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?

It's actually not always that good to have them around, something I've wrestled with over all those 23 years as indeed my mother did. To an extent you get used to it but it's a very different dynamic at home when there are people who work for you there, good and bad points as I'm sure Anna's grandmother would say. My grandmother went to India in the early 1920s to work as a nanny. I wonder if she worked for Anna's grandmother.

I think the OP made an interesting point about the divergences of roles. After all, it would be surprising if that didn't happen. Many women have been well educated and brought up to think of themselves as earning good money and then they stop. Men don't have this discussion or debate online or in real life. They don't ever imagine that having children will cause their careers to stagnate or even to end. And that discrepancy in what happens to men and women when childen are born is well worth discussing I think.

What is wrong with taking some time out to look after your kids. Why does it mean that your career has to end or stagnate? As I said in a previous post, it doesn't stop you going back to work and having a fulfilling career until you are in your sixties and beyond. of course, you'll have ground to make up but if you were ever worth your salt in the first place, you'll be re-hired. I've found my time off has given me the opportunity to reavaluate my career. I'm still ambitious and when I do go back to work I'll do so with renewed vigour. I've not lost any desire to make soemthing of myself. I just wanted (and had to) to bring my kids up in the first few years of their life and I've regretted it not one single moment.

CC, I didn't say there was anything wrong with the choice. But I think the choice is worth looking at in terms of what you might call gender politics. For example, do men who work not bring up children? How does the traditional divide affect relationships between men and women (the OP's original question)? How does it affect relationships between men and their children? And, of course, women and their children.

Do we think a man who is away a lot with work is less of a father than the one who's home at 6pm?

It's easier for women to give up their career to do the early years childcare.
They receive much more support for that choice than men ever would. I don't think that's accidental.

I think that Alfiesbabe understood the point I was trying to make which is that we do still live in more of a patriarchal society than we (or perhaps I should say I) thought we did. The evidence for this on MN is overwhelming actually. It comes back to the assumptions that NKF was talking about in her (his? sorry I don't know) post. Men assume that they have to work. Women still frequently don't and that discrepancy is at the heart of the point I am making.

Yes, it's like a different world from my world where most women have very good careers, earn a lot and work full time. I almost didn't imagine until I came on here how many housewives there were. It's amazing. I am really surprised they want to exercise that choice. I find them hard to understand.

Most decisions seem not to be sexually neutral or else they are but the women always earn less so therefore the men keep working and the women don't. Most women seem very happy to accept these things. They have a very different mind set from women who see it almost as an important matter of principle they earn as much as their other half and he does as much if not more than they do at home. I wonder what makes some of us like that and some of us not. Upbringing, levels of testosterone, exposure to the media which shows women at home and as virtual clothes horses or simply that women marry up and marry richer men on the whole.

Maybe some of us just fall in love with our children Xenia,

What upsets me about domestic/childcare work Vs career work, is the former is mostly invisible and utterly taken for granted (unless a man has done it then, he certainly tells you). It may be just as boring booking a meeting room and balling odd socks. But the former has some status, whilst your family pull socks out of their drawers and chuck them around the room without even thinking you did this for them, so you have to do it all again...

Being the person who looked after everyone else's mundane needs - rather than using my brain (and I don t think looking after kids is brain work, it is largely repetitive and mindless) ? day after day would just make me feel miserable and enslaved.

But I can understand some women can subliminate that part of themselves and enjoy feeling needed, caring and coping.

DullWitch I don't subliminate that part of myself. I just use it at other time, doing more challenging things. IMO a SAHM is not about being a mother 24/7, it is not going out to paid work. I look after my children, run the house, chait the PTA, am learning the piano, setting up a (currently non-earning but in a few years it will be) cake decorating business from home. It isn't all laundry and hoovering. Many SAHms do plenty to stimulate their minds. You name me a career that doesn't have plenty of mind numbing moments?

CC I think it's important to keep the debate to a practical level. It's nonsense to suggest that sahms fall in love with their children while wohms don't. That sort of comment doesn't further any kind of reasoned discussion.

I am genuinely interested in why women earn so much less than men and why they give up their often hard-won careers so readily.

It's not universally true that these women re-enter their former professions. One of my chums, a truly bright and clever girl took precisely two years out. It has taken her exactly nine years to regain the seniority she lost. It's staggering how just a very little time out can affect careers. If she'd tried to re-enter the labour market in her mid-forties rather than her late thirties, I reckon she'd have had little chance at all.

