Is it possible to be a feminist stay-at-home parent {specifically: a stay-at-home mom}? I find myself repeatedly defending my position, even to fellow feminists. One of the big points the feminists make to me is: how can I fight the patriarchy if I am submitting to the patriarchy?
For me to answer that, I suppose we need to decide what our bar as a feminist is. Is a feminist someone who plays by the Boys' Rules or is a feminist someone who is fighting for gender equality? My position is someone who is fighting for gender equality and, thus, I do not feel that I am submitting to the patriarchy simply by choosing to be a stay-at-home spouse, a much-needed position in my home.
To which I hear... well, is that a much needed position in your home because that is what you have been conditioned to believe?
No. No, because I would say 9/10 the people questioning me do not have children. Do not move every 1-3 years. Do not have a spouse in a career path where they are rarely home and never to be relied upon. Have never looked into the cost of daycare, finding a new daycare every 1-3 years, trying to continue their degree plan/career path in a new state every 1-3 years... And thus don't truly understand all the complications of this particular issue.
That's the answer. I am not alone in childcare challenges. Or challenges relating to the career paths of our spouses. Because at the end of the day, choosing to have a child {or 5} often means choosing to let opportunities slip by. To take less hours at work. To put school on hold "for one more year." There are gaps that need to be filled, not just in the military community, but in the civilian community. Childcare is expensive and not an expense that every family can afford. That often means waiting until the youngest child is in school full time before exploring career options for the mother-- a period in time that can stretch 10 years-- waiting ten years for your youngest child to start school before embarking on your chosen career path. Sometimes that means accepting jobs in the interim that are beneath your education experience, training, or passions, just because they are flexible. This can mean that the mothers are working in flex positions, compared to their spouses, who are salaried with benefits, furthering their career goals. This ends up meaning that the logical choice, when struggles happen, is for the flex position to take time off work or to pick up the kids every day or to support the family because the salaried position with benefits is the one that pays the bills.
It is an endless circle, one that you can relate to when you have struggled with "Women's health issues," which include: post-partum complications, high-risk pregnancies, breastfeeding issues, pregnancy, childbirth, fertility issues, etc. Pregnancy and childbirth is not always the easy, 9-months of pregnancy, 2 weeks recovery, back on your feet, type deal. I don't understand the expectation that it should be and that it is all personal. Breastfeeding is invasive and exhausting. Yet, we as women are expected to absorb all of this or else we are demanding unequal treatment, being burdens, seeking attention, getting out of work/deployment. It's not fair. It's not equal.
As someone who loves children and always wanted a big family, I see how hard it is to stay home and raise children. I talk to many mothers who have put high-profile, big careers on hold because even with their salaries, they couldn't quite get their family's needs met. They didn't have the support they needed, for a multitude of reasons. The things some of these women say now as stay-at-home spouses: "I miss using my brain all day." "I had such a demanding job. I don't know why I struggle with this." "I didn't think I'd have so much student loan debt to stay home with children." "I don't know why I'm so tired all the time." They are drowning under stereotypes. Even as stay-at-home parents, struggling with the work of being a stay-at-home parent, people lean on the stereotypes that stay-at-home parents are brainless, mindless, unintelligent, and lazy. As stay-at-home parents, we all sleep in late. We wear yoga pants and eat expensive lunches. And Lord forbid we decide not to make dinner-- we had nothing else on our plates that day, yet can't put a meal together?
The stereotypes swirl around us with every decision that we make. We constantly feel we have something to prove, don't want to be a burden, don't want to appear we can't handle it but also internally reprimand ourselves when we can't handle it. We don't understand why the expectation of what we do doesn't live up to the reality of what we do. Why don't we enjoy this more? Why is this such a struggle? Why is this so hard?
