Womb to Bloom - Maternity & Beyond

For some women, staying home is the only way to go. For others, making the decision to stay at home after the birth of their child can be a difficult one. There are financial considerations, of course. How are you going to survive the cut in family income on top of the increased expenses related to your baby? There are personal goal/identity/career path considerations. How do you just walk away from your career after investing so much time and effort? So much of your life and identity is wrapped up in your work and your office relationships, do you even know who you are if you aren’t employed outside the home?

When you and your partner are making the decision, these are the considerations in play. What is rarely discussed is the impact that your decision to stay home will have on your relationship. For as long as you’ve been together, you’ve probably both worked. You both make financial contributions to the household. You both have friends and important relationships at or through work. All of the sudden, the situation changes. You’ve got a baby. You, mom, are staying home and caring for baby. No suits or dress clothes. No working lunches. Probably no 50/50 split of household duties anymore – if only because you’re the one that’s home all day.

Obviously, the impact that all of this has on your relationship depends on the state of your relationship to begin with. I can only speak of my own experience and tell you that the choice to stay at home brought on some weird and unexpected feelings in me. All of it unbeknownst to my husband. After I had my first two children, I went back to work as an attorney at a small law firm. I finally decided to stay home after the birth of my last two children (twins) after over 10 years in the practice of law. And three years of law school, not to mention a ridiculous amount of student loan debt. A lot of work and a lot of money – and I was walking away from it. It felt really strange.

Stranger still was the realization that I no longer contributed anything to our household finances. I have to admit it made me feel a bit powerless in our partnership. Add this to a periodic feeling of abandonment – I was stuck in the house all day with four children under five years old while he got to go to work and hang out with his friends, go to lunch with grown ups, close his office door and be alone if he wanted to – and our relationship was suddenly changing.

For many relationships, the decision to have mom stay at home does result in a shift of responsibility that, while not unexpected, is unwelcome. Mom becomes the unchallenged parent-in-charge. Dad goes to work and then, maybe, pitches in a little at home. He doesn’t pay attention to things like bedtime. He’ll call and ask when naptime is if you’re out and he’s home with the kids. He needs you to tell him what and when to feed the baby. It doesn’t dawn on him to bathe the children on his own -although he’ll gladly do it if you ask him to. Mom is the CEO of kids and Dad is her executive assistant and VP of fun.

Take it from me, this is exhausting for Mom. Because Dad? He gets to leave his job at the office when he drives home or shuts off the computer and Blackberry. Mom’s job is 24/7, never-ending. Resentment is a pretty common byproduct of this situation.

I started to feel some anger and resentment that his life continued seemingly unchanged while nothing in my life was unchanged. He could take a half day to golf or spontaneously leave work a bit early to grab a drink with “the guys” without anything more than the obligatory informational phone call. If I wanted to have lunch with a friend, I had to plan at least a week in advance, get a sitter, make sure that everyone was picked up or dropped off as necessary, arrange a meal for the kids in my absence and pay the sitter. Can you feel the bitterness?!

Ruminating about things like this led me to perceive a power disparity in our house. I often became pretty anxious about how financially dependent I was on my husband and even allowed myself to wonder what would happen to us and to me money-wise if we ever divorced. What would I do? How would I pay bills, mortgage, car payments? Nevermind that we never once have had even one fight that led either of us to contemplate divorce. This was the irrational nature of my thoughts.

When I, a successful lawyer, decided to stay home with my children, I never thought for a second about how that decision might ultimately affect my opinion of myself. And how that opinion in turn could affect my relationship. No matter how many times I told myself that my contributions to our household were priceless, I still felt a little powerless and scared.

I felt like every dime I spent was some sort of drain on our finances unless it was directly baby- or grocery-related. Unsurprisingly, that thought has never once crossed my husband’s mind. This had an awful lot to do with my own self-esteem and identity crisis.

After the many occasions that we hashed out these issues (including to some extent just last week), I realized that you just have to put some faith in your partner. Talk to him, trust him and believe him when he says that he doesn’t think any differently of you just because you don’t have a paying job anymore. If anything, I found that my husband is more impressed by my work as a stay-at-home mom than my work as a trial attorney. He sees my successes every morning smiling back at him from the breakfast counter. He knows how hard it is to be with all four of them for five hours, nevermind five days, at a time.

Now that you have children, your relationship will absolutely change and you have to be flexible in your relationship in order to figure out how to handle the changes. But at the end of the day you’ve got to remember that there is a reason that you two are together and chances are that it’s not your former job or your previous income. So, while those things may be gone, you are not. Give yourself some credit. And be proud of the choice you have made and the job that you do.