Day 374: Why I work

Ah, I had forgotten the small joys of working life during my one year hiatus; case in point, the eagerly awaited long weekends. Love them. As a SAHM weekends were good because it meant Fernando was home. But this is an entirely different thing. Now they feel like a guilty pleasure. Especially when you drop the kid off with the grandparents and sleep in till 8:30! Oh, how sad that anything past 8am is now considered "sleeping in."

I have actually been thinking about the whole stay-at-home vs. working mom debate lately. I confess that I love being back at work. I didn't think I would, and I still feel like I shouldn't, but I have to say that life as a working mom is going very well indeed. So why the guilt? Why the need to chase the statement "I work full time" with "...because we need the money"? In all honestly we probably don't need the money. If our priority was to have me stay at home with Maddie, I think we could have make that work. We could live in a cheaper city, for starters. We could buy no-name ketchup instead of Heinz, Fernando could actually - gasp! - use our coffee maker rather than get his daily fix at Starbucks, and I suppose I could even skip my weekly US magazine obsession. We could do that thing I keep hearing about - budget, I think it's called. Money would certainly be very tight, but we'd be no worse off than other families getting by on one income. We just don't want to. As my return to work was approaching I was completely dreading it. So much so that I convinced myself it would be temporary, that by the end of the year I would be living the dream as a SAHM. Somewhere along the way I guess I forgot that it wasn't my dream.

What I'm just now remembering is that even before I had Maddie, I always wanted to be a working mom. There is definitely a selfish component to this desire: getting out of the house and indulging in adult conversation is a treat, and I do worry about staying at home now and 10 years down the road deciding I'm ready for a return to the workforce only to learn that the workforce is no longer ready for me. But a lot of it has to do with what I want for my daughter. I want her to see that it's okay for a woman - for a mother - to get worth and reward outside of her family. I want her to always feel a connection to the world beyond these four walls we live in. And I want her to know that the time I spend with her at the end of the day is the very best part of my day. There are other ways to instill this knowledge in her, of course; but for us, having me back at work just seems to... well, work! My year off definitely made me realize how hard it is to be a SAHM, and I am in awe and admiration of those who do it day in and day out. Being back at work has shown me the difficulties of fitting it all in. I guess both choices come complete with their own set of challenges and rewards. Whoever said that being a mom is the hardest job in the world had it right, it seems. But of course it's the best one, too.

In another short and totally unrelated topic, I think I need to make a declaration. I am officially a MySpace addict. I don't know how it happened, and to be honest I don't even know why. I mean, really - why would I possibly need a blog and a MySpace page? The whole venture seems pretty pointless to me, one giant waste of time. And yet, I have been completely sucked in. Do you ever wonder - what did I used to do with myself before the Internet? Oh right... have real social interaction. Sigh. So overrated, no?


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