Only once did I have a somber moment last weekend, when Tig showed me one of his old posts about working moms. In it, he had presented an excellent case for the stay-at-home mom. Unfortunately, even though I had always been against farming out young children to day care centers, I took only two months off after the birth of each child. So for about an hour, I was off in my own little world, on a guilt trip to the past, regretting the way things had worked out. I do this from time to time anyway--when I see mothers with small children who, along with a supportive husband, have chosen to place child-rearing in its proper place of importance. I have also beaten myself up over choices made by my son when he was left as a latch-key teenager.
The truth is, I really wanted to stay at home with my two children, now 24 and 17, but circumstances prevented this from happening. Now, I know what you're probably thinking--that I was caught up in materialism and was not able to sacrifice my "standard of living." Not so.
I had two reasons why I felt that I was better off at work, and that my children were actually better off in daycare:
Yet as I mulled over the depressing events of my former existence, I thought about what a beautiful (inside and out) person my daughter has become, even though her circumstances at home were far from perfect. In some ways, these adversities have made her a more sensitive, perceptive, and sympathetic person, and she uses these traits in her chosen fields of psychology and art. I realized (as I have so many times before) that I cannot dwell on the past, but rather enjoy the present. And so I returned to my enjoyable weekend.
l knew after only a few months of marriage that I had married the wrong person. We met in a college environment, when he was into existentialist writers and appeared to have admirable goals. Soon we moved back to his home town of nearly 500 people, and his whole personality changed. Moreover, my in-laws could see our house from theirs, and they made everything their business. I tried hard to convince him to move away before we had children, but when it didn't happen after five years, I decided that, at age 30, I really did need to start my family. I kept making excuses for the way my then-husband was acting, blaming it on his parents' influence. And I did make the vow "for better or for worse." I didn't know how much worse it could get. I will not bore you with additional details, except to say that after the children were born, we were expected to be at their home more than we were at ours. The only time I had by myself with the children was in the car when I commuted to work, or at home with them when they were sick. My daughter finally admitted at age 22 that many of her asthma attacks were faked.