Honesty

No time to write lately with the busyness of life and school starting next week. But I ran across this post from several months ago that never actually made it to the blog and thought I’d share it.

Recently I came across the following status update on Facebook: “[Friend’s Name] hasn’t slept through the night in more than eight months, but it is so totally worth it!” I laughed as I read it, for three reasons. First, if you want to get all mommy competitive about it, she’s a lightweight, and I absolutely have her beat since I’m going on eighteen months of interrupted sleep. No one gave the baby the memo that, being the third, he should at least pretend his mom has completely mastered the art of teaching her children to sleep and Sleep. Through. The. Night. Already. Seriously. He’s making me look like an amateur, and this is my 24/7 job we’re talking about here. I laughed too because that’s the closest most of my SAHM friends come to writing a status update that is in fact about them rather than only their children, and of course this one still involved at least one child. The part of this update that made me laugh and then want to cry though is that [Friend] wrote an honest thought about what is often one of the maddening, sometimes sad, aspects of motherhood, i.e., sleeplessness, but felt the need to follow it up immediately with a positive spin. It seems as though SAHMs in particular feel an overwhelming obligation to remind everyone constantly that they love their children so much they wouldn’t want to be doing anything else but spending every single waking (or potential sleeping) minute with them no matter what. But we can’t seem to admit the difficult parts of what we do in a direct way. Why do we do this to ourselves and to each other?

The honest-to-goodness truth is that sometimes motherhood seems like such a burden, and being a SAHM can make it feel like even more of a burden because of the never-ending exposure to your children. There, I’ve said it. The unspeakable sentence in most SAHM circles has come to life, so let’s discuss briefly.

For this discussion to work, we first have to agree on the premise that being a SAHM is in fact a job. Many people believe that motherhood is a calling rather than an occupation; I am not one of those people. I do believe that any woman who is a mother is indeed called to be a mother, but those of us who choose to become SAHMs are in fact choosing motherhood as our profession as well. We otherwise would have an outside occupation and be paying someone else to be with our children; ergo, being a SAHM is a career.

That fact established, do you know a single person who loves every last detail about his or her job? If you do, send that person to me, because I’d like to share a thing or two about being truthful. There is no perfect job out there. No matter how much you love what you do, there is at least one negative aspect to every profession on the planet. Some career paths have far more negatives than others, of course, and it all depends on perspective. But the negatives are always there just the same, and I’ve never understood why so many women act as though being a SAHM is any different.

First, let’s consider the pay. Um . . . yeah. I don’t care how many e-mails you want to forward me about being paid with “butterfly kisses and Velcro hugs” or always having a “hand to hold that is usually covered in jelly or chocolate,” the fact of the matter is the pay stinks. Butterfly kisses don’t pay the bills, and that jelly-covered hand is only increasing those bills exponentially through soap purchases alone. And just you wait until that same (hopefully) formerly jelly-covered hand is gripping a steering wheel in a few years!

OK, so the pay isn’t very good, but what about working conditions? Step in to my laundry room and I’ll show you a dark, scary place to work. And that is only the beginning. Noisy, chaotic and often downright messy workplace? Check. Multiple “bosses” all asking you to do something different, often yelling said requests? Check. A mind-boggling amount of varied knowledge and multi-tasking required? Check. Complete and total lack of privacy? Check. Fighting and injuries and tears a part of every single day? Check. Being on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year? Check.

You get the idea. The list could go on for days, but the point is this: being a SAHM is hard work. Truly. It is also indescribably life-changing and rewarding and fulfilling in ways that no other job can be, but it is still hard work, plain and simple, and can feel like the heaviest burden in the world. We are pouring ourselves into raising the next generation here, after all, and that’s amazing and terrifying by turns. Plenty of people do not understand the sacrifices we SAHMs make in order to be home with our children, and so naturally we feel the need to defend ourselves against their attacks, whether those attacks are intentional or not, by returning fire with all the positive aspects of being a SAHM. But shouldn’t we be able to be completely honest with each other and share the lows right along with the highs?

I love telling my fellow SAHMs about the latest adorable thing the baby did, the way my preschooler melts my heart by running into my arms after school, how my grade-schooler tries her best to help me by, ahem, “cleaning” my closet. Those highs really are what it’s all about, why I chose to be a SAHM in the first place. But sometimes I also need to be able to voice some of the lows, to say that it’s an awful thing that I haven’t gotten a single good night’s sleep in nearly a year and a half. Period. No positive spin required, because telling someone that fact doesn’t make me love my children any less or diminish my importance in the world because I don’t like something about my job. What it does say is that I’m tired, could probably use a hug and maybe, just maybe, that I could use a hand around here for a little while too, because I need to go take a nap. Any takers?