The Money We Give Up

I am often told I am lucky to be able to stay at home with my baby, and don't get me wrong, I am very grateful to have this opportunity.  I can only imagine what it might be like for a single mom who has no choice but to send her baby to a day care and work full time just to keep a roof over their heads.  However, most people seem to assume that staying at home is only a luxury for the privileged upper-middle class or better.  They are shocked to learn that my husband only makes $23k/yr before taxes.  It's incomprehensible to them that we would *choose* to have me stay at home and live in poverty.

Well, maybe "choose" is a little bit of a strong word, in all fairness, because as we're now scraping the bottom of the barrel and looking to the next school year as when I will need to go back to work, I have applied for dozens of jobs and haven't gotten a single call back yet.  Not even for an initial round of interviews--nada.  It's still only early spring and I do have a semi-solid temporary fall employment prospect to fall back on if all else fails (plus I could always join substitute teacher lists), but the fact is, permanent full-time positions aren't growing on trees, even for experienced teachers with advanced degrees looking at all arenas: public, private, and post-secondary schools.

That said,  I could never imagine not staying at home in my baby's first year, even in the face of severe poverty, unless I had literally exhausted all other possible options.  Yes that includes social welfare help.  I don't give a damn if people say that that's leeching off the system.  Why should the *lifelong* benefits of natural parenting be reserved only for those fortunate enough never to have to ask the government for help?  I hear many AP folks argue that AP can still be followed with a working mom, and I wholeheartedly agree that this is true after about 12-24 months depending on the child.  But babies less than a year old have a strong preference for close attachment and need frequent non-solid-food nourishment.  Maybe to a certain degree you can closely replicate a natural parenting lifestyle if you are working in that first year, but let's cut the pc smokescreen and be honest for a minute.  Is pumped breastmilk in a bottle really equal to nursing at the breast?  Can a binky truly be a stand in for the comfort from "non-nutritive" suckling? Can the working poor usually afford to find a caregiver dedicated to upholding AP values?  Is an attentive day care a genuine replacement for a parent?  Are those daily walks in a stroller pushed by an early childhood educator as good as being worn in a sling or other baby carrier?  Is responding as soon as possible to each (of numerous) baby's needs really as nurturing as immediate response by a parent who only has her own child(ren) to care for?  Can a really sweet babysitter really be as intuitively connected to a baby's needs as a mother who follows her instincts?  Can the snuggles in the evenings and weekends make up for the lack of bonding during the weekdays?

Let's be real.  We can do things to get as close as possible to a natural state, but nothing in human biology is in line with mama and baby being separated for 40 hrs/week while baby is cared for alongside other infants.  Just look at our closest animal relatives.  A baby gorilla was recently born across the river from me at the local zoo.  That mama gorilla won't even let caretakers come near her baby yet, much less relinquish him to any other would-be caregiver for any amount of time.  We are not much different from other primates in our evolutionary expectations.  We are born to be carried in arms during infancy, and to nurse frequently, and to only gradually begin to explore our world independently, unlike other mammals that are born being able to walk, trot, and/or gallop.

Are those other primate mothers lazy leeches?  No.  With babe in arm, the seek out food.  They multitask, keeping a cautious eye out for predators or other dangers.  They earn their keep and then some.  If we human mothers were only granted the chance to similarly multitask and not be separated from our babies, it would be a win-win-win-win scenario.  Mothers could pursue their careers outside the home, employers wouldn't have to worry about long maternity leaves, babies could get optimal nourishing, and society could stop whining about the lazy leechers. If it were plausible for me to bring my baby to work with me (and by that I mean in a sling or in the same room as me where I can respond to him immediately, not on-site childcare provided by someone else), I'd have already gone back to work (assuming I could have found gainful employment).

But instead I am on WIC and foodstamps.  And I have sacrificed obscene amounts of money to be home with my babies over the years.  I sat down and calculated a rough estimate of what my earnings would have added up to if I had continued teaching in the district I was employed by when I was pregnant with my first.  I'd have earned, cumulatively about $400,000 since my first child's birth.  Instead, I took a year off with her, only to find before I could start a new school year teaching, that I was pregnant with her sister, so I did some substitute teaching that school year, earning a few thousand dollars, followed by another year off with another babe.  Did some more subbing the following year, and started going back to school to pursue astrophysics.  But before I could finish, my husband and I divorced.  I knew if I could just get through the undergraduate program I could start earning money as a graduate student researcher, so I went into debt to finish up.  This far undid the earnings from subbing, putting me about $50k in the hole instead (since I was also living on loan money).  Then there were a couple years of graduate school and child support which got me about $27k/yr. And now I'm at home again.  So effectively, I've earned a total of about $2,000 since my first child was born.  And that's not even bringing up the fact that, had I been employed in the position I gave up when she was born, I'd have been able to pay down my educational debt instead of "in-school" deferring it and adding to it.  So the way I see it I gave up well over $400,000 to be at home with my babies.  Was it really worth it?

Yes.  I have looked back on my life and asked myself if I could trade what I have now for all those lost earnings and lost future potential earnings (since I'm a less-experienced and thus lower-on-the-totem-pole teacher that I would have been).  The answer remains a definite no, no matter how I look at it.

Critics might still argue the label leech on the logic of poor family planning.  But I doubt those critics saw a 99% effective IUD fail them and result in an unplanned pregnancy.  Shit can happen and not everyone is ok with having an abortion.  (This isn't a prolife argument, just a statement that some moms could never choose abortion, even if they respect the choice others may have made differently).  Furthermore, many poor folks don't have a shining ray of light at the end of the tunnel.  They see no end in sight to their poverty, no matter how hard they work.  Should only the privileged in our society have the right to procreate?  I believe that line of thinking is dangerous, elitist, and wrong.  And I also believe it's inaccurate and equally-elitist to claim that hard work is the answer.  Some are lucky to have their hard work rewarded by society.  Others break their backs in fruitless hard work and scrape by living paycheck to paycheck.

Furthermore we are not all dealt the same cards.  Some of us graduate from high schools with 90% of graduates going on to post-secondary schools, while others of us have to struggle to avoid drugs, gangs, and violence in our schools.  How can students possibly be expected to concentrate on attaining the same level of academic achievement when they are dodging bullets from drivebys and may be forced to work as many hours as possible as a teen in order to help out their single mom, whose husband just went to jail?  I personally don't belong to either of these extremes, but I appreciate that I had a better hand dealt to me than some and worse than others... And even with a decent hand, things can go wrong...

Well so what?  Humans are adaptable creatures and many babies in day care turn out perfectly fine.  It's giving them love that matters.  Besides why should women feel they *have* to stay at home?  I'm not arguing that they should!  Indeed, mothers decidedly should NOT feel they have to stay at home to be a good mom.  Everyone has to do what's right for their family.  But the point is that, we shouldn't be asked to rear our young in a biologically unnatural way unless we want to.  And we shouldn't be told that this unnatural way is equivalent.  And it shouldn't be unfairly demanded that poor families be subject to this unnatural way if they disagree with it as being what's right for their family.  We should *all* be given the right not to be separated from our babies for at least a year.  AND the stay-at-home vs. work-outside-the-home choice should also not be a choice forced on any mom of an infant.  There should be the very logical choice instead to multitask with baby, just as other primates do.