I just finished reading this article on the rising numbers of stay at home moms and felt inspired to share how I became a stay at home mom.
When my husband and I decided to try and get pregnant I just knew deep down inside of me that I couldn't bear to leave my children with someone else for 40 hours a week. Personally I felt that if I was going to have children I should be the one to raise them. So the ideal for me would be to stop working once our first born was finally here. How that was actually going to work out I wasn't sure.
It took us awhile to get a stable pregnancy underway, nearly a year an a half (perhaps another day I will go into that story), but finally I was in the second trimester of my pregnancy and started looking into what it would take to stay home with my son. Which is of course when my husband got laid off from his job. He was an apprentice electrician at the time and there were few open jobs thanks the recession. We kept crossing our fingers and praying that things would work out.
I was seven months pregnant when our health insurance, through his union, was running out, he was still unemployed and due to my denial we had nothing worked out for my son once he arrived. Terrified beyond belief I started the process to get onto the health insurance through my job and began looking into day care facilities.
This process scared me even more it turned out. I was making about $13 an hour at my job, full time, but with little potential for overtime or a raise (those got frozen with the recession too). The job required me to make a 20 minute commute each way. Moving the health insurance to my job also meant that $200 dollars a month would be going to there instead of my pocket. Child care for infants in my area ran around $250 a week, about half of my paycheck. Once you added the extra gas I would be spending driving to and from the child care facility and work, general baby expenses, the health care and probably formula (my office would accommodate my pumping, but there were few places appropriate for it and I was not sure how I would do keeping it up) there was really nothing left of my paycheck, and there was still the mortgage, utilities, car payments, and upcoming medical bills. I came to greatly admire single parents during this search...
In the eighth month our miracle happened, my husband finally got a job. This was one week before our insurance actually ran out and he was able to keep it active so I did not have to apply for the insurance through my job. We still were not sure how stable this job was and if we could make it on his paycheck alone, he was making roughly $20 an hour but that was after all the union expenses were taken out.
I was also beginning to wonder if I could actually stay home and stay sane. During the last trimester of my pregnancy I was experiencing a lot of contractions and my doctor ordered me to take it easy, I started working half days at home, only going into the office for 4 hours at a time. That meant I sat around at home a lot, and it was starting to drive me crazy. Cabin fever started edging in on me and I began to wonder if trying to work part time might be a viable option for me.
Then it finally happened, I went into labor (two days after my due date). I actually went into work that morning. They laughed at me, I was due to have a baby two days prior, but I could not sit around the house anymore, I had to get out, so I went in for a few hours and then went home. I watched TV and made muffins. Those muffins turned out to be a godsend because they were the last thing I ate before going into labor for the next twelve hours. By the next morning I was cradling my beautiful baby boy, and feeling the pressure of responsibility his little presence placed on me like a great big weight.
We went home and I began my maternity leave. It was a cold winter and we were stuck in the house most of the time. However I quickly discovered that I was not going stir crazy like I had thought I would. With the baby around I found I was actually enjoying my stuck in the house time. It gave me a great opportunity to really bond with the little guy, and I found I could spend hours just watching him sleep. Plus I was no longer under medical directions to take it easy, so I could do the laundry and the dishes and other projects between nursing baby boy. I took to being home with him so well that my husband laughed when our pediatrician told him to look out for signs of post partum depression. He said that I had the opposite... I was miserable during the last few weeks of my pregnancy, but as soon as I gave birth I became a happy vibrant mommy.
So as the weeks turned to months I realized I needed to make a decision and let my job know when, or if, I was going to return to work. My maternity pay had been very minimal, I think they cut me a check for $1,000 for the 6 weeks they covered. Most of that went straight to the hospital bills for the delivery. Otherwise we had been living on my husband's paychecks for two months, and it looked like the job was actually working out. We crunched some numbers and realized that if I went back to work full time I would maybe bring home $100 a week after child care and gas expenses. If I only worked part time that amount would drop even lower as the gas prices wouldn't go down but my paycheck would. The office was not interested in letting me continue to work from home regularly, so that was not an option for us. I also started to realize that if I stayed home I could work on saving us money, by making our food from scratch, and devoting more time into projects like rehabbing things in our house and researching coupons. Not to mention I was pretty certain now that I wanted to stay home and that going to work was going to break my heart.
Finally we decided that it just made more sense for me to stay home. I called the office and gave them my notice. The small amount of money I would be bringing in just was not worth it for us. Since then the old job has called me up a few times and I did some independent contract work for them, mostly at home, although for about a month when my husband was again between jobs I did go in for a few hours a week to help with some backlog. That has occasionally helped out with our finances but it has never been something to count on. Now that we have moved out of state it really isn't an option anymore and I have started dabbling in this blogging thing, although we shall see how, if, it helps with our finances any. Other than that I have been a full time mom, and I don't regret it.
This job has been nothing like I expected it to be. I work harder than I ever have before. I am tired, dirty and stressed out most of the time. I do not get paid for any of this. I get yelled at and peed on on a regular basis... but it's wonderful. I plan on keeping this up for at least another four years (when my daughter is due for Kindergarten) and from there we shall see.
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