Is leaving a paying job to stay home with your kids “the worst mistake [you] ever made”? That’s what author Leslie Bennetts says older women have been telling her. She’s thus written The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? in order to “warn a new generation about the hidden costs of financial dependency,” as she says in an article in Glamour. “When most women quit their jobs,” Bennetts says again in the Huffington Post, “the long-term risks of economic dependency aren’t even on their radar screens.”
There are indeed financial concerns involved in being the stay-at-home parent, and to this extent, her words are wise. I once spoke with a woman who thought that having her name as a second cardholder on her husband’s credit card was enough to build her own credit rating. To her credit (!), she soon applied for a card of her own. “Educating ourselves can help us to make smarter choices,” Bennetts says.
I disagree with Bennetts, though, in her not-so-subtle bias against stay-at-home moms. She says in Glamour:
The feminine mistake—building a grown-up life around the notion that someone will take care of you—is an outdated idea that could jeopardize your future. Wouldn’t you rather protect yourself against adversity and enjoy the rewards of work, money and success in addition to family life? Why should you settle for less?
It’s a twisted strand of ideas, and one that a feminist such as myself needs to untangle carefully. Yes, blind financial dependence is bad, as is the societal assumption that the mother in a straight family will be the one to stay home. Just as being pro-choice doesn’t mean you believe all women should have abortions, however, being in favor of mothers’ financial success and career opportunities doesn’t mean you think all mothers should have outside employment. It’s also not always a matter of one or the other. Some women stay home when their children are young, then return to the workforce. Others use the time to build alternate, often self-employed, careers.
Here’s my question to you, though: Do lesbians go into motherhood with a greater sense of the financial realities of the stay-at-home option? Does our shaky legal status as a family give us more incentive to make sure we each have backup plans? Or does this mean more of us don’t consider staying at home even possible? Depending upon whether both moms are legally recognized as parents, and whether their employers provide partner benefits, the child may not have health insurance unless the legal mom is employed. This still doesn’t mean both moms have to work, but it does constrain the options.
If a lesbian couple does have the financial wherewithal for one to stay home, however, do we have greater flexibility in determining which mom does so? This was the case for my partner and me. She gave birth to our son, and stayed home for the first eight months or so. I then chose to leave my job because of a reorg. We both sent out resumés with the understanding that whoever got the better offer would take it, and the other would stay home. Now I’m staying home. I tell this to straight moms and they look at me like I’m from Mars (or Venus . . . or perhaps, more appropriately, someplace in between).
I’m not saying both moms should always be willing to do either role. Sometimes one person has a strong preference one way or the other, and that’s fine. I just think fewer lesbian couples feel locked in by societal or familial expectations. I also believe fewer and fewer straight women feel locked in, too, and this whole “mommy wars” thing is media hype. At the same time, I suspect we lesbian moms may be ahead of the curve in our breaking of traditional roles.
Growing up, I knew I never wanted to be a full-time “homemaker” like my mom. Career was always my goal. I find myself in the (mostly straight) stay-at-home world, then, a little like Jane Goodall among the chimps. Yes, I’ve skipped back across the generation of superwoman, do-it-all feminism to stay at home with my child. I’m doing so, however, as part of a relationship that is anything but traditional, and where we each had equal opportunity for either role. It wasn’t staying at home that I objected to when I was young, but, I now realize, the idea that someone else had made the choice for me.
Your thoughts?
My wife and I split staying at home during nearly all of our son’s first 18 months. Since I was a teacher, I had my maternity leave and summers (with my maternity leave conveniently leading into the first summer). My wife took off from her job for most of the school year. She got a job just before the school year ended, leaving us with a part-time babysitter for a few weeks, and then I was home for the summer again. By the time I went back to school in the fall, our son was acclimated to his new home daycare–and we were both ready to let him have that time out of our care.
Your last point captures it pretty well for me, I think. Once I was in the position of having a child and the decision that one of us would stay home was truly our measured decision, I found that it didn’t feel like the imposition I had imagined it to be as a child. I also think that being in a two-mommy household has freed us from some of the expectations, and we are able to make our decisions based on what is best for all of us, instead of falling back on gender stereotypes.
We plan on following a similar plan whenever we have our second child.
I think we also need to consider temperment. I would love to stay home more than I do, but I think I would be a bad “full-time, stay-home” mom. I think that’s also true of my partner.
BTW, one of the ads I see from the comment window is for the book “Why a Daughter Needs a Dad” by Gregory Lang. Kind of surreal in context, at least judging by the title.
Very true about temperment.
As for the ad: Yes, Amazon sometimes serves up something not quite on target. I think part of the problem is that there are a limited number of books about LGBT families to recommend, and their algorithms reach farther afield sometimes, not always adeptly.
All of the “Mombian Recommends” books under For Moms and For Kids are hand picked by me, though, and LGBT inclusive (or neutral, if they don’t mention families at all).
I am not really made for being a stay at home mom. Although at one point I loved it when my Boo was a baby (she is now 10). A Couple of years ago I became a stay at home mom for about a year and a half, and I absolutely hated it! I guess it is different when your child doesn’t need you at every moment of the day.
