I don’t work.
I mean, I don’t GO TO WORK. I don’t put on pantyhose and I don’t sit in traffic. I don’t go to a place where they give me a paycheck every two weeks in exchange for showing up on time and helping out around the place. I don’t have a boss and if I want to forego the late meetings, I may do so, fearlessly.
What I DO is I get up every morning and “use force to move people objects distances”.
You see, I have four children.
I am “stay-at-home” mom. But that term doesn’t seem to accurately describe me anymore these days.
When my kids were all six years old and under, I would have been insane to be anywhere BUT home. And I know this is a fact, for there were many kind and all-knowing people who were pretty blunt about their thoughts on the subject when I was brave enough to attempt to leave the nest with these four little ones. So “stay-at-home mom” was dead-on. I was a mom and I stayed-at-home with my children and did “wonder-fully” creative art and educational projects with them, deep-cleaned daily, potty-trained toddler after toddler, sterilized bottles and made my own diaper wipes, cooked nourishing from-scratch meals, and I even found time to hostess a group of other stay-at-home moms once a week.
Then they grew up – those little angels. Now almost every one of them has a double-digit age and aren’t as angelic anymore. And I still don’t work.
I mean, I don’t GO TO WORK.
But I don’t stay-at-home either. In fact, I am rarely home anymore. I am running to the post office; picking up prescriptions; grocery shopping; taking children to dentists, doctors, etc; delivering sneakers for PE and my husband’s forgotten lunch; driving carpools; volunteering in classrooms, at church, and after-school sports; driving employed children to work; returning books to the library; getting pizza for dinner; meeting with principals, teachers, and school nurses; going to the gym; picking up animal feed; attending band and choir concerts and awards assemblies; showing up to PTO meetings and sometimes even holding someone else’s babies so they can get out of their house alone for a moment.
So maybe I shouldn’t call myself a “stay-at-home mom” anymore.
But I am not a “working mother” either.
Should I call myself a “mother-who-doesn’t-stay-at-home-and-doesn’t-GO-TO-work”?
How about something wildly revolutionary, like: I am a mother…
It’s quite inclusive…. “working mothers”, “stay-at-home moms”, and “mothers-who-don’t-stay-at-home-and-don’t-GO-TO-work”… we can ALL say:
I am a mother…
What do you think?
her conversations 