A Mother and More

Last year the cover of what many women consider to be the pregnancy bible, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” was updated. Gone is the matronly woman sitting in a rocking chair, book in hand, arm across pregnant belly, while she stares into the distance contemplating what is about to befall her. The book’s new cover has a standing longhaired woman dressed in hip pregnancy jeans, V-neck T-shirt, and she looks like well, me. What people fail to see when looking at this symbol of modern motherhood, is how complicated her world is.

As a graduate student in 2003, I spent a summer in New York doing a fellowship with the International Radio & Television Society which brought together thirty of the most promising students in the field of media. Now, five years later, I keep in touch with them through Facebook. They’ve gone on to work for network and cable television, high-profile ad agencies, even the United Nations and media law firms. What am I doing they ask? I’m a full-time mother. The only person in the group with children. After returning from the fellowship that summer, my husband and I were surprised to learn we were expecting. We were elated; we’d always wanted a family. I gave birth to our first son three weeks after graduating with my Master’s degree.
We both thought a parent should stay at home while our children were young, and I wanted to do it, plus my husband’s income was three times what I made. My career as a news producer was put on hold and I launched into motherhood, recently having a second child. I’ve now been at home four years and with all the messages I’m receiving about how to mother, run a household, and the demands on my time, I often feel overwhelmed.

I’m still the creative woman who likes to see her ideas put into motion and goals achieved, but now they deal more with the production of finger paintings than news images. Gone are the bonuses, recognition, and adult conversation about current events. I now spend long days at home, sometimes “dumbing” myself down to sing rounds of Itsy-Bitsy Spider or joining in to imagine the laundry basket as a pirate castle. My business attire is now a food smeared sweatshirt and loading the dishwasher a major part of my job description.

To add to the pressure, every time I stand in the checkout aisle, magazines tout the latest celebrity who had a baby and got back to her pre-pregnancy weight hours later. Daytime television tells me I should be able to keep my home immaculate and organized, decorate like a professional, make earrings out of pinecones, all while preparing a three course meal in 30 minutes, and making sure that I’m “green” when doing it.

Some days I cry along with the kids when I’ve reached my capacity for listening to whining about the temperature of chicken nuggets, found make-up smeared on my drapes, had my fifth call to come and wipe my four-year-olds bum, and the baby’s diaper has blown-out on his third outfit of the day. Then my loving husband has the audacity to come home and suggest the boys need a dog that I will inevitably end up caring for. It's then that I rethink my decision to be a "homemaker," a word I choke on whenever I say it.

To go to the playground, I have to get three people bathed and dressed, make sure my mini-van is packed with diapers, wipes, a bottle, snacks, water, sunscreen, changes of clothes, a blanket, hats, and a stroller. Once there, I have to navigate the mommy clichés and know that they’re judging me when having forgot the baby’s sunhat, he’s left exposed to the elements.

With experts urging women to have babies before they turn “high-risk” at age 35, my husband and I are contemplating when to have our third child, which is now the new status symbol in many parts of the country (and not why we’d have a third). I realize another child would delay me from going back into the workforce until I was in my 40’s and further stunt my earning power. But, despite the agony of being a stay-at-home mom and feeling like my brain isn’t as sharp as it used to be, that will be my choice because for all their trouble, my children make my life more valuable than any workplace position I could ever aspire to hold.

While what I’m doing doesn’t come with any corporate perks or awards, it’s a gamble I’m taking that it will benefit my children and give me some sort of lasting satisfaction. And there are those moments when my baby laughs or my preschooler says something outrageous that I’m glad I was there to hear it and for me, it makes my sacrifice worth it.

Late at night, after I’m done being super mom and adoring wife, you’ll hear a clicking noise in the dark. It’s me, at the dining room table typing away on the laptop trying to maintain any vestige of education and intelligence I once had in hopes that one day, I’ll be able to step back into a job I loved and instinctively knew how to do.

So, when you see the new cover of “What to Expect” at the bookstore, or the next time you see a mother like me out in “mom” jeans and a dirty T-shirt, know that she’s much more complex than she appears and one day, using the skills she learned being home, she may even be your boss.