That's where I feel like feminism belongs everywhere, in all things, at all times. You cannot promote change or gender equality without every person being a feminist. It is a shift in mindset that we need to support. Women's reproduction and women's health does not belong whispered about between women in hushed doctor's offices, shame flaming on our cheeks. Women's health is not a topic that only women should be educated on. Women's health is something everyone should understand in order to better support those gaps. Women do not have a long history of being connected to the earth, diving back to the "dawn of time" where our feet are "firmly planted in mother earth" and we have innate, natural knowledge how to birth, how to breastfeed, how to care for children, and balance work and home life. Women do not have a history with equal rights, with equal voices, with equal health care. In fact, much of women's rights have been historically curtailed because of shorter life spans due to childbirth, promoting the idea we are the weaker sex. We need to rip the curtain off of women's health, take away the mystery, and learn how to actually meet those needs, whether a woman chooses to reproduce or not. We need to make sure we are meeting people's real needs.
What are my struggles as a stay-at-home parent? I think for starters, I thought I would be raising my children in a community of mothers. I pictured something similar to my deep friendships and my sisters. But it hasn't been like that at all. Parenting isn't a club that you suddenly join and everything makes sense. Parents with younger children judge your children. Parents with older children criticize your younger children, romanticize when their children were young, or give idyllic advice that they would never follow when their own children were a particular age. People are all at different ages and stages in their own lives, in their own parenting, we all have our own particular struggles, and instead of relating all of this to each other, people shrink inward because everyone feels like they are failing. Everyone feels like they aren't measuring up to a standard that doesn't exist, to an ideal that isn't there, to a sense of perfection that none of us will ever reach.
I felt like with my last pregnancy, people didn't understand what I was going through, deliberately or unintentionally. I move every 1-3 years and have to restart my friend base with each move, which is a challenge as an adult. I am the only one plugging my family in at each move. My spouse is rarely home and his job hasn't allowed him to connect with the family on that level. With my last pregnancy and it's complications, I felt that instead of people jumping in to support my struggles, I got much more judgment. "That's what happens when you have so many kids." "I had a hard pregnancy before too." "You keep complaining about your pregnancy, but have you asked about my pregnancy?" It felt that with each downward turn of events in my life, the judgement was heaped on. "You are a competitive parent who always have to have it worse." And with that, I was set adrift at a new duty station with very few resources.
It made me feel that the community that I have worked for over a decade to support-- the military community-- was a farce. Where is this military family? Where is the support that I have given and strive to give with each move? Where is my spouse's command? Where are all these people? I was seen as a failure of a woman-- trying to get my husband out of deployment, not supporting my husband who is in the military and needs to be mission ready.
The experience changed my perspective on stay-at-home parents and, especially, military spouses. Our needs aren't being met. We work in a field with no HR department, no management, no coworkers, no spouse groups, no days off, no benefits. We rely on our spouses. We do our best to make friends, friends who connect with us. We want friends that see us for who we are-- individual people-- but who also like our kids and maybe have kids the same age as our kids so they can play. Yet, even in our friend groups, the friends don't always listen. We find these gaps in our friendships that we strive to fill, that we long to fill, that we wish we could talk uncensored to someone who would actually understand, who wouldn't judge us, who would get our particular problem. We want to connect. We want to be the people we see ourselves as, yet also fulfill this role that we have stepped into. The only feedback we get is negative. And when the tide turns against us, for whatever reasons, there is no getting out alive. We can only sink in it. Because as a stay-at-home parent, it is a lone position. A lone position with no back up, no substitute, no reserves.
I used to think my spouse thought I was a rockstar, that he understood what I put into being a stay-at-home parent. I thought he knew all the late nights I shouldered and the endless days. Getting up at 5 am with the kids and staying present and pleasant until 9 pm, when they finally all fell asleep, only for the toddler to get up at 11 pm, the baby at midnight, a bed accident at 2 am... a bad dream at 4 am... I thought he knew all the people I said good-bye to with each of our moves, the support networks I finally built and then had to leave, again. I thought he knew the difficulties of each of my pregnancies {in general} and I thought he knew the complications of my last pregnancy. It was a punch in the gut when I realized that he didn't. That somewhere along the line my spouse and I had become untethered and the sacrifices I was making for us were really only for me, sacrifices I don't think I would have made on my own, for myself. I realized that somewhere along the line he had started taking all the things I do for granted-- not because I was a woman, but because they were things that I had done in our marriage for our family for so long.
