all those invisible logistics of constant care work entail if they've never done it. But boy are they always tired at the end of the days when they come in from out of town... with FOUR adults between all of us. I'm like "yeah, imagine doing all that but just you, by yourself during the workdays." :)
Before I actually quit my job to be a SAHM (pretty recent) I was attempting to work from home in a techy job while also watching my baby. I managed for a few months (my employer was extremely accommodating and lovely), but the overall takeaway was that it is actually impossible to do this unless your job is completely fake or you are an insanely productive person (I’m sure a few exist). Taking care of a child is no joke! There’s a whole Reddit forum of women who WFH with their baby(ies) and while my heart goes out to them (many have no choice!) the things they have to do to make it work are imo extreme and less than ideal — constant screen time for the baby, lying to their employer, secretly breastfeeding while on camera, Uber eats every meal, etc. While I was WFHing, I had one meeting I had to lead where I was simultaneously breastfeeding and then changing a poopy diaper (luckily camera off) while also explaining a bunch of code (lmao). Friends and family that I shared this with seemed to find it very cool and empowering. In fact, I did not find it empowering — it just kind of sucked? Also, it was like the work I was already doing to take care of my baby wasn’t enough to be respected, I needed to add a Teams meeting and some code review on top. Whatever! I reject that framing. But major respect for the few women who can pull it off.
Beautifully said, as usual, and excellent points. I actually (despite my 20 years of motherhood) never put together that the reason I struggle to keep up with the housework is because care is, in and of itself, work. At least, not in those words.
Perhaps there is another layer to this: “As a working mom, you have the exact same responsibilities, they just need to be completed after work hours. Plus the added stress of your career.” Consider another layer: “plus the extra care you need to give your children to make up for the sub-par care and attention they received at daycare”. Many women don’t have the choice to stay home and they get the state-subsidized, low-quality daycare to boot.
Even the best daycare doesn’t make up for the care and attention of mom/family for 8-10 hours a day. You might feel invisible to your kids who get to see you only one harried hour a day before bed.
Care work is 90% of the work of a parent’s day at home but care work often weaves rhythmically with life-work of laundry and cooking and cleaning. There is so much value for an infant or child to watch you (help you) chop or cook or fold or vacuum. That’s how they learn. To the people who really matter (your kids) you’re not invisible!
As a SAHM of a two-year-old with a newborn on the way, THANK YOU for writing this. I felt so seen, nodding my head and close to tears (hello, I'm pregnant) at nearly every paragraph.
Aw. Thank you for sharing with me that this resonates for you. Sending you lots of love in the very important work you're doing of creating and sustaining and caring for human beings!
I had 5 kids in 7.5 years and at one point I went through a good couple months where I could not get anywhere on time. My husband commented on it only once, alluding to me needing to get my stuff together and stop being late all the time and I took great pleasure in informing him that my every movement was at the mercy of the bowel habits of 5 separate people.
So looking forward to this read and the discussions you are leading, Amber!
I was struck by the overlap between the trivialization of childcare and the trivialization of non-medical support for mothers through the childbearing continuum. Medical screening and medical intervention often receives incredibly high valuation, while the simple care of good cooking, supportive home structures, and nurturing relationships with providers and within the client's community often are either given a low value or dismissed entirely.
More research is coming out to emphasize how important the human-to-human care is for maternal and newborn wellbeing (vs medical provider to client/patient care), but I'm not impressed by the fact that we NEED clinical studies between women who receive care and women who don't receive care to realize that oh, wait, caregiving is actually a HUGE deal. So much so that the non-medical care a woman receives is more important to her short- and long-term wellbeing than any medical services or screening in MOST situations.
I do wonder if the work of childminding has been relegated to the category of "easy" and "relaxing" partly as a consequence of several generations of age-based division from first grade through graduate schooling. Many of the people I know who have grown up continually exposed to small children and their needs for structure and care have never slipped into thinking of childcare as work-lite. It's viewed as a full-time vocation which requires learning, investment, and a unique set of well-integrated skills.
I’ll be so happy to have your voice in the book club conversations as usual, Jan!
Such a great connection! Another example of how we’re so removed from care as a culture. I think we've established that mothers are one of the main groups who suffer because of this!
