Original URL: http://life.familyeducation.com/mothers/baby/40200.html

To Stay at Home or Return to Work?

Francine Deutsch, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College, found that 58 percent of at-home and 53 percent of mommies working outside the home reported feeling frustrated, depressed, hopeless, or angry. That's what I found, too, when I delved into work questions: women in both camps are full of angst about their situations.

Among others, Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura deride parental selfishness, saying, "You chose to have a baby so now deal with the consequences." Yet, they didn't see what I saw: Hurting mommies were already sucking it up, already putting their children's and families' needs first even if finances required that they work. Over the long term, though, the repercussions of the disappointments moms stuffed inside were corrosive. The "put up and shut up" approach does not take into account that family life centering round a toxic mommy cannot forever be spared lethal effects.

Stresses of Staying at Home
Scores of moms I know relinquish work to stay home with little ones but are dissatisfied or frustrated a good portion of the time. They are clumsy introducing themselves, half-mumbling what they used to do for work in a previous life, or resorting to a browbeaten "Just a mom." Shut inside with two children with chicken pox for a week, I understand how very desperate the situation is for them, how on-the-precipice they feel, even though their husbands don't often recognize it.

Sally, a mother of two in Indiana, imagined she'd be the perfect stay-at-home mom because she's very nurturing. "I now realize I need to get out and have more time alone than full-time motherhood allows," Sally says. "More than that, there are times I don't enjoy being a mom. I never expected to have those feelings. I get so overwhelmed and frustrated, and I am not the person I want to be with them." Unable to accept her emerging Jekyll and Hyde personalities at home, Sally returned to full-time work. Indeed, researchers tell us, work seems to buffer new moms from depression, and stay-at-home moms have harder emotional travails.

After all, guilt is an equal opportunity employer. Mommies at home feel guilty for not making the most of their college educations and alternatively for not being able to master household tasks given their supposedly freer schedules. Frequently, moms at home expressed their frustration at feeling sluggish and stuck, unable to complete a multitude of projects with which they'd charged themselves. "I could gaze at my daughter all day long," says a former lingerie designer with a six-month-old dumpling. "It's almost easier to succumb to doing one thing rather than fourteen. Except at the end of the day, I can't believe how little I've accomplished."

Stresses of Salaried Mommies
To my eyes anyway, women who worked full-time at relatively family-friendly companies seemed ever so slightly healthier. Their children were in day care and at least not presently exhibiting ax-murderer tendencies. These women retained some confidence, and a modicum of salary-fueled decision-making power in their households.

Of course these wonder-women were utterly stressed out and secretly ashamed to welcome the start of a workweek when they could leave their children in the care of others. They also missed some of parenthood's biggest rewards – first steps or first poops in potties, or school pageants in which kindergarteners wore bonnets and warbled songs about springtime. The two or three hours after work with their children were stomach-taut tense, as everyone was exhausted and grumpy, homework and baths beckoned, and dinner was thrown together. To top it off, a child's cold or fever inspired negotiations between spouses and Palm Pilots more complex than those that precede treaty signings.

Only in glossy magazines in the height of the dotcom boom can I find examples of parents successfully tag-teaming child care, through shift work or reduced schedules for both mom and dad. Only through friends of friends of friends do I hear about "sequencing" and moms who gracefully surrender work to raise children, only to return to career success years later.

I once read about an executive at IKEA who was encouraged to nurse her baby during an interview for a promotion, but know no one who has experienced anything remotely similar. I also read about stay-at-home dads, but I don't know a single one in my child-filled neighborhood. According to statistics, dads who take over the role of primary caregiver do so mostly as a stopgap or emergency measure. Studies show only 20 percent of dads serving as primary caregivers will still be numero uno parent two years later.

The Stresses All Moms Share
Here's the reality I experience firsthand: friends who bounce babies and checks, as couples try to maneuver a lost or reduced income and/or the heavy costs of diapers, child care, preschool, feeding, clothing, and entertaining their little kids. For reasons scientists don't understand, couples still base economic and "who will work and how much" decisions on the formula in which child-care costs are charged against Mom's salary only. While it's true that a woman's salary is still apt to be less than her husband's, there's no good reason for couples not to approach choices, considering child care a cost to be absorbed by their joint incomes.

