by Katie Allison Granju
If anyone had asked me 10 years ago whether I would ever find myself a stay-at-home mom of three children, I would have scoffed.
Although I knew that I wanted to be a parent, I was certain that I required the daily stimulation of an office environment and that my children would thrive in the wonderful daycare centers that I would carefully choose for them. In fact, I distinctly remember a heated discussion that took place between an older friend (who was already a mother) and myself shortly before I found myself pregnant with my now 10-year-old son, Henry. I argued that young children actually need daycare to develop properly. Funny how I knew everything about being a parent before I became one. �
My son actually did spend several of his first years in substitute care while I pursued school and work away from home. First his paternal grandmother cared for him, and as a toddler, we enrolled him for 40 hours a week in what I still believe to be one of the best daycare centers in town. Despite these thoughtful arrangements, Henry let us know pretty much as soon as he could express himself clearly that even though there were no special arts and craft activities, field trips, or expensive educational toys at his house like there were at the daycare center, and despite the fact that I lack any talent at all for most of the domestic arts, he would still prefer to spend his days at home just being with with me.
After several years of denying, through a variety of rationalizations, the legitimacy of what this small person was trying to get across to me, I decided to take him at his word and bring him and the baby sister he had recently acquired home to full time mama-care. It didn't hurt Henry's cause that I was feeling continually overwhelmed and not up to the task of meeting the needs of my children and (at that time) full-time law school. Juggling exams, my own classes, pediatric appointments, Christmas shopping, and even the basics of keeping the kids clean and fed left me exhausted and frustrated. �
And that is how, despite my stated position prior to having my babies, I am what I am today: a stay-at-home parent.
I do work as a freelance writer from my desk/oasis sitting in the middle of the crayola chaos that is my children's playroom, but mostly I mother. In fact, after some initial discomfort, now when people ask me what I "do," I am often pretty comfortable saying just that: "I mother." �
Although there's no way to know for sure yet whether my generation has a trend in the making, I sense that many, many other women of my 30-something age group are making choices similar to my own. As I consider my circle of friends, I see lawyers, social workers, writers, teachers and others, all deciding to either figure out a way to work primarily from home as I do, work part-time, or put careers on hold for the time being to be with their children, a practice now so prevalent that sociologists have given it a label: "sequencing."
In my own case, now that my youngest child is in preschool part of each day, I am working more than I did a few years ago, but I still want to be the one that handles the after-school milk and cookies duty. A traditional 9-5 job wouldn't allow that.
But as pleased as I am with my work-family balance, I sometimes wonder if by structuring my days primarily around my children's schedules rather than an employer's time clock, I am betraying the sacrifices and hard work of the previous two generations of women who paved the way so that I could pursue a professional life. I mean, did Sandra Day O'Connor, Geraldine Ferraro, and even my own grandmother and mother, highly successful journalists who blazed their own trails, work as hard as they did just so that I wouldn't be too tired after a long day at the office to read bedtime stories to my toddler? I have decided that they did.
Feminism is all about the power to choose. Half a century ago, it is likely that my current stay-at-home status wouldn't have been mine to accept or reject. Instead it simply would have been the way it was. That was the case for the brilliantly stifled Betty Friedan, an Ivy- League-educated genius who launched the modern women's movement when she wrote The Feminine Mystique—after finding herself imprisoned by societal expectations that she confine her interests to home and hearth.
Twenty years later, Friedan re-explored the lives of American women in The Second Wave, in which she argued that the assumption that every woman should construct a life centered primarily around earning a wage could be just as limiting as previous social paradigms. �
I am well aware that for many mothers, financial imperatives take away their choices. They must work traditional hours in traditional jobs if they are to feed their children. However, for lots of others, the decision to forgo full-time, outside-the-home employment for the time being is, to a greater or lesser degree, doable. As a mother and a daughter and a feminist, I celebrate my ability to compose a life that works for myself and my family, and I often give silent thanks for those women who struggled to give me that opportunity.
Katie Allison Granju is the author of Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child (Simon and Schuster/1999).
September 19, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 38
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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