Some days I feel like a single parent. Like this morning, since my husband stayed in the city for the second time this week because of his company's "big meetings." I haven't actually seen my husband in quite a while since as of late we seem to be two ships passing in the night.
Public debate continues about stay-at-home moms vs. working moms and I can't help but think that it is not really a choice one can make freely. My husband's work assumes that he has a stay-at-home wife and that his childcare concerns are not his own or else why would they schedule Saturday meetings and expect their employees to stay late all week? When he tells me he has to work late, I often ask him if his company is going to make childcare arrangements for him.
See, as good as his job is (and it is because it allows me to work from home and not worry about making money) it also requires a lot of his focus, energy, and time. And it requires me, the other parent, to take up the slack at home. My husband would argue with me that this isn't so. He would say that at least he doesn't travel much for work and most weekends he is home.
But I wonder why it is that Americans freely work 60 hours a week without complaint? I wonder how I am expected to really push my own career when my husband IS NOT home all that much. He leaves the house at 6:00 am each morning and doesn't return until 7:00 pm. Which means that all day, every day, I am the one who is the parent-on-duty.
And while my husband is home most weekends, as of late, I have been doing much of my own work on weekends, because there just isn't any other time to get it done. So, we are juggling like most families, and trying to squeeze in as much we can. And because often on weekends I do leave for meetings, my husband is doing his share of the at-home chores too, and shuttling the kids around. I
know that my husband helps out at home more than many other husbands, so I really can't complain. But then on days like today, as I throw in one more load of laundry, and look in the fridge and realize that someone (me) needs to go foodshopping AGAIN, I can't help but feel that the work around the house is just never done. And it sometimes feels like an overwhelming responsibility for me -- and one that I don't really want. A
nyway, my rant comes down to the fact that I still don't think that many American companies are "family-friendly" and that they more-or-less expect their workers to work all the time, and they also assume that children raise themselves. When I complain about my husband's schedule, and ask him how it is that women (i.e mothers) at his office put in the same hours he does, he just tells me that they all have "full-time, live-in nannies" and then suggests that we do the same.
Some days a full-time nanny feels like an ideal solution. But then I realize that a nanny would only really solve my problems if I were to treat her like a wife -- meaning she would have to cheerily and easily put in slave hours at slave wages. But (a) I'm too much of a control freak to hand over my life to a nanny and (b) I really want to live my life and not defer it to someone else. Besides, nannies are people too and come with their own management responsibilities and their own issues. And I'm not sure I want to "manage" one other thing right now.
I think that one thing I've learned about myself, is that I can work from home and that I don't need to work Monday to Friday in an office in order to be efficient. I think that if more offices allowed work flexibility then maybe our spouses who work outside the home could be around the home more and be more involved in the day-to-day things and then they would see what they are missing.
Because I know that right now, I feel as if my husband isn't home enough, and he doesn't think he works too much at all. But I can tell you that if I left my house at 6:00 am every single morning and didn't come home until 7:00 pm, I would be complaining my head off about the fact that I work too much -- and I would feel like I was missing a big part of my life. And I'm sure that I would feel as if life was spinning out of control, because I wouldn't be able to keep on top of the day-to-day stuff.
I also feel like a big part of why women are feeling so overwhelmed is that while our mindset has changed, in many ways the mindset of men and of corporate America hasn't changed. Sure, women can succeed in business as long as they approach work "like a man."
But the next step in the whole feminist revolution is to help men see that they can stay home too, work flexible hours, and not assume that raising children is only women's work. And we need to define "success" differently too. Because we all seem to be working our butts off and feeling oddly "not-good-enough."
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