What an interesting idea about schooling contributing to the ignorance of care. My dad went to a "country" school until grade 8 where yes, there was one teacher, and in general we used to live in a way where we were organically around people of all ages. Which absolutely plays into this, I think you're correct. I said in my essay for IFS that I had no idea about the different stages of child development (like I had no idea how fast the baby stage goes) before becoming a mother, as I hadn’t been around many small children. So for sure, plain ignorance is part of it, but also part of it surely is that the ideas of second-wave feminism have been thoroughly weaved into our cultural consciousness.
Few things grind my gears more than catholic/Christian dads who say their wife has “the most important job” but can’t be bothered to actually help with their own children
So excited to dive into this - care as a valid profession has been on my mind so much lately as we moved across the country and I am just now coming up for air, while my husband and has his new colleagues and exciting work to talk about every day (not faulting him, I just don’t bring the same enthusiasm to the dinner conversation right now). Doubly excited to have found the boom at my new local library!
Yes 100% - if the care when both parents were working was marginal, daycare wouldn’t be so expensive! But it is expensive (even while the caregivers aren’t paid very well) because caring for little kids is constant work. I can meal prep to get ahead on cooking or go to a restaurant, but I can’t “care prep” my young kids by doing it all outside work hours and then just…idk leaving them home alone? It doesn’t work like that.
It strikes me that any employed parent who thinks they do everything an at-home parent does plus working (because I’ve known dads like this too, though they don’t phrase it the same way!) must really devalue the work of paid caregivers if they hire them - and there’s no coherent way imo to value the work of paid child caregivers while denigrating that exact same work because it happens to be done by the child’s own mother.
Do you find that you do have to “care prep” anyway when you work? There is so much care”prep” that goes into packing lunches, drop offs, commuting, getting out of the house without snot or kids food on your work clothes, help them adjust to daycare and help them regulate after an overstimulating day at daycare, finding alternate care when the daycare has a holiday that you don’t. There’s finding time for quality time with your kids that means turning down other social invites on weekends because you didn’t see your kids all week.
At home with my kids I can just heat up leftovers for lunch and not have to pack something. No teary goodbye and no worry if my kid wipes some food on my clothes. Sure I’ll go change eventually but I’ll finish my task first.
My kids haven’t gone to daycare/full time childcare, so I don’t have experience on that end, but yes I do have to pack lunch for my kindergartner. The logistics of daycare and full-time employment is a small contributing factor to why we didn’t go that route. But even with the best routine I can’t efficient-ize out of needing 24/7 care for my kids that I/my husband either provide ourselves or hire someone else to do.
I worked until my first was 2.5 years old and then retired from my job to be a stay at home mom. One of my best friends (and my daughter's godmother) agreed to nanny for me for those years, which was amazing, since my husband was in grad school and I needed to work for us to have insurance (and money beyond grad school stipend). Yes, I was wildly stressed and overworked.* But in a very different way than now, when I'm a stay at home mom.
When I was working full time, leaving in the morning was such a stressful rush, get dressed, nurse the baby, change and dress the baby, clean the pumping parts, pack the pumping parts, pack lunch, hand-off to nanny, walk to work, work had its own intense stresses plus making time to pump (I highly recommend the book Work. Pump. Repeat. By Jessica Shortall to any other working, pumping mom), and then the normal, what's for dinner, have I run the laundry, when will I ever get to shower?
As a stay at home mom, the children are *always* with me. Which makes me realize, when I was working, for those 8+ hours, I could go to the bathroom whenever I wanted, I could write or type sentences without being interrupted, I could have uninterrupted conversations and meetings with adults, I could think about work solutions without getting interrupted, and *no one was ever touching me!!* (I didn't think I could ever be touched out until I became a stay-at-home mom. Boy howdy, now I get touched out all the time.) I wasn't responsible for the health and safety of my child for that *whole* work day. I didn't have to be vigilant to make sure my child wouldn't do something dangerous and hurt themselves. Waaay different!
I feel blessed to be home with my kids now! A young new mom asked me for advice about being a stay at home mom of a toddler, and I said, actually, in some ways, I'm going through this stage (with my second child) for the first time. I wasn't home all day for my first until she was two and a half.
I wouldn't trade being home with my kids for anything, and I'm proud that I did what I needed to for my family when I was working. I'm also proud I've learned (at least a little) about human limits, and that some of my overwhelm in life when I was working was from not having healthy boundaries and saying, "Yes!" to opportunities when saying, "No," would have built more margin into my life.
