that I knew this person’s criticisms were unreasonable and unwarranted, I still felt a twinge of guilt.
Guilt, unfortunately, is often the reluctant working mother’s constant companion. Guilt when you drop off the kids at daycare and they don’t want to go. Guilt if they happen to hit a milestone while at daycare and you don’t see it. Guilt when evenings are filled with errands or extracurriculars or even just dinner preparations and cleanup instead of quality time with your kids. Guilt when you’re eager for the kids’ bedtime because all you want to do is turn your brain off and watch a show on Netflix with your husband.
Guilt when a child wants you to chaperone a field trip, or has an in-class party or awards ceremony, but you’re completely out of paid time off. Or worse, guilt when your children are sick, and even though it’s breaking your heart to leave them with their father or a sympathetic relative or neighbor, you can’t afford to take an unpaid day or there’s a meeting you can’t miss, short of a dire emergency.
I can also attest to the fact that stay-at-home mothers aren’t immune to mom guilt. After being laid off twice in the span of one year, I decided to take a break from the workforce for a while (primarily so I could concentrate on writing this book). I was still wracked with guilt — guilt that I wasn’t getting enough housework done, guilt that I was spending more time doing housework and writing than with my kids, guilt that I wasn’t contributing financially to the household like I had before. It never ends.
As actress Anna Faris puts it, “Motherhood is like a big sleeping bag of guilt.”10
It may not be possible to get rid of the guilt entirely, but you can turn it into a tool for good. Use that guilt as encouragement to prioritize your tasks and stay focused on your children so that you can be completely present for them during the times when you are home. Focus on providing your children with quality time in lieu of a quantity of time.
Remember that guilt is often Satan’s way of trying to infuse us with depression and self-doubt. He loves to hit us where it hurts and whisper in our ear, “If you were a better mother, you wouldn’t be working right now; you’d be with your child.”
Sometimes, we have to be firm and say, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” whenever those niggling feelings of guilt start creeping into our heads. God gives us conviction and the strength to make the changes we need to make — he does not give us condemnation.
Also remember this: If it was God’s plan for you to be home, you would be. Like the Blessed Virgin Mary, you are being faithful by saying “yes” to God’s will, even if his plan was not one you had envisioned for your life.
God may have you in your current situation for a reason. Maybe in the capacity of your employment, you will affect the lives of a client or a coworker or a customer for the better, bringing them closer to God. Or maybe God is protecting you from a financial pitfall that would otherwise transpire. But whatever the reason, as long as you have carefully and intentionally discerned the will of God for your life, you can be confident in knowing that you are where he needs you to be, even if you can’t immediately see your place in his larger plan.
For example, I often prayed for our circumstances to change so that I could be a stay-at-home-mom, but it took thirteen years for that prayer to be answered. In hindsight, I can see that God’s plan for me was to form the Catholic Working Mothers Facebook support group, which has now touched the lives of thousands of women. If God had answered that prayer on my timeline instead of his, the group might never have been created, and those women would not have gotten the support that they needed at that time in their lives.
Another tactic that helps with the guilt is to reframe the aspect of the situation that is making you feel guilty and look at it from a different perspective. For example, a CWM in my group was lamenting about how hurt she felt that her toddler, when asked where his mommy was by a friend, said, “At a meeting, working, working, working.”
I asked her, “If he had that same reply when asked where his father was, would that be equally as hurtful?”
She said, “That’s a really good question … and helpful to consider. I don’t think AS hurtful, very true.”
It’s a fact that kids with working parents are missing out on time with them — but that is true whether the parent is the mother or the father. I’m pretty sure that same child would also miss things like healthcare, good food, reliable shelter, and other necessities that his mother’s income helps to provide if she did not work.
The Daycare Dilemma
By and large, the biggest source of guilt for reluctant working mothers is putting our children in the care of others while we work. It seems to be somewhat more acceptable if we have husbands who are SAHDs, or if we have relatives who care for our children; but if we put our children in daycare, we are “paying someone else to raise our kids” or “letting our kids be raised by strangers.”
Unless you take your kid to a new daycare every day, or you take your child to a center where turnover is unusually high (as in, new employees are hired and fired on a daily or weekly basis), strangers aren’t raising your child. Instead, your child is forming close bonds with an adult who cares about him or her.
Furthermore, even stay-at-home parents aren’t engaging their children one hundred percent of the time. A stay-at-home-parent does housework, reads, visits with friends, shops for groceries, brings the kids to playdates where they play with other kids, perhaps does volunteer work, blogs, spends time on social media, etc. What’s the metric for gauging how much one-on-one time constitutes raising versus not raising? Is there a mathematical formula?
“Honestly, I put staying home out of my head. For me it was an impossible pipe dream that would have required winning the lottery because my husband is disabled; but still it was something I had always wanted, and I was disappointed. Happiness is more about perception than reality. If your heart is somewhere other than your reality, you’re going to be unhappy. If you can’t change your reality, change your heart.”
— Carrie K.
If we want to foster a culture of life in this country, we must stop denigrating daycare. Most single moms need to work to support their kids, and a lot of mothers who choose life and keep their children instead of giving them up for adoption must, by necessity, place their child in daycare.
If it is the quantity of time that parents spend with their children that equates to “raising” them, then logically only mothers raise their children. Fathers do not, since (presumably) the father is working forty or more hours per week and only sees his children evenings, weekends, and holidays. Yet Catholics speak about both parents raising their children, as does the Church. How can this be, if the mother is the only one doing the raising?
What those with this mindset do not realize is that a good daycare complements our parenting; it does not replace it, much as schools do not replace parents as the primary educators of their children, but instead serve as a supplement to a child’s education. Those who criticize daycare seem to be under the impression that all daycares are designed to expose young children to secular modernism and hedonism.
While centers like the ones they envision may exist, they certainly aren’t like any of the ones I’ve had experience with, or have sent my children to in the past. They’ve obviously never seen my kids’ former daycare, which was a home daycare run by a Mormon husband-and-wife team with four kids of their own. I know from experience that they shared many of the same moral values that I do as a Catholic, and they were also very respectful of our Catholic Faith (just as I was respectful of their Mormon faith).
