The following are NOT reasons that I am a stay-at-home-parent:
- I am too stupid to maintain outside employment. Yes, somebody said it. And I guess I can only hope desperately that this is not the case.
- Or, alternately, I am too lazy to hold down a job. Actually, my brother is the chief proponent of this myth. I don't know if he says it just to watch my head explode or if he really believes it. Either way I should probably beat him up.
- Related to #2: I sit around all day and eat bon-bons. I'm not entirely sure what a bon-bon is. But I think I do occasionally eat something resembling a bon-bon. Usually when I'm starving and am running to try to save a child who is swinging from a chandelier while another one is doing something dastardly to the bathroom and the third needs to get to some school event 15 minutes ago and my husband has been gone for 18 hours and I didn't have a chance to eat lunch because the kids have been on an endless loop of "Mommy!" all day long and so I grab a handful of alleged "bon-bons" in order to not pass out from hypoglycemia. (And I usually don't even wash it down with a swig of vodka.)
- I find homemaking to be immensely satisfying. This is wrong on so many levels. Don't get me wrong, I love to vacuum, but "immensely satisfying" is overstating it. It's not really why I get up in the morning.
- I love to be the neighborhood babysitter. This was an assumption of a former neighbor. No amount of money would have been sufficient. Her kids were terrors.
- I stay home because my husband expects me to. I cannot even imagine a universe in which I would marry someone who would harbor any sort of June Cleaver expectations of me. And if this is something that Jeff covertly desires, he is one disappointed man.
Now my children seem to think they want breakfast. So I'll be done. But I feel much better for having gotten this off my chest.
Posts
I, for one, wouldn't think any of those things. My sis is a stay at home mom (twin boys - argh), and I think what she manages to do every day is pretty amazing, so tack on one more child? Yeah, that is one tough job. I don't know how I would manage if I could stay home with one child let alone two or three!
ReplyDeleteI have gotten a slight reverse of your situation. More about putting my boy in daycare (people don't seem to get that he's in daycare because my husband and I work) than anything else. Like not putting him daycare is an option (and it's not). Like we put him in daycare to get rid of him (um, noooo). Like daycare is the evil of all evils (our daycare, and this is probably why it's so flipping expensive, it wonderful and I feel Mateo is getting way more out of life than he would have being stuck home with my laptop-loving butt or my husband's incessant need to clean). Like we just had him to have him, but who cares who is taking care of him and essentially raising him.
People think the way they live their life is the best way to do so, and what the heck is wrong with the dissenters who do their own thing for their own reasons?!
Ugh. As they say, walk a mile in my shoes....
As you can tell, I'm particularly perturbed at other people's attitudes towards these things...