Meagan Francis Large

Meagan Francis

The Happiest Mom

We want to believe we’re doing it right.

When my oldest son was a small baby, I stumbled across a now-defunct parenting message board (this was 1997, before the rise of the mom blog) and innocently wandered right into the middle of a heated debate.

The argument – working moms vs at-home moms – was nasty, full of rhetoric and black-and-white thinking. Which you would think would have turned me off, right? But instead, I found myself anxiously drawn back to the drama again and again. Were they right? Who was right? The working moms arguing that daycare makes babies smarter and better socialized; that at-home moms are unfulfilled and boring? Or the at-home moms decrying the evils of daycare and accusing working moms of being detached, selfish and materialistic?

My brain struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, and here is the general direction it went:

  • Obviously, people feel really strongly about the whole to-work-or-not-to-work thing.
  • If they feel so strongly about it there must be a reason.
  • I really want to be a good mom.
  • Therefore, I had better be on the right side of this issue.

Both sides were putting up an impressive fight, but (as is human nature) I wanted to be on the winning side.So I grabbed on tight to “my” position as a SAHM and defended it with all the energy I could muster.

As time went by, my position began to seem a little shakier. First of all, I met some actual working moms who had little in common with the soulless monsters described by some of the SAHM debaters. Then I had another child. He wasn’t an easy baby like my first, and I found the transition of going from 1-2 kids incredibly hard. Being an at-home mom with one easy, portable baby had been fun. Now, I felt like running away half the time.

When my sons were 3 1/2 and 1 1/2, I found myself in the position of having to put them in daycare and head to an office job in order to pay the bills. And to my shock, our family did not fall apart. My boys didn’t become sociopaths or come down with horrible diseases. I also found a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment in bringing home a paycheck, not to mention being able to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted.

The only thing is, I really didn’t like working in an office. And while I didn’t think daycare was harming my kids, I wanted to be around them more. So when pregnant with my third, I started working from home. It helped that I had a long-standing desire to be a writer, which I could do from home, instead of, say, a brain surgeon. Had my ambitions been different, I might have made very different choices.

As it is, some days I think our arrangement is the best of both worlds; other days it feels like the worst. But mostly I know that it’s all a tradeoff. I look at the lives of full-time working moms and of full-time at-home moms, and I see ups and downs, benefits and downsides to each lifestyle.

What my peek into three very different worlds has given me is the knowledge that there isn’t – cannot be – just one correct choice. Which is a really hard thing for moms to grapple with. We want assurance that we’re doing it right. That if we give up Social Security and career advancement we’ll be rewarded with happier, better-behaved, smarter, healthier kids. Or that if we give up some of those precious moments, if we give up some control over how our kids experience their childhoods, we’ll be more interesting, well-rounded people; be able to give our kids things, experiences, security that we otherwise wouldn’t.

We so want to believe that we’ve picked the winning team. But there is no winning team. There’s just all of us, doing our best to raise kids in an imperfect world.

It doesn’t pay to judge, because we never know where we’ll end up, or what realizations we might make along the way – like my realization that we could, technically, make it on one income, but that I’d rather have two…and that that doesn’t make me selfish. Or my realization that I’m actually a much better mom when I have a project stewing and a little kid-free time to concentrate every day. Or my realization that actually, it’s not so bad for kids to learn to rely on more than one person. And my realization that not everyone feels the same about those three things and that’s OK, too.

The funny thing about all this is that very few of us will stay in one role throughout our lives as moms. Among the SAHMs I hung out with when my oldest was a baby, only one or two are still at home. Some returned to part-time work when their babies became preschoolers. Many returned to full-time work when the youngest entered school. Most of them – even the homeschoolers – have some sort of employment now.

When I started writing professionally, I befriended several NYC editors who had small children. During the recession, several of them lost their jobs. Now, to their ultimate surprise, they’re stay-at-home moms, maybe trying to start a freelance career. But still, their lives are totally different then they anticipated. Life is funny that way.

Working moms selfish? At-home moms lazy? Please. Whenever I feel tempted to make generalizations like that, I know it’s time for me to examine my own motives, satisfaction, and life choices. Because if life has taught me anything, it’s that people who judge others are often really judging themselves. And if motherhood has taught me anything, it’s “You’ll eat your words one day.”