All Mothers Want Forgiveness

Recently when I was at a local playground a woman asked me if I was a stay at home mom. Her son was playing near one of my daughters and we were both watching an aggressive little thug of a kid staging a coup in the sand box. I told her I was home for now and wasn't sure I was ready to go back to full time work any time soon. The woman was probably around my age, with lots of dark hair and a bit of the mommy pouchy tummy that I am still battling myself. 

"Oh, I thought for a little while I might want to stay home," she said. "But I'm the kind of person, I've always worked and my husband was telling me 'you're too smart to stay at home. You'll be so bored.' " I tried to count the passive aggressive chain of insults in this little speech. I responded to them all in my head. I too have 'always worked,' since I was 16 I've had at least part-time jobs. This is the first time in my adult life I've been without a job, full-time school, or both. My husband, I believe, thinks I'm smart, though he's been nothing but supportive of my choice to stay at home. Honestly, I am sometimes bored. I miss work from time to time and on bad days I regularly search the education listings on craigslist. 

"The thing is," she continued, "when you stay home, you just get too comfortable." Okay, lady, now I'm pissed. Seriously? Comfortable? I'm running, often literally, after crazy busy toddlers and you're reckoning I'm comfortable? So then I say something I'm not proud of. Actually, the thing I say to her is the thing I often say to myself when I get anxious about this time away from work, "Well, I figure I have the next twenty-five or thirty years to work and only these few years to be home with my young children." She stops talking. She looks a little stricken. I feel bad. Now that I have children I often think about how I want them to behave when they grow up, which makes, 'she was a bitch first' not seem like such a good excuse. I would like my daughters to be generous to others even when they're not at their best. I would like my daughters to be secure enough in their choices that they don't need to lash out at other moms at the playground. 

I hate the term 'stay at home mom.' Something about it just makes me feel bad. I don't stay at home with my daughters. We go out all the time. We go to music class, play dates, field trips to the aquarium, parks, and zoos, we go out to lunch, and to our little co-op preschool. We're out a lot. We have a ball. I wouldn't trade this time for anything. I'm almost 100% sure that I'm doing the right thing. And, sometimes, I wake up in a cold sweat wondering where my life is going, and worrying about how/if I'm ever going to accomplish anything ever again.

The thing is, I don't know very many moms who are completely comfortable with their choice. From what I can tell, when you become a parent you lose the right to be comfortable and end up feeling constantly conflicted. David Brooks has this great comment in his book The Social Animal; "All fathers want applause and all mothers want to be forgiven.' True. No matter how much you love your work, I'm sure there are days when none of it seems as worthwhile as another twenty minutes with the children you adore. No matter how much I adore my children, sometimes I wonder if I would be a better mother if I had more of a life outside of theirs. Maybe that's what I should have said to the lady on the playground. 

My mother was at graduate school when I was little and worked as a professor while I was growing up. I was always proud of her. I knew she was accomplished and that other people admired her and I wanted to be like that too. Recently my mother was staying with me and after a crazy day with my twin girls, said, "I couldn't have done this for two years." I know my mother loves my girls and I believe she respects my choice. But just like the comments from the lady on the playground, I can't stop myself from hearing the hum of my own anxiety that the world of work is leaving me behind.

I want my daughters to be proud of me. I want to be a good role model. Soon I think that will mean going back to work. Soon, but not yet. As I watch them feel their way through the world, making sense of their experience, piecing together all the information they are flooded with day after day, I know it is the privilege and joy of my life to be here with them, guiding them as kindly and clearly as I can. And so I will have to tolerate the 4 am panics where the night prods at me asking over and over, 'what next?'