*Eventually, in my working mom girlboss I-can-do-it-all era, I had a mental breakdown, when my husband was on internship for five months across the country, and I was single parenting, working one full-time engineering job and one part-time job at my church, and auditing a grad school course... And didn't feel like I could ask for help, because other people had it worse. My goodness! I was insane. Therapy and Adoration and short term disability leave and a literal miracle from the Lord and I found healing and came out the other side. I'm in a much healthier place now. Praise God.
Yes such different realities, and different kinds of hard! Thanks for sharing Kate — I hope you’ll read along with us!
“As a working mom, you have the exact same responsibilities, they just need to be completed after work hours. Plus the added stress of your career.”
Then you wouldn’t need day care or a nanny. You just do it all when you get home.
Great post! I agree, when you're home with littles, it's 90% the 'caring' work and not the household chores work. I do *sometimes* try to combine the two. Today I made pasta from scratch with my 3 year old since it's very simple and tactile and takes forever anyway. I have to keep reminding myself it's the process, not the end product.
This book has kept coming up here and there - it looks great!
One thing that's been interesting as we had 3 kids in 3 years, is seeing how my in-laws have come to understand at least a bit more about what being home and caring for them entails. My MIL worked full-time since my husband was like 8 weeks old, and was an only child to boot..... so some of that "same exact responsibilities, and ALSO work" mindset seemed to be there when I stopped paid work to do the homemaker thing. Like you said, people just don't know what all those invisible logistics of constant care work entail if they've never done it. But boy are they always tired at the end of the days when they come in from out of town... with FOUR adults between all of us. I'm like "yeah, imagine doing all that but just you, by yourself during the workdays." :)
Ha, love it! My dad helps my mom care for my nieces, and he has also gotten a rude awakening! I love to hear it.
Hope you’ll join us in reading the book!!
Before I actually quit my job to be a SAHM (pretty recent) I was attempting to work from home in a techy job while also watching my baby. I managed for a few months (my employer was extremely accommodating and lovely), but the overall takeaway was that it is actually impossible to do this unless your job is completely fake or you are an insanely productive person (I’m sure a few exist). Taking care of a child is no joke! There’s a whole Reddit forum of women who WFH with their baby(ies) and while my heart goes out to them (many have no choice!) the things they have to do to make it work are imo extreme and less than ideal — constant screen time for the baby, lying to their employer, secretly breastfeeding while on camera, Uber eats every meal, etc. While I was WFHing, I had one meeting I had to lead where I was simultaneously breastfeeding and then changing a poopy diaper (luckily camera off) while also explaining a bunch of code (lmao). Friends and family that I shared this with seemed to find it very cool and empowering. In fact, I did not find it empowering — it just kind of sucked? Also, it was like the work I was already doing to take care of my baby wasn’t enough to be respected, I needed to add a Teams meeting and some code review on top. Whatever! I reject that framing. But major respect for the few women who can pull it off.
Beautifully said, as usual, and excellent points. I actually (despite my 20 years of motherhood) never put together that the reason I struggle to keep up with the housework is because care is, in and of itself, work. At least, not in those words.
So glad you’re doing this! I have a copy I’ve been meaning to read but it hasn’t made it to the top of the pile yet.
Ah it will be great to have your voice in the conversation Serena!
Perhaps there is another layer to this: “As a working mom, you have the exact same responsibilities, they just need to be completed after work hours. Plus the added stress of your career.” Consider another layer: “plus the extra care you need to give your children to make up for the sub-par care and attention they received at daycare”. Many women don’t have the choice to stay home and they get the state-subsidized, low-quality daycare to boot.
Even the best daycare doesn’t make up for the care and attention of mom/family for 8-10 hours a day. You might feel invisible to your kids who get to see you only one harried hour a day before bed.
Care work is 90% of the work of a parent’s day at home but care work often weaves rhythmically with life-work of laundry and cooking and cleaning. There is so much value for an infant or child to watch you (help you) chop or cook or fold or vacuum. That’s how they learn. To the people who really matter (your kids) you’re not invisible!
As a SAHM of a two-year-old with a newborn on the way, THANK YOU for writing this. I felt so seen, nodding my head and close to tears (hello, I'm pregnant) at nearly every paragraph.
Aw. Thank you for sharing with me that this resonates for you. Sending you lots of love in the very important work you're doing of creating and sustaining and caring for human beings!
I had 5 kids in 7.5 years and at one point I went through a good couple months where I could not get anywhere on time. My husband commented on it only once, alluding to me needing to get my stuff together and stop being late all the time and I took great pleasure in informing him that my every movement was at the mercy of the bowel habits of 5 separate people.
