Why I'm Going To Be a Stay-At-Home Mom, Part 4

A couple of more reasons to share with you today for why David and I have made the decision for me to be a stay-at-home-mom…

I don’t believe that you can “have it all.”

I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this, and that’s totally okay, but, contrary to what culture pushes us to believe, I do NOT think that women can “have it all” by being working mothers. Sure, you can work 40 hours (or more) a week and then come home and still cook an amazing dinner and be an incredible mother and wife while you are at home in the evenings and weekends (I myself am not even talented enough to cook a good dinner some days after work even without the addition of children, but that’s my own shortcoming, lol). I guess the way I see it is that something has to give. I don’t see a way that I personally could be totally committed to my family and totally committed to my career at the same time. I know my own personality, and if I were to try I would spend my time at each place worrying about the other place. While at work, I’d worry about my home and kids and wonder what I was missing by not being there, but when I was with them I would let the inevitable thoughts of what more I needed to be doing at the office creep into my mind.

To be honest, being a working wife has been a struggle for me (again, David was fully supportive of me being a stay-at-home wife long before we were pregnant, it was I that decided for income/savings reasons to keep working). I do firmly believe that my priorities should be God, followed by marriage, followed by children, followed by extended family, career, and everything else. While I love my job, in many ways it caused me not to have the type of commitment to being a wife that I wanted to have. I wanted to be at home, focused on what David needed and the type of home I could be making for us. The result of not doing it? Frustration. Sometimes tears. Feeling like I couldn’t be the type of wife I wanted to be while being at an outside job 40 hours a week. If I felt this just as a married woman, I don’t believe I could handle it with small, totally dependent children.

I know many of my friends who are working mothers love their jobs too much to give them up, but they also have admitted to me that they sometime struggle with guilt over not being with their children. But then when they are with their children they struggle with guilt that they didn’t put in that extra hour or overtime or didn’t finish that big presentation by the day they had planned to finish it. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Too much on a plate and it’s hard to know how to manage your time. I’m not saying it can’t be done – maybe it can - but I’m saying I can’t do it. I don’t even want to try.

Making the choice to stay at home is making the choice (at the same time) to be 100% family focused and 0% career focused (at least for a period of time). That’s not okay with some, but it’s more than okay with me. I just don’t want the struggle with fitting everything in, and, if it came right down to it, I’d 100 times rather invest full time in my husband, children, and home and neglect and outside-the-home career as a result (again, this makes me very unpopular in today’s society, I know!) I know I tend to go kind of “quote crazy” in these posts, but I just find so many things out there where people have expressed my thoughts better than I even could have…

“Those who would defend anti-feminist traditionalism today are like heretics fighting a regnant Inquisition. To become a homemaker, a woman may need the courage of a heretic…Feminist claimed a woman can find identity and fulfillment only in a career; they are wrong. They claimed a woman can, in that popular expression, ‘have it all’; they are wrong – she can have only some. The experience of being a mother at home is a different experience from being a full-time market producer who is also a mother. A woman can have one or the other experience, but not both at the same time. Combining a career with motherhood requires a woman to compromise by diminishing her commitment and exertions with respect to one role or the other, or usually, to both.” –F. Carolyn Graglia


“Women are told today they can have it all – career, marriage, children. You need a total commitment to make it work. Take a close look at your child. He doesn’t want you to be bright, talented, chic, smart – any of those things. He just wants you to love him. He will be the one who pays the price for your wanting to have it all.” –Beverly Sills

Another reason that we are choosing for me to stay at home – I think that being a homemaker is incredibly rewarding!!!!

I have never been more excited by any role I am about to take on than I am about this new role of mine starting in November, and one of the reasons is the amazing rewards that you reap!!! I am serious, I cannot think of a more rewarding job. I get to be there to kiss my children’s boo boos, cook my family a nutritious dinner, and make a beautiful home for us. I get to watch my children grow up, think of ways for my family to reach out to others, and clean out the closet at the back of our hall whenever I feel like it (the clutter that accumulates in that closet could be a whole post in itself!). I have the freedom and time to raise our family in the way that we know we want to raise it. For me, NO position I could get in any job, no award I could win, no praise from any manager or colleague could compare to that! I haven’t even started my new role, and despite the many challenges I know will come with it, the rewards that will come as well remind me that “My cup runneth over…” with blessings!

“The best happiness would result if women would continue to let this be a man’s world and continue to provide a bower of bliss at home. Her greatest career is to help her husband and to start her children off in the right direction. Women should be reminded that they can have just as much pride saying, ‘Look, I helped my husband and I have raised some decent children.’ I don’t think women can do anything better than that. That’s more important than winning the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Peace Prize.” –Richard Armour

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.” –Samuel Johnson

Thanks for your interest to those who are reading along with this series. More reasons to come tomorrow!

You can read the other posts from this series here:

Part 3: http://www.onefleshonelove.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-im-going-to-be-stay-at-home-mom_10.html

Part 2: http://www.onefleshonelove.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-im-going-to-be-stay-at-home-mom_09.html

Part 1: http://www.onefleshonelove.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-im-going-to-be-stay-at-home-mom.html