I think I want to talk about my mother a bit.
My mother mostly stayed home with us: that is, she did daycare for extra money; she worked PT teaching one school year between my sister and I (from which I have horrid memories of being left with a neighbour); she got a real estate license and sold houses for a few years during a boom; she eventually started her own 4-hr-a-day business which was a school cafeteria, which she saw as a kind of adjunct to teaching.
Prior to having me she was a teacher and for my entire life I have heard how she was the best teacher ever; her students adored her and the parents wept when she went on maternity leave, never to return. But after moving up here (Canada) she never actually became credentialled to teach again. She was a non-teaching teacher in a lot of ways and my sister and I sort of became her success stories, which may explain why my academic history is so spotty.
It took me until my mid-20s to consider that maybe she was a Great Teacher and maybe… she wasn’t, since so many things she remembers as fantabulous about my life were total disasters. But that remains the family mythology: my mother was a great teacher who chose to stay home with us, doing odd jobs for money here and there when it was needed, but mostly choosing to be a great parent instead.
I suspect that no matter what choices she made, many of the problems we had growing up would have been the same. Some even more so, because it may well be that the stress of juggling work and home would have made her even more controlling and strange. On the other hand, turning her intelligence and drive outward and being around interesting adults might have made all the difference there.
I never want to make the opposite choice from her out of a purely reactionary urge: I’m not going back to full-time work because she didn’t and it! ruined! us! or anything like that. And yet sometimes when I’m feeling my way through this transition period, I do feel a bit like I may be dodging that particular bullet: the one of confusing my ego as a productive adult with Noah’s need for parenting.
This thought helps me a bit when I get comments. Pride goes before a fall, and I had been so smug that the mommy wars don’t actually exist in my neighbourhood, but it appears that choosing to put Noah in daycare was like crossing a border. One of my previous mom-friends actually said “and I guess it’ll be ok with you when he puts you in a nursing home.” (Actually, yes, but it had better have field trips!!! And hence, the previous in the sentence above.)
I still am experiencing a deep ambivalence about whether this will work best for our family. I am really worried about the rush and what things will fall by the wayside.
But the closer I get to starting my new job the less ambivalence I have about me. I am very very happy to be getting back into the kind of focus you get from working full-time and my head is filling with ideas for the new place. I feel more alive and less stuck. I sort of feel like I am winning my own personal war, whatever that is.