Whether by choice, or because they had smaller salaries, lots of moms I know who quit full-time employment started innovative Internet-driven or home-based businesses such as selling Mary Kay cosmetics or Weekenders clothing, but none of them did so to pay the mortgage.

Alternately my friends who shine in their offices, law firms, and on sales staffs become masters of the faked calendar or the forwarded office phone, rarely able to be truly candid with their employers about their needs as mothers.

Many of us approached motherhood the same way we did marriage: to enhance, not complete our lives. We envisioned hoisting Baby in a backpack and going on with the lives we had already established. Little did we know that we would meet our match, when the real needs of babies and little ones exposed the limits of our energy, our marital partnerships, and our forward-thinking companies.

Does Daddy Help, Or Complicate, the Situation?
Missing from many of our baby-makes-threesomes are spouses who share family duties equally, and defend our careers as energetically as their own. The men we married became more involved parents than their dads were. But the pledge they made to be "involved" – even actively – turns out to be a far cry from "responsible for" or "in-charge" to the extent most moms become.

How startling it is to find that although your spouse shares basic parenting with you, he does not experience the anguish and indecision, the guilt and frustration that tears at many a mom's soul every day. He leaves for work in the above-it-all way he always does, unaware of how many diapers are left, where the kids have stashed their cleats, or when tuition is due. And because the father of your children cannot relate to the pain and injustice of this, your sarcasm and rage start blacking out all the good stuff he represents.

The golden rule of the equal rights movement, that nature can be overcome by nurture, becomes a piñata in early motherhood. The impact of a husband's laissez-faire parenting style sets it reeling. Choices that are often too poor to be considered true choices dull the swing of our hopes, forcing them into a prescribed back-and-forth route. But the biggest blow is often from our own physiology – mammary glands, cuddle hormones, hairs on the backs of our necks, and frogs in our tummies that tell us we are mothers, body and soul, and indeed deep down in our bones.

Many moms believe their husbands' lapses as fathers are due to DNA. Because even dads who jump with two feet into the muddy waters of parenting don't get preoccupied about being good fathers and don't experience the constant gnawing of details and concerns that mothers do. I would venture that moms spend as much time thinking about kids as men spend thinking about sex.

In The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued, author Ann Crittenden sums it up well: "For all the change of the last decade, one thing has stayed the same: It is women who adjust their lives to accommodate children; who do what is necessary to make a home; who forego status, income, advancement and independence."

Ask, "Is This a Good Fit for Me?"
When I was single and ruled by my career, I thought it was ludicrous for my peers not to know, before their maternity leaves, whether they would come back to work. "How could a respectable woman not know her own mind? Could a baby turn a woman into complete mush?" I thought.

These days, I admire ambivalence in expectant mothers. These women grasp the enormity of emotion a child brings, and give themselves permission to feel what they feel, even if it is vastly different than what they expected.

Ultimately, according to several mom executives, women cannot "plan" the right mix of work and family life because life's many twists and turns require even the best plans to change. Take it from the president of Medalia Communications and the former vice president and group publisher of Working Woman Network, Delia Passi Smalter, who by thirty, had three daughters, divorced, and then functioned as a single mother. She says women shouldn't feel pressured to follow a prescribed path. "I never planned to have children so early, but when it happened my family took precedence and my career went into neutral for six or seven years."

Having adopted two children, an attorney and president of the New Ellis Group in Princeton, New Jersey, Karen Kaplowitz discourages women from thinking there's a certain method for combining career and children. "Having it all is always a goal, not a formula."

Start with a cursory review of what gives you energy and what you simply can't bear. My friends and I have spent many hours dissecting the mind and body of the fulfilled stay-at-home mom, since most of us consider her the "perfect mother." We've also isolated the factors and characteristics that buoy women in the other two roles – that of full-time or part-time work outside the home. See which list best matches you and your situation:

Attributes of relatively happy stay-at-home moms

• A temperament suited to small children
• Financial means and a support network that works
• Faith- or value-driven desire to be at home
• Desire for major life change
• Easier hormonal/emotional adjustment

Attributes of relatively happy moms working outside the home

• Economic need
• High energy and good at handling stress
• Long-held desire to be a working mom
• Family-friendly job
• Need to restore herself, away from child

Attributes of relatively happy split-time moms:

• Adaptable personality
• More flexible budget
• Husband who's willing to help or meet his wife halfway
• Independent-minded and comfortable with lack of firm identity