Professional couple, now SAHM - does it change your relationship?

[mrschop]

I know having kids results in a big shift, anyway. But I had a good career - same field as DH - which I've given up (at least temporarily) to stay at home with the children and support DH. He's just had a big promotion at work, is under lots of pressure so I'm at home alone a lot. So our day to day lives, which had previously been very similar, are now quite different. I'm 18 months in to my SAHM role, and am quite happy, but I do wonder how things will be in 5, 10 years time: I always assumed we'd be 'equivalent' (socially/professionally) throughout our life, and now his career is motoring off while mine recedes in to the past. Although I don't like to define myself purely in work terms, I do think the woman I am now is quite different to the woman he married! I know others must have gone through this, I just wonder how you get used to your expectations as to how your life together will be being completely turned on their head?

I think you make excellent points foxinsocks.

Yep, I said the same myself Foxinsocks. Education is about choice. If I had no education my only option would be a low paid, low skilled jobs, paying just enough to scrap by. But having had an education I have the choice to have the career, do jobs just for money and convenience or take time to raise my children.

I also agree with Cod that you don't spend your time at home stagnating, you think about the future and plan, collect skills but as I also said in an earlier post I don't think most SAHM do just sit around, cleaning and changing nappies. Most of them are out and about doing other things.

OK somebody says that they know of women with teenagers who haven't worked since their children were born and who don't appear to do anything (although how you would know their personal circs unless they are friends I don't know). You also get women who have babies and go back to work within days and delegate 90% of their childcare to other people. Both of these are extremes - I would suggest that most people fall between these two. Their careers are important but they arent the priority or they stay at home and they do other things and a hundred different variations in between.

I really don't believe either that any educated and intelligent woman does anything whether it is deciding to work or to stay at home without giving it thought.

And as for giving up work having implications for your relationship, having children has implications. It is just another variable and like the decision to have children in the first place, it has to be worked through as a couple. Both of you continuing to work after children will still mean a shift in your relationship too - you can't focus on your careers to the exclusion of all else and adjustments have to be made. Different adjustments, but adjustments all the same.

This is a very interesting discussion - sorry I've come to it so late. I wanted to add that my DH and I were both full-time employees in high-pressure careers until I went freelance in 2001, five years before I had our first child. The adjustment for both of us to me working from home full-time was bigger than the adjustment in our relationship when I became a full-time mum and then a part-time mum, part-time self-employed person working at home. My life is busy and not too unbalanced and full and interesting, but my gut feeling is that DH sees my work as somehow less 'real work' than his, despite me only contributing slightly less income than him, and I may well project that as well. So perhaps it's partly to do with the way you and your DH see your 'status' as someone who doesn't go to an office in a suit everyday, for example, regardless of whether that's because you are doing a full-time job as mum, or a mixture of work/volunteering/being mum, or working almost full-time but from home.

I've just finished reading 'Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety' which has some really interesting sociological thinking on SAHM, working mums, and how most of us actually fall somewhere between the two extremes. Every family will have a different formula that works for them, and that will change as the DCs get older and what you all want from that equation shifts.

I have new acronyms!

WIHMS WOHMS and WOIHMS

Women who work in the home, outside the home,
or both!

Take your pick.

It could make these debates less divisive .