Our work/home decisions
My decision to be home with Noah was less about whether or not I wanted to work and more about I didn’t want to put him in daycare. Because I used to work in daycare, I have very strong opinions about what constitutes quality care and it’s unlikely that I’ll ever find a situation where I would happily put my children. (This doesn’t mean that I have anything against daycare in theory — just in practice — or that I think other people should feel the same way I do. I get angry about it because I think that working parents need better and more affordable child care options. I don’t know what the answer is to that.)
Another selfish reason that I wanted to be home was that the thought of someone else caring for Noah made me really jealous. I wanted to care for him. I wanted to work, too, so for the first six months I took Noah to work with me and worked my other hours when Brett was home with him. Eventually when Noah got bigger my boss said that he couldn’t come anymore so I quit.
Having me at home was financially disastrous. For the first year, Brett was making $19,500 although he did get a second weekend job after awhile. Even when he got a job with better pay, we were still making less than we needed and so we sunk deeper into debt. It isn’t until now when I’m making enough money to start paying off that debt that I face how deep a financial hole we created.
It was also very, very hard. We didn’t have a car for awhile (in a city built on sprawl with little public transportation, this is difficult) and we’ve cut corners that didn’t even exist. But we got good at it. It’s not fun to live so close to the bone and have to do things like dig under couch cushions for change because you’re out of toilet paper and the paycheck doesn’t go into the bank until tomorrow. (I did get help from my mom who took me to her warehouse club twice a year and stocked up on necessities to cut down on couch digging in order to wipe our tushies.) It was discouraging and scary and it caused a lot of stress in our relationship. In fact, the only thing we fought about was money, really, and I used to wonder what we’d fight about once we had enough (dishes, as it turns out).
Being frugal has served us well. I never felt like we were truly needy even when things got scary. We never used WIC although if I might have considered it if someone had told me that we qualified. I would write often enough that we could count on my occasional income to pay for things like a zoo membership and other luxuries. We had generous friends who sold us a car for $400 and we’re masters at thrift store buying. On paper, we can’t afford our house. You know how they want your take-home to be in a certain ratio to your house payment? Well, according to that, we can only afford a house that cost half as much as this one. We had to have my mom co-sign to get it but we’ve never been late on a mortgage payment.
I don’t think we could have done it without our families nearby. Not just for the warehouse runs but also because they offered their emotional support and occasional dinners out. The only person who ever suggested I put Noah in daycare and get a job is my father and frankly, I don’t have a ton of respect for his parenting advice so it was pretty easy to let that roll off my back.
It also helped having other people around me in the same boat. My sister, some of my friends — they understand about being too poor to go get a cup of tea after a playdate or to contribute to someone’s baby shower fund. That cuts down on the humiliation.
I spent the first couple of years completely bewildered. We’re both college graduates! We’re both smart! Why were we so poor? We both grew up upper middle-class and so we had these high expectations for our lives and they weren’t coming through. I would compare myself to other people and feel like shit. It wasn’t that I wanted a shiny new volvo or a big house or a standing appointment at the hairdressers (although those things would have been nice), it was that I was so sick of wearing 8-year old tights and having to ration the fresh fruit. I would look at people who were worse off and instead of making me feel grateful, it just made me feel guilty for complaining. It really rocked my self-esteem.
Having this house made a big difference. It’s not an especially nice house (it’s a 1961 track home exactly like 73 other houses in our neighborhood) but it’s ours and it suits us. I feel lucky to have a mortgage and to have my supportive inlaws and mom who helped us get into it. (My inlaws gave us an advance on a relative’s inheritance — they were the executors — for our downpayment.) I don’t feel like such a failure anymore.
When I was first home and was feeling so sad and defensive and angry that it was such a financial sacrifice, I thought that every parent ought to make the same choices that we did. When people told me that they couldn’t afford to be home, I’d feel like my head was going to blow up. “We can’t afford it either,” I’d think, “And we’re doing it!” I had a huge martyr complex about it. But now, stepping back from those difficult first years, I can see that just because someone can do it doesn’t mean they should. We’ll be paying for our decision forever. The loss of my income and my retirement is permanent and we’re unlikely to catch up. I also think how hard it was for me — truly convicted that our decision was the absolutely right thing for Noah — and I think that for someone who doesn’t have the same issues with child care that I do, the sacrifices wouldn’t be worth it.
