Sixteen years ago next month, I made the momentous decision to become a Stay-at-Home Mother. I had a three year old and was about twelve weeks pregnant with my second child and I was tired. Tired of commuting from my home in New Jersey two days a week to my Managing Editor position in New York, and then squeezing in the other three-days-worth of work when she was napping or at night or when she was watching Elmo. I was tired of getting up at four a.m., tired of having to scrounge for a sitter when my sitter's three year old son was sick (which seemed to be often), tired of the company I was working for, which, I had discovered accidentally, was paying my two male counterparts more than me, tired of working with another manager who was constantly undermining me....I was just tired.
My husband and I did not think we could afford to live on one salary. In fact, we knew we couldn't. We had run the numbers before, and we had always concluded that there was no way we could afford it. I was miserable enough, though, that we decided to do it for a year and a half, from that point of my pregnancy until that child would be one, and then I would go back to work.
A year and a half later, we were living on one salary much more comfortably than we ever though we could. We had given up many of the things people say they need or want, like dinners out, and I budgeted very carefully. We decided that it was working out so well, I would just stay home another year.
And another year went, and a year after that, and before I knew it, I had two kids in the elementary school and was the PTO President and involved in a million of the school and kid activities and was loving it. I had finally found something I was really good at. I was a Mother with a capital M.
Around the time my younger daughter finished elementary school, people started asking me when I was going back to work, so it felt like, well, that I should go back to work. I looked for a job halfheartedly but I kept coming back to the idea that I really liked what I as doing -- Mothering -- and that we were all happy.
And I was writing. And wondering what would come of the writing.
More years passed. Last year, my older daughter graduated from high school and left for college. My younger daughter is in high school, so the writing is on the wall. I'll lose her to adulthood in a few years, too. With my writing career started, I'm definitely on the edge of another new phase of life, much like I was sixteen years ago, when I decided to become a Stay-at-Home Mother. But unlike last time, this time, I'm very aware of the huge shift my life will take. I'm very aware that their adulthood is not temporary; that my goal has been to raise happy, healthy, productive adults and release them into society. So when someone asks me what I do, even though I'm a published author, and even though one of my daughters is essentially an adult, and the other clearly on her way, I still say Stay-at-Home Mother. Because I can't imagine ever being anything else first.
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