Quattro, in my case I earnt similar to dh, I hated my job, his earning potential was set to steadily incresed annually, mine was and would remain stagnant for years, or the way the nhs is going would decrease. Between the 2 of us my children knew they childcare better than their own parents. We (WE) choose that I should take time out, spend with the children, take stock of where I wanted to proceed career wise and when. I haven't sacrificed anything, haven't been forced into it. I am not a boring, subservient servant/cleaner. I have a fulfilled and stimulating life, plans for the future, all I don't have is a paycheck in my name.

CoV - that sounds a great balance. But few SAHMs I know are so enterprising and engaged in society. Then they moan they are bored and have no role when they've spent half their day in coffee shops or tootling around the shops with their babies.

Major companies are really going to have to rethink women re-entering the workplace. Now the majority of medical, accounting and law students are women. Yet almost all of them stop full time work when they have babies. So unless they do welcome them back, there is going to be a huge shortfall in available talent.

I sometimes wonder why they give these places to girls - at expence of boys - when boys would serve the country for longer and be a better return on their education.

Well isn't that the logical consequence of that train of thought? Why bother recruiting and training women? In fact why bother educating women beyond 18? Isn't that the way the Taliban thinks?

But it is true, though isn t it. I have a friend who is a doctor, another who is an Oxford educated lawyer. They both could return to work fairly easily and their kids are all around 8-10. But they have no intention. They just do art courses and redecorate their houses and sit around all day. And I just think, my parents paid for your education out of taxes on their tiny salaries. And you are wasting all that investment the state made in you. Someone else could have taken that course who really really wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer.

Quattro, I didn't say that WOHMs don't fall in love with their children and I don't appreciate being lectured on how to conduct this debate.

Here we go again...

FWIW, I endorse the CoV point of view that bringing up children and managing your family life does require quite a lot of brain power if it is to be done to a high standard. It also leaves time in the day for other activities (of multiple different natures, depending on your personal preference) but not for a full-on, full-time job.

Sit around all day? How do they manage that?

Oh these stay at home mothers makes SUCH a meal out of looking after a baby/toddler! They turn it into a high powered job, with all the groups and toddler training and flash cards and spending months researching schools/nurseries, just so they FEEL it is something more weighty than essentially cuddling, cleaning and chatting to a child.

CoV, has the right plan. Turn outwards, make a difference in your community.

They sit around all day because their children are all at school until 3.30pm.

Gosh yes, I recognise the art courses. Also interior design courses. Also PTA stuff. Also cordon bleu courses. Also curtain-making businesses with astonishingly low levels of production. Also healing courses (takes years apparently) Also painting lessons. Also being a magistrate.

Actually that's a bit unfair, being a magistrate probably could be useful.

It's all harmless enough but the point remains, you really don't catch many men filling their time like this, which brings me right back to how patriarchal a society we live in.

Sorry Quattro. I did't mean to be so aggresive. I'm a bit hormonal today....just waiting for it to pass. The point is I'm really offended by suggestions that I'm some sort of inert, slobby moron simply because I've taken time out to be with my kids. The circumstances of my family dynamic (disabled husband, no family around etc) meant that in some ways I had no choice, but tbh (and this is where the falling in love with my baby bit comes in) I woiuld've made that choice in any event. I love it. I loved work too and I put every effort into it, but when I had kids I couln't bear the thought of somebody else looking after them. My own experiences of a working mother shaped my decision as well.

It is a good deal of work teaching a baby/toddler good emotional control - it requires a great deal of patience and one-to-one conversation, as well as endless, unremitting modelling of decent behaviour.

And, judging from the many threads on MN about discipline, an awful lot of parents haven't got that message yet.

Magistrate, PTA, voluntary work, charity shop stuff... all keep communities going, have total value.

All these self-indulgent pretend courses for services (healing, massage, aromatherapy etc) no one really wants - and certainly won t when the recession takes hold - are just time-fillers for women who mostly should wake up and do something with their lives.

OK, so if children are at school between 9 am and 3.30 am, a SAHM "only" works between, say 7 am and 9 am drop off and between 3.30 pm and 11 pm betdtime? That's already nine and a half full-on hours. And most SAHMs do quite a few chores during school hours - only the very lucky few get to delegate them all...