ATTENTION WORKING MOTHERS
How do you decide if it makes sense
to leave a job and become a stay-at-home parent?
The whole issue of choosing between
being a stay-at-home mom and being a working professional started with the
controversy of whether a stay-at-home mom “ever worked a day in her life.” This is nothing but a slap in the face to the
institution of motherhood. Being a
stay-at-home mom is work, a full-time
a job—it’s just not a paid one.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg
surrounding this arduous, misunderstood dilemma.
We love our children. What we wouldn’t give to be there for
spending time with them, making the most of those cherished moments—treating
them, walks in the park, going out to eat, driving or flying to special spots
for family vacations. We want to share
with them our life wisdom, guiding them so they may grow into happy,
responsible adults. We yearn to celebrate
the milestones in their lives, their first steps, making friends, bringing home
a good report card, excelling in sports, performing in school plays or music
recitals. We want to continue
encouraging them, so they strive and attain ever greater achievements, setting
a solid pattern for whatever they do in their adult life.
At the same time, we require the
material means to fulfill those joyous, legitimate responsibilities of
motherhood. Children need a warm, safe
home, healthy food, health care, transportation, clothing, a good education,
savings for college.
A good mother would do no less for
her children.
But society fails to recognize child
care from the economic side. Whether they
choose one path or the other, whether to work or stay at home, both mothers and
fathers this day in age are especially vulnerable.
If they stay at home, it leaves a
gaping hole in their financial future. They
can never build a retirement plan, never get full Social Security benefits. College funding is damn near impossible. Disability or premature death of a husband
can pose devastating, soul-crushing consequences for a family, far more than if
both spouses work outside the home.
According to a Pew Research study, 60%
of Americans say children are better off when a parent stays home to focus on
the family, while a growing share of stay-at-home mothers say they are home
because they cannot find a job: 6% in 2012, versus 1% in 2000.
The role a stay-at-home-mom,
homemaker and housewife is deeply fulfilling to many women. Working part-time for a couple of years would
be ideal. It would give you the best of
both worlds, wouldn’t it? To keep one foot
in the workforce while being there for those formative years of children’s
lives?
But most employers wouldn’t be that
sympathetic. They have a business to
run.
And it goes even deeper than
that. Most often we have no option but
to work.
It’s a far cry from when we first
started our careers. We gave way to the
desires that drew us to marrying our husbands, someone who would work as hard
as we do, to build a life together. In
the beginning our interdependence had strengthened that undercurrent of romance,
brought to a whole new level with the experience of childbirth.
We might have had blind faith in conventional
wisdom. When the kids were sick, Mom was
there to care for them full time, without having to hire a nurse. If Dad was laid off, Mom could enter the
workforce for a while, earning income until Dad found another job. Back then, the family found that it had one
member with considerable, respectable value: a well-skilled, dedicated adult,
available to pitch to help her family in times of emergency. Why shouldn’t we expect this wonderful woman
to have the power to render her beloved family a safety net, an all-purpose
insurance policy against disaster?
Like many, we may have felt the first
mild interruption in earnings, one that gave way to devastating impact over the
ensuing years in the labor force. The
world has changed. Inflation is taking
its toll.
As a result, more often than not, Mom
is no longer the indomitable pillar of strength. Today more stay-at-home moms are in poverty—an
astonishing 34% in 2012. For many the
story that began so wonderfully and well-planned slowly unravels.
We love our children. At the same time, in a financial standpoint,
children are the biggest predictor of financial catastrophe. Despite our willful obligation to care for
our children, we are forced to make a more distressing sacrifice. Each lost year of employment could cost our
family more than three times a parent’s annual salary.
And if that weren’t bad enough, the
rising cost of child care exhausts—or even exceeds—the take-home pay of both working
parents.
Cutting back is hard if you’re not
really spenders in the first place. For many, their income goes to basics like
a mortgage, car payments, daycare, and food on the table.
But what about the all-too-frequent
occurrence nowadays, of either you losing a job, or your husband losing his? Some other company or store sucks away their business,
so to keep their heads above water, to cut costs, they lay off people, no
matter that company loyalty once meant something. You may resort to making money with garage
sales, or asking family or neighbors whether they’d pay you $50 or so for odd
jobs, maybe more specialized like filling out tax returns. You ask for loans from family and friends with
no foreseeable means of paying them off—they’re just temporary infusions of
money. They cover minimum payments for a
few months but way out of the hole.
Bills, credit card payments, and IOUs build up. Car repossession, foreclosure and
bankruptcy—all too common landmarks in American life—may loom ever closer on
your financial horizon.
You’re both frantic and
desperate. Either you or he are willing
to do jobs, even degrading ones, that don’t even match your previous salary,
because at least it’s something.
You may even cling to the belief that
the situation is only temporary. But for
many, it isn’t.
Yet you never neglect the deep and
desperate love for your children and husband, your purpose, that solid rock in
a stormy sea of life. Despite that the
lack of work—which would give you the best of both worlds, at least in part—is
an empty, mind-numbing experience when you have only the scarcest means of
providing for them. Out of a desire for
stability, you tolerate being reduced to an empty shell of a human being, live
a life of quiet desperation.
Still, you ask yourself why? Why does life have to be like this? Your family’s future and well-being at the
mercy of unstable economic indicators, government fulfilling self-serving
political agendas, industry leaders making decisions more over profit then
people?
But you and your family are not as
powerless as you might think. Sometimes
we can’t see the forest for the trees. We
focus only on the people closest to us who are as poor as we are. Other women succeed, and gain financial
security, in spite of the sexism, mansplaining, objectification, shaming and
the wage gap. They succeed because they
have knowledge we don’t, associate with people beyond our social circles, and
run their own businesses. They live life
in a way that challenges outdated standards of feminine behavior—and in the
process redefine what it means to be a woman.
Many such women share equal
professional and financial status in a nationwide community of real estate
investors called Renatus. They focus not
only on real estate investment, but also commercial marketing, tax and legal
strategies, mortgages, financial literacy, wealth management—all those things that
men and women alike never learn in school.
They work together, support and encourage each other, and their work
brings profound benefit to the communities in which they live.
No comments:
Post a Comment