It brought to light the downside of being a stay-at-home parent, especially a long time stay-at-home parent. Your job is thankless. No one is grateful for you. Your community of stay-at-home parents is judging you. Will they be there for you when you need them? For many years, they had for me, but when I needed them most, they let me sink and then they pulled me deeper. My children aren't grateful for me. Maybe they will be one day, but for now they wake me up all night, they complain about their food and clothes and schedule and bicker endlessly. Many of my working friends don't understand life as a stay-at-home parent. My spouse, after all these years, does not and did not recognize what I do.
I was angry. I felt very let down and alone. I talked to my friends, working and stay-at-home parents. Turns out, I'm not alone in any of those feelings. There has to be a shift in thinking. Feminism isn't about submitting to the patriarchy's rules. You aren't fighting the patriarchy by refusing to do traditional female roles or by having a non-traditional gender fulfill a traditional role {such as, a male stay-at-home spouse-- a stay-at-home dad}. If your feelings regarding the work of a parent-- working or stay-at-home-- remain judgmental or shrouded with stereotypes, nothing is really changing. We need to shift our thinking to be more accepting of women's health, women's reproduction, and the role of parents-- working and stay-at-home. Parenting is important to our society and better incorporating women's health, childcare, and parenting into our dialogue will help fill those gaps.
Reflecting on my own experience, I briefly felt embarrassed of my role as a stay-at-home parent. How could I dedicate so much of my life to someone who took me for granted? How could I feel raising my children was important? How could I think I was actually doing something with my life?
I took a step back and thought of my childhood. What did I want to be when I grew up? I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. I wanted a big family. I wanted a house near the beach and woods and I would take walks and write books. I wanted a sturdy writing desk and my hands constantly covered in ink and kids running in and out of the house all day. I thought of who I am as a person-- not what people say about me and not what my spouse may or may not think about the role I've filled in our marriage for nearly 12 years. But who I think I am, how I view the world and how I want to interact in it. I thought about my professional goals. In some ways, I've been a stay-at-home parent longer than I felt I would be, but that is partly because my pregnancies all went different than I thought they would {miscarriages, trying to get pregnant, complications}. I haven't completed the things I thought I would by this point in my life. My book still isn't finished. My degree isn't finished.
I look at my kids, and I know how I feel about them. That's where I feel fuck the patriarchy. I don't care if people want to say a woman's work is her kids. I don't care that I'm a woman and I don't care that they are my children. I love them and I am incredibly proud of them. If a man doesn't feel that same sense of pride looking at his family, then fuck him. Because I love their faces. I love who they are. I love the time I've spent with them. I've gone back and forth-- would I change the time I've spent with them, with everything that has happened in my life over the past couple years? I think maybe. I think I would pursue my goals a little more. But, no, I cannot say at the end of the day that these years have been a waste. I think it is a waste that the world doesn't recognize what I've been doing with my life and I think it is a waste that stay-at-home parents do not have better support networks. I am shifting gears in my role as a parent. I will no longer be the stay-at-home parent I have been over the past decade. I won't be as available to my spouse and children as I have been, tailoring my time around theirs. I am sad to see that chapter close, but I am looking forward to the next chapter of my life, a chapter I expected to have naturally started before now.
Being a stay-at-home parent for all this time, supporting my spouse in the military, has taught me that feminism doesn't belong only in the business world. Feminism belongs at home, in day-to-day life. In your relationships with your family and friends. Feminism is what is going to change the world and bring true gender equality to the next generation of peoples. Feminism should not be recognized by certain haircuts, outfits, or protests. Feminism should be breathed daily and characterized by our small, unknowing actions. Feminism should bridge the gap between working and stay-at-home women, working and stay-at-home men, working and stay-at-home parents of both genders, and expectant parents-- whether by adoption, surrogate, fertility treatments, or traditional pregnancies. Women's health topics don't deserve blank stares and embarrassed avoidance. Women's health is life changing, not just to the women directly affected, but to the people around them. The gaps need to be filled. We can be the people to fill them.
