Truth Tuesday
"Mom, how come when you take me to school, all of the other moms are wearing exercise clothes but you are wearing fancy work clothes?"
This was the question my then-three-or-four-year-old daughter (she's now 10) asked me point-blank one day when I dropped her off (or was it picked her up?) at preschool.
This was the question I never forgot.
This was also the question I knew would come, someday, in some form.
And because, at the time, I was relatively young and inexperienced and not entirely self-confident, I was really stressed out in anticipation of that question.
I had, after all, been a card-carrying Working Mom since Day 1. The kind who wouldn't have traded her "Working Mom Status" for all of the money in the world. (Something I was hesitant to admit and that caused me more than a little guilt.)
So instead of being proud of myself or accepting of who I was/am and what I wanted, I would nod my head in agreement when presumably well-meaning people gave me the "I'm so sorry you have to work" scrunched-up sad face speech and look.
(By the way, I found that the people who felt sorry for me that I "had" to work fell into one of three groups:
1. Male colleagues with stay-at-home wives
2. Older people from another generation (like my grandmother)
3. Stay-at-home moms who now, five or six or more years later, call me asking for career advice.)
When it comes to us moms, there is no shortage of information, opinions and debates (some bordering on too-intense, in my opinion) about the whole working/staying-at-home issue.
Yet I cared about and listening too – sometimes too closely – all of the various opinions for years.
I wondered what was "wrong" with me that I so loved to work.
That I didn't only work for the money.
That if I had desperately wanted to stay at home full-time with my kids, my then-husband and I could have gotten by on his salary.
I look back at my younger self with two young kids and a career that could have gone in any one of many ways and I just have to smile: That girl sure thought she knew a lot.
And she might have.
But boy, was she ever afraid of what she wanted. And even more afraid of letting the world know what she wanted.
She was afraid because she didn't want the world to find out her secret:
She wasn't SuperMom.
She enjoyed working.
She liked to make money.
She sometimes even looked forward to Mondays because a weekend with a two-year-old and a four-year-old could really suck the life out of you.
She had a life in which no one called her "Mommy" and in which she had no responsibility to clothe, feed or diaper-change others.
She believed deeply in many things and people…but never enough in herself.
Looking back, now with a 10-year-old and a 12-year old and from a totally different vantage point, I don't know that I would have actually done anything differently.
I do for sure, however, know that I would have judged differently.
Myself, that is.
I would have spent less time giving my inner-critic the time of day and more time focused on what mattered and still matters in my life– my family, my career, my health (mental and physical) and making sure that I laughed enough.
So when my scarily-perceptive daughter asked me the question, I gave her the only answer I could. I told her the truth. The truth I knew deep inside but perhaps hadn't the guts, or the foresight or the sense of myself to previously say out loud.
I told her something like this:
"Because different Mommies do different things during the day. Some Mommies exercise. Some Mommies paint. Some Mommies go to a job and some Mommies make their own jobs. Your Mommy has a job that she works at in an office at our home. All kinds of Mommies love their kids. And I hope when you grow up, you get to choose exactly what kind of Mommy you want to be."
Come to think of it, my answer wasn't all that bad. And pretty accurate, too.
Great post & great answer for your young daughter. I get questions like "Why do you have to go to work?" from my young ones. They see lots of mommies at their preschool dropping their friends off, but my husband does the dropping in our family because he stays home with them.
Posted by: Marie | Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:31 AM
Great post! I've wrestled with this a bit lately, having seen my 2-year-old playing pretend with a "mommy" and a "baby." The conversations always end with the mommy informing the baby that it's time to get ready to go because she has to get to work. Argh.
Posted by: Rachel Coker | Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:47 AM