This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Stay-at-home moms? I don’t know any of those. I know lots of drive-around-frantically moms, though. I’m one myself.
I have a lot of friends who go off to work in an office each day, or maybe a few days a week. I admire them. They’re always clean. They get things done. I brag about them as if they were my children: the lawyer, the doctor, the business owner, the physical therapist, the teacher. They’re productive citizens and great moms. They like their jobs and they love their kids.
I, on the other hand, am neither productive nor great. I’m rarely clean. I never get the chance to actually finish anything-I’ve left the house with half my hair combed. And truth be told, lots of times I’m not even close to great as a mom. Let’s just say the kids and I get a little tired of each other sometimes.
I’m not, technically, a working mom since I don’t work for real money. I arrange my life around my kids’ schedule. I’m the one who is not just responsible for every little thing but also expected to make every little thing happen just right. So even though I’m classified a stay-at-home mom, I’m not.
I drive so much, I suspect that I’m single-handedly responsible for the melting of at least one glacier. I’ve had 200-mile days when I’ve never gone above 40 mph. There have been times behind the wheel when I had absolutely no idea where I was supposed to be going. Not lost, mind you, just clueless. Which child am I getting where-and when am I supposed to be there?
I’m not a bad driver. I have no record of accidents or tickets-though I admit to being as much a scofflaw as the next person and a bit of a lead foot. I don’t dislike driving or get nervous on highways or bridges. I’m not meticulous about my car, either, so I don’t worry so much about its condition, like the school of smushy goldfish beneath the seat cushions, or the-is that dog fur or mold? behind the cupholder. In fact, I guess I kind of like my car because, unlike everything else in my life, it can actually handle my particular type of care: benign neglect.
But no matter how much I like driving or my car, I don’t want to drive all the time. I don’t want to get in my car in the morning, in the dirty shorts I wore gardening, and get out in the evening, in the dirty shorts I wore gardening, and have nothing to show for my day but mileage. I didn’t win a case like my lawyer friend, cure an illness, like my doctor friend, or fix a sprain like my physical therapist friend. There’s not going to be any IPO for my driving business, and I know I didn’t teach my kids anything useful (except maybe that special word Mommy used just that one time to the mean man who almost sideswiped her-that could be useful someday).
If I’m going to be classified a stay-at-home mom, with the income of a stay-at-home mom, when am I going to get to stay at home?
