If, like me, you are a working mom, you know the ambivalence I feel this week–the week my kids are home on spring break, and we are not going on vacation, and I am working, and they are home with a babysitter.
I am fortunate enough to work by choice, and I only regret that choice during the days and weeks when my kids are not occupied by school. Today, for example. My kids are at the movies with their babysitter, while I am sitting at my desk.
If I had made a different choice, they would be out with me right now.
I think back to the years when I was a stay-at-home mom, and I had the opportunity to be with them full time. I felt ambivalent then too. My mom, indoctrinated a 70′s-era feminist after an early divorce, raised me to be independent and to make my own money. For better or worse, I never had much of a chance as a stay-at-home mom.
When I am home with my kids, I think about work. When I am at work, I think about my kids. I need both, and yet I can’t really ever be fully, 100% present in either at any given time, because the other is out there, lurking in some corner of my mind. That’s working mom’s ambivalence in a nutshell.
And I think I will have a pretty severe case of it until my kids go to college.
You’re definitely not the only one who feels this way. I recently read a similar post via @TheMamaBee on Twitter: http://ow.ly/1vZov
I definitely feel this same way often…I regularly think about what it would be like to stay home with my son all the time, but I love being at work and working for a living. I don’t know if I could do it yet I think I could regularly.