I lost my job soon after I was diagnosed with Graves Disease. The museum for which I was working just didn’t understand that it’s a real disease with real health problems that kept my energy levels at permanent empty while it was being balanced. Losing the job and being able to go on unemployment for 6 months was what helped me finally get healthy.
It also gave me time to start working on starting my own business. We knew that we would start trying to get pregnant sometime in the following year, and being fired actually ended up being a great opportunity for me to get established working at home before getting pregnant. Of course, 3 years later I’m much more established than I expected to be before a baby came.
I seem to be rambling a lot in your comments lately, so let me just end by saying that I ended up being so grateful to lose my job, because it meant that, when I do have kids finally, I can stay home with them while still contributing to the family finances.
Great weblog entry. WIC would’ve been helpful & it sounds as if you would have qualified. Why didn’t you use it?
Was it facing the prejudice and stereotypes? I know I got upset many times going in to that office when they’d assume I was an ignorant uneducated single mother without a clue how to cook or shop.
Truth is, I am college educated married woman with a working husband, but the act of becoming parents catapaulted us into poverty. Like you, I couldn’t bear to leave my children to be cared for by someone else.
The payoff, of course, is feeling confident that our children are turning out well. The fact that it’s easy to drop into hardship once children are present is a social problem.
this entry really hit home for me, like my-eyes-are-getting-teary kind of hitting home. we are in precisely the same situation now. i got o one of my jobs (waiting tables), and have to tell my co-workers that my husband is unemployed, and that yes i have a master’s degree, but right now can make much more waiting tables than teaching at a community college (my other job)…. or i tell one of my customers that i have two kids, near their kid’s age, and i can see it in their eyes, their relief that they are not me, waiting tables to feed my kids.
and some of that is definitely my own perception, but it’s just so hard to be this poor.
was this just a big self–pitying ramble?!!? my comment, i mean…
I really relate to this. It is pretty much the story of our lives. Last year, when J was unemployed for 5 months, our total income for the year was only $24,000, for 4 people (one of them pregnant). I still don’t know exactly how we did it.
Sometimes I wonder if I should work outside the home. J is so supportive of my writing that whenever I discuss getting a job, he says, “You already HAVE a job.” But I get a lot of pressure from virtually everyone except my parents to go back to work f/t outside the home (my parents made similar choices to us, so they’re very supportive).
Then again, as hard as it can be sometimes, I wonder how we’re really suffering as a result of our low income. We have a car, we have health insurance, and we always have food. We have a roof over our heads. We may not have college funds for our children (and that is honestly the part of our lives that most bothers me, because it suggests they’re starting out their own lives at a disadvantage). But compared to the rest of the world, damn, we’re comfortable. It’s only compared to the supposed American dream that we’re lacking anything.
i see myself in a lot of what you have said. i was a student when i had my daughter. for a while, i lived from student aid, and had some support from my parents. while i had little, it wasn’t a lot worse than many of my student friends did (although i spent my money on diapers rather than drinks). then i got married. we were three people living off the same instead of two. then my student aid got massively cut down. i had two pay (mandatory) health insurance for three instead of two, i turned 25 and had to pay adult fee (more than twice as much). my husband, who’d just immigrated, was unable to find a job and couldn’t get unemployment money either. and there we go, we’re reduced to steal toilet paper from the university and hunt coins for a bag of rice.
Been there, done that, and still doing it sometimes. It was so hard on my self-esteem and at times on our relationship. Once I was at home, we lost more than fifty percent of our income. The only thing that got me through having to stay home on the weekends because we couldn’t use the gas in our vehicle out of fear that my husband wouldn’t have enought to make it to work the next week-and of course there was no more money in the pool (or barely a puddle in our case)was looking at our daughter and taking solace in her beautiful and innocent little face. Going to the grocery store with $60 and having to buy groceries and toiletries (the ones we HAD to have) for two weeks would reduce me to tears at times and just a stressed-out mess the others. How do you feed two adults, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for two weeks on $60? We sort of did and just made it through the rest. It is amazing how small you can make the neccesities list if you have to. Right now I do have luxury of being able to buy paper towels (they are rationed), but I dream of the day when I can go to the grocery store and buy everything that I want. I can’t imagine having a full fridge all the time!
My sister is going through this now and my heart breaks for her!