By Melissa Mitchell, Ghostwriter & CEO at Mitch Publishing
Women around the world are often confronted with the term ‘stay-at-home-mom’ almost as soon as their bundles of joy come into the world. For me, it was a decision that I had made on my own, and that I was absolutely confident in, but I kept finding myself having to explain my way through family gatherings and get togethers with old friends.
One of the questions that kept cropping up during this unfortunate encounters was, “What do you do all day?” Honey, what don’t I do? If it wasn’t the questioning, it was the well-meaning, but painfully misplaced comments like, “I don’t know how you do it. Just sitting around the house all day. I’d lose it.” Yes, I was on the verge of losing it, but not for the reasons that everyone thought. I wasn’t bored out of my mind, sitting on the couch all day, I was exhausted. I was essentially at the end of my tether with everything, and no one realized just how much work goes into caring for young children around the clock – no matter how many times you seem to explain it to them.
So, there I was: a young mother with all the accolades under her belt, a rising star in her own right, snuffed out by the doldrums of motherhood – or at least that’s what everyone thought of me. That is the general consensus when you decide to stay home and care for your children, isn’t it? You’re washed up, never to make a comeback in your career. You’ve stunted your own growth and you’re completely out of touch with reality. Might as well go home and watch Cocomelon on repeat, right? Wrong. Oh so, very wrong.
You see, mothers who make the choice to stay home and care for their young children do so much to hold a household together. The mental load of what we process on a daily basis as we desperately try to keep children-turned-trapeze artists as soon as our partners are out the door, alive, entertained, and fed – all while working on our own goals, chores, and routines – is eye watering.
So here come the terms ‘working mother’ and ‘stay-at-home-mother’. The problem with these terms is that they feed into this archaic idea that only mothers who are out in the traditional workforce are working, when this couldn’t be further from the truth. Raising children is work – hard work at that. If you had someone over to your house to babysit your children everyday, that would be their form of work. If you dropped your child off at daycare everyday, those people in that center are working to take care of your child. It is work. Period. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your own child or somebody else’s.
The fact of the matter is that those of us who chose to stay home are mostly highly educated, well-decorated women. We’re ex CEOs, writers, performance artists, chefs, mechanics, psychologists. Even without any extravagant titles – or unnecessary nouns and prefixes – a mother is just as much as work as someone sitting in a cubicle, or an office, or lying beneath the undercarriage of a car.
I don’t think any of us need to justify who we are or what we do with our time any longer. I think it’s high time that we just ignore the need to explain our entire life story and reasoning to every person that asks.
So the next time someone snidely – or politely – asks me what I do for a living, I’ll simply turn around ask, “Why? Are you hiring?”