The Legacy Of The Stay At Home Mom

In this modern era, not many women want to be a stay at home mom. Many women prefer careers and school as opposed to being a full-time housewife. There is something fulfilling and motivating about taking the career world by the horns and conquering it. It gives men and women alike a great sense of accomplishment and prestige. However, some level of prestige is also attached to rich housewives who marry well and can afford to remain at home and organize their household and care for their children. In addition to this, there are the women who actually attempt to combine the best of both worlds and juggle career life with family life.

However, in this blog, I want to talk about regular stay at home moms who are not rich and are not interested in careers or prestige. The stay at home mom's whose lives are all about the home, the children and being the backbone of their family by keeping abreast the household matters. The ones that choose to be a housewife in order to ensure that the home is running efficiently for the benefit of her children and spouse.

When my first child was born and I realized that he would require special care even after he came out of the hospital, I started rethinking my feminist stand on stay at home moms. Prior to my children, I saw myself as a woman capable of conquering the career world, shunning the traditional view of women as nurturers and embracing the new age woman who could achieve anything that her male counterpart could achieve.

Post children, I began shedding my feminist skin and embracing myself as a nurturer. I began wishing that I did not have to work but could stay at home and give my undivided attention to my children and making my home comfortable for me and my family. I began seeing my job as a hindrance to my family life as it forced me to find babysitters that I knew would not care for my children exactly the way I wanted. When I came home from work, I would be so tired that my immediate reflex was to fall on the bed and close my eyes. Unsurprisingly, because I had two babies that are one year apart, going to bed early was never an option. I would end up going to bed around midnight and wake up every two hours to feed my darlings. By the time it was morning, I had to get up and get ready for work and do the process all over again. I was sleep deprived for a while.

Eventually, my husband and I managed to work out a schedule where we did not need babysitters and where there was always a parent with the children. Unfortunately, this did not help our sleeping schedule as we still had a lot on our plates like school and work. I continued to discuss becoming a "housewife" with my husband so we could cut some slack in our tight schedule.

While I am still working part time, I am looking forward to being a stay at home mom. I believe that the old fashioned moms back in the day had very good reasons to be content with being housewives. Investing as much time as possible with my children has yielded such great results that I know that if I were to be at home with my children all the time, their progress would be even greater.

Stay at home moms have this as their legacy. That is, being able to be with their children more often than working mothers. They get the opportunity to supervise their children more closely and to be more hands on with their children. This is not to say working moms are not great mom's too. However, based on personal experience, the less I worked, the more time I could spend with my babies supervising and teaching them things that have made them somewhat advanced for their age. The eldest baby is only two years old and already knows his ABC from a-z. He knows how to count, he knows his colors and he knows his shapes. He knows how to use my laptop and smart phone as well and is able to navigate his way to Youtube to look at his favorite learning programs such as The Mothergoose Club on his own. My second child who is only a year old is following in her big brother's footsteps as she tries to recite the letters of the alphabet as well as he does. She holds her fingers up when she tries to count and is also able to use the smart phone but not as well as her big brother. It inspires me to continue investing my time in giving my children basic education.

Even though this way of mothering sounds great, the fact is, we live in a day and age where many mothers choose to work out of necessity. Many mothers are either single parents, or the breadwinner of their families due to one thing or the other and as much as they would like to spend all their waking moments with their children, they are just unable to as the priority of providing for their families needs takes some level of precedence over quality time with the family. As such they find themselves bartering for time as it relates to their children. Thankfully, women have the superpower of being able to be a provider and a nurturer simultaneously and do get both jobs done and produce wonderful well adjusted children in the process which proves just how spectacular most moms are. Providing that I had the option to choose though, I believe I would want to be a housewife/stay at home mom for the sake of my children.