Becoming SAHM

There is this blog I've been following, the SAHM Project, a one woman countdown to getting out of the daily grind of her hated job and melting into what she imagines will be the slow rhythms of staying home with her kids. One is seven, the other is on the verge of being born. (For those who may have missed it, SAHM stands for stay-at-home mom.)

It's an escape fantasy really. She longs to trade the deadlines, awful people, the hurry up and go, do, complete for just being. As with many escape narratives, the focus is on the negative – what she is running away from instead of what she is running toward. (Although she does see herself staying in her pajamas for an inordinate about of time and mentions a preference for changing diapers as opposed to some of the crap she has to put up with.)

My favorite part of the site is the countdown clock on the side with eight figures: days, hours, minutes, seconds. It's reminiscent somehow of the blastoff clock that rolls back to send shuttles into space or the clock in Times Square that the whole world seems to watch to welcome in the new year. The hitting of the zeros is supposed to represent a great, anticipated, maybe even feared change. (Even though on the plain old New Year, this countdown is usually anticlimactic. January is still a long, cold, endless winter month.)

For the most part, I connect with the SAHM Project's journey. There are many days that my yearning for home has more to do with not wanting to be at the office. The fact that my child is waiting for me, wanting for me is one giant perk, but not the reason for the exit strategy. (Although really my personal SAHM fantasy didn't begin until after my daughter was born and because I was blindsided by this sudden desire, I am still trying to puzzle my way into a world I never thought I'd want.)

In Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (University of California Press, 2007), Pamela Stone investigates the forces in 54 professionally educated (MBA, MD, JD, etc), upper class women's lives that pushed them out of the workforce and pulled them home. The thematic message woven throughout these stories seems most consistently to be: It's simply too hard to combine the fast paced, stream of work with its infinite demands on our energy and brain power with the completely opposite rhythms of life with children, that is different, but no less demanding on our energies and brains (even if the time is less rigidly scheduled and tasks can be met in varying degrees of dress.)

Is it too far a leap to say: If we loved our jobs, we would stay in them?

Yet, the more complicated narrative being woven by Stone's book and others that have recently followed (Sylvia Ann Hewlett's On Ramps and Off Ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success) is that the current forces within our working culture are such that it is impossible to actually love our jobs once we become mothers.

The workforce, as it is currently conceived, is simply not compatible with being a successful parent (there for our children in all the ways we want to be there for them) and a successful, fully achieving professional (there for our bosses in all the ways they want us to be there for them).

The more time I spend toggling between being a professional and a mother the more I tend to agree with this assessment. (And yes, I feel as though I toggle, not that I am both, or that I do either as well as I could if I was not trying to do both. I tend to think that this is less because I've absorbed the cultural dichotomy and more because I actually feel this is how my reality plays out.)

There are thirty some-odd followers on the SAHM project. The comments that begin to pile up are messages from other mothers, ones I can only presume are SAHMs themselves because of their responses. They congratulate her. They praise her courage. They offer her encouragement, mostly in the context of their own transitions into SAHM-ville. They are waiting, excitedly, for her to join them there. The music is playing. The gates are opening up. I find myself caught up in their excitement, even if I haven't figured my way to join them, despite that ticking clock.

Then, the last entry is a curious one. It is more about loss than I expect. She sites her very real accomplishments in her workplace. She worries about what will happen there once she leaves. She also leaves the door very obviously open to returning by telling her co-workers that she'll be back. This too has a firm date, twelve weeks (thankfully protected by law). Even on the verge of her exit, she talks about being torn.

What she doesn't say, what she doesn't talk about is the life she is moving toward. I wonder why this piece of the narrative remains so hidden. Why the pure, unadulterated, uncomplicated joy, stays so tight to the chest (save the few short comments below each post, but even those talk about what a hard decision becoming SAHM was to make).

Are we so afraid of the mother who is in love with her SAHM life that we have to lock her up in the closet and pretend she doesn't exist? Do we sell her out and characterize her instead as the locked up women we fear becoming in the pages of the Feminine Mystic?

Or do we fear that the breadwinner father will figure out that he's drawn the short-end of the stick and will likewise begin to opt out? Breathe, only 1% of fathers are currently SAHD. Which begs the question: Is the acronym more prophetic than it means to be because so many dads are missing out or does it mean that some day a whole generation of fathers will also contend to be tortured by their choice to stay home?

Or is it simply that life is complicated and whether real or imagined, our stories are still stuck, having grown from a generation of women who were pushed out into factories than stuffed back into homes, followed by another generation who pried back open the doors to universities and the professional workforce, even though having children sent many of them back home. (See previous post -- Oh Pioneers -- for more on this statistic).

That is, of course, the trouble with fantasy, the problem with happily-ever-after. The clock hits zero. I want to know what happens next.