Even when my partner and I both worked full time jobs, she always made more money than I did. I was lulled into a sense of not being able to support my family. I hated that too. Now a couple of years later I am the one who makes most of the money, and my partner works part time during the day and takes care of most of the family stuff. I love it. I love providing for my family, and my partner is a wonderful mom. She does it so much better than I ever did.
People just need to do what works for them. This works wonderful for us. Of course I was raised with being told I could do anything and I did not need anyone to take care of me. My father was the stay at home parent, not my mother, and people used to make fun of us and call my dad lazy. But with five kids, and my mom made a lot of money, it really worked out great. People who never stay at home full time do not understand the amount of work it really takes. It truely is a labor of love. It makes me angry when people say that it’s not important, because wether your cut out for it or not, raising your family IS the most important job you will ever have.
Like anything else, you have to plan for when someone stays home.
My partner quit her paying job last July. While we are not living paycheck to paycheck, its close sometimes. However, we must plan for a potential situation in our older age where she will need money in the chance I’m not around. Social security from my earned income for these years will not be made available to her, if there’s any to be had by anyone at that point (26 years from now, social security may not be solvent anymore). We put the max away in 401K plans and are as frugal as possible.
We’ve had some good discussions lately about if & when she will ever return to work. Our children are 8, 4, & 2. By the time the oldest is in high school, the youngest will be hitting the busy years of mid grade school. And all three will no doubt need trucking around for scouts, ball practice, whatever. The other issue is what happens during summers when both work- daycamp and summer programs cost a ton around here. And then factor in the sick days- three kids times at least 3 or 4 days sick from school eats up tons of vacation time– then when would we be able to use vacation for fun stuff together? Our commitment is genuine to having Mommy stay home while Momma works- and then is able to use vacation for family time.
First off, this is a fascinating (and complex) topic, and the question you ask is so important. Do two-gal parent teams take a novel approach to the questions around who stays at home, and how? I have to think, Of course we do! Every gender-role driven question gets answered with more latitude than usually is found in heterosexual relationships, and this still pertains in lesbian relationships where the untutored eye might think it’s looking at stereotypically male-ish and female-ish distinctions.
Ours is a butch-ish/femme-ish duo, but in the complex ways that these descriptors actually function, and a heavy emphasis on the “-ish” part. For instance, I, the gentle-manly one, actually cook and decorate, as well as take out the garbage and do the fix-up stuff around the house. So that’s that caveat.
I would love to be a stay-at-home Baba, and write in the interstices, when and if ever they make themselves available. My being the butchier one of the two of us has no bearing on (or heck, maybe it’s partially responsible for?) my being far better suited to stay-at-home parenthood than my partner who gave birth to both kids. Our problem is that living in such a phenomenally expensive urban area (the SF Bay Area), and both of us wanting to pursue work in the non-profit/arts arenas make this a very, very challenging undertaking. We’re far from out of the woods.
Ultimately, I think this nation is LONG overdue for more socialist or democratic-socialist style family friendliness, no matter what the configuration of the family. Imagine what would happen in every family unit if (a) women were paid their due, and (b) both parents could afford to choose to stay home based on inclinations, rather than income. I can guarantee, who’d be at home would look different.
Geuninely family friendly workplaces do exist on the planet. My sister gave birth to both her sons in Norway, and had the choice of 80% pay for a year, or 100% pay for nine months. Her spouse had much less paid time off, but he still had it, and had to take it (couldn’t “roll it over” to her). This kind of workplace policy, so far as I understand it, is common in Scandanavia.
I’d like to think, ultimately, that lesbian parents are conscientious objectors in the mommy wars, rather than draft dodgers. Especially, as you point out, when it’s antifeminist media interests that are doing most of the “drafting,” and the war is essentially against one another.
“Conscientious objectors.” I like that–though it does connote a certain desire to make a point of one’s non-participation. For some lesbian moms, this is certainly the case. Others may simply opt out quietly. But I quibble here, and I think we’re really on the same page.
And as you say, the U.S. has so far to go in the area of parents’ rights. Organizations like Moms Rising are trying to create change, but as I wrote last month, there’s a need for such organizations to work more closely with LGBT-rights organizations. Otherwise, LGBT parents will still end up with half the rights of others.
One thing that has not come up yet in this discussion is the penalty of lower wages parents who stay home wiht a child face after they return to work. As lesbian parents we still pay this penalty and even in more family friendly Scandianavia parents pay it too. My sister, who lives in Stockholm, was able to take nearly two years of maternity leave (partially paid by the gov), but when she returned someone else had taken over most of her responsibilties and she was reassigned to projects that didn’t challenge her or offer possibilities for advancement.
The mistake writers like Bennetts make in whipping up stories about Mommy Wars, is overlooking this employment side of question. Lesbian mothers, as seen in this discussion, often have more flexiblity about roles within their relationship, but lesbian mothers may both mothers face discrimination as parents AND as women. Discrimination against women in the labor market has reinforced gender roles in straight families. Giving up the possiblity of a not-discriminated-against and better paid husband hardly seems like draft dodging! Family friendly policies need to include pay high enough for any worker to support a family and flexibility to work fewer hours or take time off without losing future earning power.