A Note to Part-Time Working Moms

When the mom that you are isn’t the mom you thought you would be…

Sometimes, when I look at my life & the way I’m raising my children, I feel an overwhelming sense of disappointment in myself. It doesn’t look like how I thought it should based on how I was raised. I grew up in a family of 7 kids with a “stay at home” mom. (Side note: I’ll use quotation marks a lot throughout this blog because I think we use a lot of terms & words surrounding motherhood that are incomplete, no longer relevant, or completely inaccurate and for semantics sake, I think we need to be a bit more clear.) I loved how I grew up. And I always thought I would do it the same way. I actually have a journal of mine from elementary school that said by the time I was 30, I hoped to have 7 kids of my own. So, I’m currently failing at that dream as well seeing as I will only have 4 kids at age 30, instead of 7. 😜 (Which is a major blessing of course! I’m just poking fun at how I thought I would casually have 1 baby per year after graduating college.) 

Can you relate with this feeling of disappointment? Maybe it’s not the same circumstances as mine, but a similar feeling. You grew up seeing your mom have a thriving professional career and now you’re a stay-at-home mom wondering if you’re doing “enough.” Or maybe you are in a similar boat to mine and what was modeled for you was a full-time, stay-at-home mom, so now that you find yourself working, you wonder if you’re doing something “wrong”, if you’re making a “bad” choice. Or maybe, what was modeled for you is irrelevant altogether due to your circumstances, but along the way, you still built some ideal in your head of what a mom “should” look like, and when you don’t match up to that image, you question if you’re failing at your God-given role of mother.

It’s worth noting that the way we mother is made up of both personal choices and circumstances outside of our control. Circumstances like finances, whether or not we have a supportive partner, how many kids we have, if we have children with special needs of some kind, our own personal health restrictions, where we live, etc. - these all impact the options & choices we even have available to us at all.

Regardless of what the ideal was that you created in your head and how you match up to it currently, as moms, I think we can find common ground here. We’re wrestling with who we thought we would be/what life would look like raising kids & the reality of what actually is. And we’re trying to make peace with it all.

When culture undermines the value you provide at home…

Over the last several decades, women in America have seen major advancements. Rights that weren’t even granted to our very grandmothers are now ours. Over the last 100ish years, women were given the right to vote for the first time, were promised equitable wages for the same type of work as men & have seen other major improvements in the work place, have been better protected against discrimination for pregnancy & childbirth, were given more advocacy as victims of domestic abuse & rape, & more. And I believe there is still more to come, BUT -

I think with these major advancements, has often come an undermining of the role women often play at home. The term “stay-at-home mom” often has the word just in front of it. “I’m just a stay-at-home mom,” we say. As if it is something of lesser value than more easily defined roles that we see in the work place. There is a pressure that now that we can be/do/accomplish whatever we want, we should.

More accurate encompassing titles for “stay-at-home mom” (many of which I got from you guys via my Instagram) might be CEO of [your last name] Inc., Home Engineer, Family Manager, Superwoman, Chief Home Officer, President of HR, CFO of Home & Family Budgeting, Life Sustainer, Quality Control Coordinator, Professor of Emotional Development, Mind Reader, Manager-of-all-things-no-one-knows-has-to-be-done-until-they’re-undone, [your last name] Home Chief Officer, Snack Machine, Human Growth Specialist, Domestic Engineer, Boss Lady, CEO of Child & Family Safety & Development, and the list could go on & on & on & on.

When mothers choose to stay home instead of taking a role they would slayyy in the work place, they are not simply “staying home.” They are making a choice to take on some combination of raising children, educating children, meal prepping, cooking, managing the family’s finances, cleaning the home, organizing schedules, providing transportation, doing the laundry, organizing, planning enriching experiences, & MORE.

And this non-exhaustive list leads me to my final point & ultimately my encouragement today for part-time working moms:

Part-time working moms often don’t outsource their roles at home.

I think that a reason part-time working moms often feel so stressed, exhausted, & under-appreciated is because they don’t replace themselves at home. As a part-time working mom, you are now spending x-amount of hours at your job or on your business, but have you then delegated those same amount of hours of the work you were doing at home to someone else? cricket, cricket… My guess is: probably not. The pitfall of the part-time mom is that she thinks she can take on 20 hours per week at a new job or start a business of her own or pick up a “side-hustle” and still accomplish the same exact exhaustive list of things she was doing before in the home. That math just don’t add up. The reality is, those things at home either need to be outsourced to someone else (maybe that’s a paid position, maybe that’s your husband, maybe that’s grocery delivery, maybe that’s your kids!) or they need to be let go of completely. We all have different standards for how we manage our home & family. We have different expectations of just how clean a well taken care of home is, just how many meals are fully homemade & if those ingredients are all organically, locally sourced 🤪, or just how many loads of laundry we can get done in a week. Sometimes, things don’t need to be outsourced, we just need to change our expectations within reason. We need to take a look at our current reality and see what’s actually possible.

And on a separate note, I think this needs to be said - if you don’t want to outsource these things and you don’t want to let them go… maybe you need to quit your part time job. It’s a hard truth to hear, but if you have the option of considering this, be sure to make your mental health and well-being a top consideration in the decision-making process. It’s hard to put a financial value on a well-rested, happy mom. Happy moms = happy kids. And that is worth A LOT.

Some final love for my part-time workin’ mamas:

(and a note to self)

Go eat a snack. Showers are something every human deserves. Exercise is SO hard to make time for, but so worth the pay off for your mental health. Get a good night’s rest. Your well-being is so important. Ask for help. Ask for help. Ask for help. If you have a teammate raising your children with you, have an honest conversation about how things are going, about what might possibly be delegated, about how things can run more smoothly. Surround yourself with positive community. Guard your heart & mind from negative thoughts.

The work you do at home is valuable, almost impossible to put a price on. You have such a high capacity, because you’re a woman, but that doesn’t mean you can or have to or should do it all.

It’s okay if your ideals don’t match your current reality. Make the changes you can make to live at peace in your spirit and let go of the things you can’t control.

Sending my love, Suzy