Note: If you are interested in someone actively working to fill those gaps, check out Mother Pukka on Instagram {@mother_pukka}.
For me to answer that, I suppose we need to decide what our bar as a feminist is. Is a feminist someone who plays by the Boys' Rules or is a feminist someone who is fighting for gender equality? My position is someone who is fighting for gender equality and, thus, I do not feel that I am submitting to the patriarchy simply by choosing to be a stay-at-home spouse, a much-needed position in my home.
To which I hear... well, is that a much needed position in your home because that is what you have been conditioned to believe?
No. No, because I would say 9/10 the people questioning me do not have children. Do not move every 1-3 years. Do not have a spouse in a career path where they are rarely home and never to be relied upon. Have never looked into the cost of daycare, finding a new daycare every 1-3 years, trying to continue their degree plan/career path in a new state every 1-3 years... And thus don't truly understand all the complications of this particular issue.
That's the answer. I am not alone in childcare challenges. Or challenges relating to the career paths of our spouses. Because at the end of the day, choosing to have a child {or 5} often means choosing to let opportunities slip by. To take less hours at work. To put school on hold "for one more year." There are gaps that need to be filled, not just in the military community, but in the civilian community. Childcare is expensive and not an expense that every family can afford. That often means waiting until the youngest child is in school full time before exploring career options for the mother-- a period in time that can stretch 10 years-- waiting ten years for your youngest child to start school before embarking on your chosen career path. Sometimes that means accepting jobs in the interim that are beneath your education experience, training, or passions, just because they are flexible. This can mean that the mothers are working in flex positions, compared to their spouses, who are salaried with benefits, furthering their career goals. This ends up meaning that the logical choice, when struggles happen, is for the flex position to take time off work or to pick up the kids every day or to support the family because the salaried position with benefits is the one that pays the bills.
It is an endless circle, one that you can relate to when you have struggled with "Women's health issues," which include: post-partum complications, high-risk pregnancies, breastfeeding issues, pregnancy, childbirth, fertility issues, etc. Pregnancy and childbirth is not always the easy, 9-months of pregnancy, 2 weeks recovery, back on your feet, type deal. I don't understand the expectation that it should be and that it is all personal. Breastfeeding is invasive and exhausting. Yet, we as women are expected to absorb all of this or else we are demanding unequal treatment, being burdens, seeking attention, getting out of work/deployment. It's not fair. It's not equal.
As someone who loves children and always wanted a big family, I see how hard it is to stay home and raise children. I talk to many mothers who have put high-profile, big careers on hold because even with their salaries, they couldn't quite get their family's needs met. They didn't have the support they needed, for a multitude of reasons. The things some of these women say now as stay-at-home spouses: "I miss using my brain all day." "I had such a demanding job. I don't know why I struggle with this." "I didn't think I'd have so much student loan debt to stay home with children." "I don't know why I'm so tired all the time." They are drowning under stereotypes. Even as stay-at-home parents, struggling with the work of being a stay-at-home parent, people lean on the stereotypes that stay-at-home parents are brainless, mindless, unintelligent, and lazy. As stay-at-home parents, we all sleep in late. We wear yoga pants and eat expensive lunches. And Lord forbid we decide not to make dinner-- we had nothing else on our plates that day, yet can't put a meal together?
The stereotypes swirl around us with every decision that we make. We constantly feel we have something to prove, don't want to be a burden, don't want to appear we can't handle it but also internally reprimand ourselves when we can't handle it. We don't understand why the expectation of what we do doesn't live up to the reality of what we do. Why don't we enjoy this more? Why is this such a struggle? Why is this so hard?
