Summer, SAHM, and the Illusion of Choice

I love that Mongo DB CEO Max Schireson told the world that he quit because of his kids. But as even he acknowledged, he isn't walking away from everything. He's just dialing back his work. He wrote, "I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have an meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so."

As a run-of-the-mill, college-educated, tech-savvy, but not technical woman with three kids, I don't have that option. Tomorrow, I return to SAHM status after an 8-month stint working part-time. The company was (is) great, although the job itself gradually required full-time availability or face time. 

I am not particularly happy about it. Part of it is that I still hate summer. Part of it also is that I feel like Elephant in the Mo Willems story, We Are in a Book. Replace "book" with "job" and the sentiment is the same: 

As I have written previously, work-life balance is an issue among parents in my generation. (I recognize that this may have been an issue for parents in the pre-Internet days, but I do not know such things in the way that I know it affects modern parents. Or maybe just me.) I don't think it's unique to women / mothers either, but I've yet to meet a full-time SAHD in my travels through Chicago parenting circles. 

I feel like I should have figured this out by now. Some of my frustration may be tied to that self-judgment. 

I often think of various challenges in my life or work as puzzles. It's a matter of fitting the correct tab into the right slot, or finding the word that matches the clue and the little boxes. I'm still struggling with finding the piece that fits my desire to contribute something significant to this world, in my skill set, for an organization, on a regular basis, with recompense, without sacrificing my existing relationships (with my children). Put simply:

• I want to use my writing/communication, analytical, and organizational skills. 
• I want to be home for my children in after-school hours. 

This doesn't seem like it should be so hard to find. 

And yet, it is. At least in the modern U.S. economy of competition and drive. Politicians in the media often give lip service to the "importance" of raising children, usually as they justify why their wives don't work. They don't talk about the minutiae and repetition of parenting, but of the Hallmark moments that allow us all to give lip service to the importance of child care. 

The Choices We (Don't Get to) Make

Yesterday morning, The Dad and I made our annual pilgrimage to Park Ridge, to have our taxes done. While The Boy, The Girl, and The Tot (Who's Not) kept themselves busy with a 3DS, iPod. and iPhone, respectively, The Dad and I learned that this year, we would again receive a rather decent refund from the Feds.

By again, I mean that we have received refunds in the past, but owed the government in 2010 after I worked full-time for the year. I know I should be thankful that we'll get what feels like a an unexpected windfall in a bad economy. But I'm not.

I'm angry. I feel betrayed by our culture and our government. I naively believed for years that the decision to work--or not--was mine. Do societal norms set public policy or vice-versa? It's a cornerstone of economics that governments determine and pursue a course of public action to encourage (or discourage) certain behaviors. Clearly, if one looks at the tax code, the ease in finding child care, and the average respect accorded school teachers, this country doesn't want both parents in a two-parent, heterosexual family to work. 

I know it's possible that the U.S. government doesn't mean that men must work in a two-parent, heterosexual families. But given how respected and well-paid the average day care or parks & recreation worker or K-12 teacher is, it's clear that the business of taking care of children and/or households--the same duties performed on an hourly basis by SAHPs--is not valued in this country. 

No one questions if The Dad loves his children while he puts in a 10-hour day writing code, so I am not going to even go there. But if what I want out of life goes beyond being paid in hugs and temper tantrums, what course of action can I reasonably pursue? If I work for pay, our family takes a giant hit in what I can reasonably bring home, as child care for my three children costs more than I made in my first three jobs out of college, and the government gives us a measly $5,000 tax credit for it? When I was working, achieving work-life balance was my number one concern. Now that my executive functioning is spent on meal-planning, lunchbox-filling, carpooling, and keeping the bathroom stocked with TP, I'm wondering if I will ever be able to pursue the work part of work-life balance without losing my shirt in the process?

This war on women has got to stop. I don't want The Girl, The Boy, and The Tot (Who's Not) growing up to think that daddies work and mommies (or female nannies) make lunch and drive them around because that is all that they see around them.

Boomerang

Well, that was fun while it lasted. By choice, I'll be back on the SAHM circuit on Monday. It sounds clichéd, but this really is the right thing for our family. Between childcare costs and taxes, I was taking home 8 cents on the dollar. Yes, you read that right.

I have mixed feelings about it. As I said last year, working full-time in a rigid job is a killer.  Everything from going to school functions to cooking to doing laundry is a hassle. But the flip side is the intellectual flat-line that often accompanies spending 14 hours a day in the company of 3 children who all want your attention, right now. When I told my co-workers that I was leaving to return to the SAHM life, most expressed envy. As The Dad said, there is such romanticism about staying at home. 

