Realizing the Importance of parenting

Finally giving myself some credit for being a full-time, not "working" mom
 
After Natasha was born, I went through many emotions and thoughts, not all of which were very positive at this new job I had in life. I had been very excited about being pregnant and loved pregnancy, but as our due date drew near, I started to have second thoughts as I realized what was about to happen. I was about to become a parent. Not just a parent, a mom. And as the only-occasional, contract-working member of our relationship, I would be staying home and being a mom all day, every day for the next... oh, about six years.
 
It did not take too long for the busyness of our days and the new life in our house to be enough to keep me occupied for the full day, sometimes to my amazement. I remember looking at the clock one morning when Natasha was 3 months old and wondering, "If it is 7:30 now, what will I do until 11:00 when we usually go out for our walk?" Amazingly, the next thing I knew, it was time and were out the door. My hands and attention were full. This was enough for me physically, but my brain and intellect were starting to feel abandoned.
 
One of the first questions people ask you when they see you with a new baby is if you are on maternity leave. This is an automatic question, and I think that people ask it merely as something to ask, like "what do you do for a living" when you meet someone for the first time. The question implies that you will be going back to work after this sidetrack (as we seem to consider it now) of having a baby and starting a family is a year old. I, however, hated this question and tried not to ask or be asked by people. My answer was that, "Well, kinda" about the maternity leave, as I had no job to go back to, had no benefits because of being a contract worker, and had only recently figured out a possible career path based on my abilities, training and the available work world. After years of going from one job to another, I kinda, almost had it figured out what I was going to do when I grew up.
 
When we started going to Baby Group, I was in a room full of professional women who were taking their one year leave. They were all on maternity benefits and were having their pay topped up by their employers. My feelings about being unemployed and staying at home with a little one were magnified, both in size and intensity. And my brain really did feel like it was atrophying. I needed the stimulation of conversation, the challenge and discipline of a deadline, and the satisfaction of a job that you plan and work for and achieve in a short period.
 
When Natasha turned 1, her nap schedule changed so that we could start to go to Toddler Time at the same drop-in centre. The mothers there mostly had older children, and they were mostly full-time moms. Some of them, I learnt months later, are working part time and being moms part time, but when we started going and saw the same faces every time, I assumed that they were all with their children all the time, as I was.
 
I, in spite of myself, asked some people if they were going back to work or if they were sticking with one full-time job (the 24 hour one) for now. One woman put it very well when she said that she has never heard anyone say that she wishes she had spent more time working when her kids were young, but you hear a lot of the opposite, of people wishing they had spent more time with their kids.
 
Being around these women who were devoted to and had happily accepted the role of full-time mother helped to alleviate my anxiety around the question of work. As for money, after hearing people talk about the waitlists for child care and the costs of the desirable places in town, I realized that I was paying myself close to $1000/month by not paying someone else to spend the days with our child.
 
Then more recently I thought about the requirements to work in these places. You have to have a degree specific to caring for and understanding children. We demand that people go through 4 years of organized, formal education that passes on knowledge and theories based in years of observation, research and experience before letting them occupy our child's days with activities. Those people, in turn, expect to be paid a certain wage for their training and knowledge. So why am I (and why is most of society) undervaluing my role as a mother? Why has our culture suddenly stopped looking at creating and raising a family as a necessity and a healthy, helpful way to contribute and started looking at having a baby as an interruption to a woman's "real" contribution to society? When did it become secondary for us to continuing our species and making sure our future generation has the values and skills that we cherish in our present self and social fabric?
 
So, while I still have times of wanting to devote more time to myself and my intellectual needs and pursuits, I no longer feel less worthy as a member of society because I am not working. I have created work of my own that I feel contributes to the members of my new social circle, the moms. Hopefully as Natasha grows she will see the value in what I have done, why I do it and that it keeps me balanced and will internalize the example that I am trying to set.

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