Absolutely in!
A few times when I had a rough day caring for my five, when my husband would query about my day I would simply respond,
“I kept them alive.”
So looking forward to this read and the discussions you are leading, Amber!
I was struck by the overlap between the trivialization of childcare and the trivialization of non-medical support for mothers through the childbearing continuum. Medical screening and medical intervention often receives incredibly high valuation, while the simple care of good cooking, supportive home structures, and nurturing relationships with providers and within the client's community often are either given a low value or dismissed entirely.
More research is coming out to emphasize how important the human-to-human care is for maternal and newborn wellbeing (vs medical provider to client/patient care), but I'm not impressed by the fact that we NEED clinical studies between women who receive care and women who don't receive care to realize that oh, wait, caregiving is actually a HUGE deal. So much so that the non-medical care a woman receives is more important to her short- and long-term wellbeing than any medical services or screening in MOST situations.
I do wonder if the work of childminding has been relegated to the category of "easy" and "relaxing" partly as a consequence of several generations of age-based division from first grade through graduate schooling. Many of the people I know who have grown up continually exposed to small children and their needs for structure and care have never slipped into thinking of childcare as work-lite. It's viewed as a full-time vocation which requires learning, investment, and a unique set of well-integrated skills.
I’ll be so happy to have your voice in the book club conversations as usual, Jan!
Such a great connection! Another example of how we’re so removed from care as a culture. I think we've established that mothers are one of the main groups who suffer because of this!
What an interesting idea about schooling contributing to the ignorance of care. My dad went to a "country" school until grade 8 where yes, there was one teacher, and in general we used to live in a way where we were organically around people of all ages. Which absolutely plays into this, I think you're correct. I said in my essay for IFS that I had no idea about the different stages of child development (like I had no idea how fast the baby stage goes) before becoming a mother, as I hadn’t been around many small children. So for sure, plain ignorance is part of it, but also part of it surely is that the ideas of second-wave feminism have been thoroughly weaved into our cultural consciousness.
Few things grind my gears more than catholic/Christian dads who say their wife has “the most important job” but can’t be bothered to actually help with their own children
Same. I haven’t seen it much since I’ve been Catholic but have seen it a ton elsewhere (and I’m sure exists in Catholicism too)
So excited to dive into this - care as a valid profession has been on my mind so much lately as we moved across the country and I am just now coming up for air, while my husband and has his new colleagues and exciting work to talk about every day (not faulting him, I just don’t bring the same enthusiasm to the dinner conversation right now). Doubly excited to have found the boom at my new local library!
GREAT post. I loved how you constantly remind us of the hidden work on our culture. We as women can be as blind to it as anyone.
Yes 100% - if the care when both parents were working was marginal, daycare wouldn’t be so expensive! But it is expensive (even while the caregivers aren’t paid very well) because caring for little kids is constant work. I can meal prep to get ahead on cooking or go to a restaurant, but I can’t “care prep” my young kids by doing it all outside work hours and then just…idk leaving them home alone? It doesn’t work like that.
It strikes me that any employed parent who thinks they do everything an at-home parent does plus working (because I’ve known dads like this too, though they don’t phrase it the same way!) must really devalue the work of paid caregivers if they hire them - and there’s no coherent way imo to value the work of paid child caregivers while denigrating that exact same work because it happens to be done by the child’s own mother.
Do you find that you do have to “care prep” anyway when you work? There is so much care”prep” that goes into packing lunches, drop offs, commuting, getting out of the house without snot or kids food on your work clothes, help them adjust to daycare and help them regulate after an overstimulating day at daycare, finding alternate care when the daycare has a holiday that you don’t. There’s finding time for quality time with your kids that means turning down other social invites on weekends because you didn’t see your kids all week.
At home with my kids I can just heat up leftovers for lunch and not have to pack something. No teary goodbye and no worry if my kid wipes some food on my clothes. Sure I’ll go change eventually but I’ll finish my task first.
My kids haven’t gone to daycare/full time childcare, so I don’t have experience on that end, but yes I do have to pack lunch for my kindergartner. The logistics of daycare and full-time employment is a small contributing factor to why we didn’t go that route. But even with the best routine I can’t efficient-ize out of needing 24/7 care for my kids that I/my husband either provide ourselves or hire someone else to do.