Work-Life Balance

In late March, the White House hosted a symposium on workplace flexibility. Of course, I could not watch it live because I was at work, but I did watch the opening session online that evening. (They've since added all the breakout sessions to the blog.) That the White House was even having a public discussion about this stuff is pretty compelling to me. 

The work-life question is a popular topic of conversation among my friends and peers, whether our primary-waking-hours job is employment outside of the home or caring for our own children. Truthfully, I know very few people who work full-time or stay at home full-time who are 100% happy with that. SAHMs long for more intellectual stimulation and/or some financial independence. Working moms long for more flexibility and/or time to themselves and/or time with their children.

Back at the White House in March/April, Michelle Obama spoke of how she brought Malia in a stroller to a job interview because she didn't have adequate childcare at the time. That she brought a sleeping toddler to a job interview in the late 1990s is no less shocking to me as is the fact that they gave her the job. 

Obviously, Mrs. Obama's interviewers recognized some quality in her that would let her perform well in paid work despite a small child. Was she lucky? Or is that kind of workplace flexibility and work-life balance a common occurrence? In a world where women earn only 70-80% of what their male colleagues earn, I'm fairly confident that Mrs. Obama was lucky, or magnetic, or both.

The 1970s manifesto of equal wages, equal treatment, and fair valuation of housewifery is yet to be realized in 2010. That SAHMs have intrinsic value is somewhat recognized; that their work should have a monetary value is decidedly not. To wit: a 7-year argument I've had with my husband about whether childcare necessarily involves (or should) housecleaning. After all, when modern couples outsource these tasks, they are generally to different service people. While both can be (and often are) mind-numbing, busy-work tasks (and to be fair: so can any job in corporate America), they do require different skill sets.

After nearly a year of full-time work after 6 years of very, very part-time work, I can firmly say that I wish Chicago was a more flexible working town. Although I do know people with flexible working arrangements (some of them even in my company), it seems that most of them paid their dues as full-time workers for a period of time before negotiating their time down to 2/3 or 3/4-time. This would be the difference between reported flexibility arrangements between employers (one half) and employees (one third), as cited in the Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility study.

Trials of the Working Mum #1

This evening, at the GIPNA 4th Annual Fine Wine and Cheese party, I ran into my friend Meredith, who asked me about my new job, and whether I was still blogging, although not necessarily in that order. She told me that she used to read this blog and feel guilty because I was always taking my children on fabulous adventures, while she was working.

I now understand what she means, as I've neither written for pleasure in almost a month, nor done anything enriching with my children in twice as long. Where I used to have five solid days each week to take my children to museums, on playdates, and to IKEA, I now have but one (the other taken up with football with the cousins until early February). And that day is also the day that suburbanites trek into the city to see the fish, tourists on a mad-dash Windy City trip gawk at the Bean, and all of Lincoln Park/Lakeview goes shopping. Add in my regular chores of laundry, bill-paying, dry-cleaners, menu-planning, Target runs, and catching up on my sleep. Not to mention squeezing in quality one-on-one time with each child (one of whom insists that that time include a ride on the trip and a trip to Starbucks), and well, there's hardly time to breathe, let alone muster the energy to pack three children into a crowded museum for the day.

Yes, I know: this is a uniquely middle-class problem, and I'm fortunate to count myself within it. I've been spoiled by years of visiting the Field, the Shedd, MSI, the Notebaert, the zoos, the Arb, and the Garfield Park Conservatory (not to mention the big blue box) pretty much on my own terms. But: I now understand why people take vacations. I have not worked long enough to feel guilty, as Meredith did, about the adventures upon which I am not or no longer taking my children. Someone ask me in a year if this is still true.

Working Moms Circuit

As recent posts would indicate, I went back to work earlier this month. A job opportunity fell in my lap and it seemed wise to take it, especially in this economy. There are lots of things I missed about not working, especially as it became harder to execute adventures between The Boy's schedule and The Tot's nap.

Although I miss spending quantity time with my children, going back to an office after 6 years at home/working evenings is a new adventure of sorts. I'm used to running into random friends on weekdays at the treasure store, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, the park, etc. Now I run into fellow working moms, our children in tow, at odd times and places, like Target at 7:30 on a Friday night. And there's the new adventure of finding, hiring and, well, having a nanny, tossing about phrases like, "My nanny can pick The Girl up," while arranging playdates with my SAHM friends. (The Tot and The Girl like Natty a lot [I can't make myself use "The Nanny;" it's too The Nanny Diaries for me and I'm sooo not Mrs. X]. The Boy is mostly in aftercare at Disney II.