That's where I feel like feminism belongs everywhere, in all things, at all times. You cannot promote change or gender equality without every person being a feminist. It is a shift in mindset that we need to support. Women's reproduction and women's health does not belong whispered about between women in hushed doctor's offices, shame flaming on our cheeks. Women's health is not a topic that only women should be educated on. Women's health is something everyone should understand in order to better support those gaps. Women do not have a long history of being connected to the earth, diving back to the "dawn of time" where our feet are "firmly planted in mother earth" and we have innate, natural knowledge how to birth, how to breastfeed, how to care for children, and balance work and home life. Women do not have a history with equal rights, with equal voices, with equal health care. In fact, much of women's rights have been historically curtailed because of shorter life spans due to childbirth, promoting the idea we are the weaker sex. We need to rip the curtain off of women's health, take away the mystery, and learn how to actually meet those needs, whether a woman chooses to reproduce or not. We need to make sure we are meeting people's real needs.
What are my struggles as a stay-at-home parent? I think for starters, I thought I would be raising my children in a community of mothers. I pictured something similar to my deep friendships and my sisters. But it hasn't been like that at all. Parenting isn't a club that you suddenly join and everything makes sense. Parents with younger children judge your children. Parents with older children criticize your younger children, romanticize when their children were young, or give idyllic advice that they would never follow when their own children were a particular age. People are all at different ages and stages in their own lives, in their own parenting, we all have our own particular struggles, and instead of relating all of this to each other, people shrink inward because everyone feels like they are failing. Everyone feels like they aren't measuring up to a standard that doesn't exist, to an ideal that isn't there, to a sense of perfection that none of us will ever reach.
I felt like with my last pregnancy, people didn't understand what I was going through, deliberately or unintentionally. I move every 1-3 years and have to restart my friend base with each move, which is a challenge as an adult. I am the only one plugging my family in at each move. My spouse is rarely home and his job hasn't allowed him to connect with the family on that level. With my last pregnancy and it's complications, I felt that instead of people jumping in to support my struggles, I got much more judgment. "That's what happens when you have so many kids." "I had a hard pregnancy before too." "You keep complaining about your pregnancy, but have you asked about my pregnancy?" It felt that with each downward turn of events in my life, the judgement was heaped on. "You are a competitive parent who always have to have it worse." And with that, I was set adrift at a new duty station with very few resources.
It made me feel that the community that I have worked for over a decade to support-- the military community-- was a farce. Where is this military family? Where is the support that I have given and strive to give with each move? Where is my spouse's command? Where are all these people? I was seen as a failure of a woman-- trying to get my husband out of deployment, not supporting my husband who is in the military and needs to be mission ready.
The experience changed my perspective on stay-at-home parents and, especially, military spouses. Our needs aren't being met. We work in a field with no HR department, no management, no coworkers, no spouse groups, no days off, no benefits. We rely on our spouses. We do our best to make friends, friends who connect with us. We want friends that see us for who we are-- individual people-- but who also like our kids and maybe have kids the same age as our kids so they can play. Yet, even in our friend groups, the friends don't always listen. We find these gaps in our friendships that we strive to fill, that we long to fill, that we wish we could talk uncensored to someone who would actually understand, who wouldn't judge us, who would get our particular problem. We want to connect. We want to be the people we see ourselves as, yet also fulfill this role that we have stepped into. The only feedback we get is negative. And when the tide turns against us, for whatever reasons, there is no getting out alive. We can only sink in it. Because as a stay-at-home parent, it is a lone position. A lone position with no back up, no substitute, no reserves.
I used to think my spouse thought I was a rockstar, that he understood what I put into being a stay-at-home parent. I thought he knew all the late nights I shouldered and the endless days. Getting up at 5 am with the kids and staying present and pleasant until 9 pm, when they finally all fell asleep, only for the toddler to get up at 11 pm, the baby at midnight, a bed accident at 2 am... a bad dream at 4 am... I thought he knew all the people I said good-bye to with each of our moves, the support networks I finally built and then had to leave, again. I thought he knew the difficulties of each of my pregnancies {in general} and I thought he knew the complications of my last pregnancy. It was a punch in the gut when I realized that he didn't. That somewhere along the line my spouse and I had become untethered and the sacrifices I was making for us were really only for me, sacrifices I don't think I would have made on my own, for myself. I realized that somewhere along the line he had started taking all the things I do for granted-- not because I was a woman, but because they were things that I had done in our marriage for our family for so long.
It brought to light the downside of being a stay-at-home parent, especially a long time stay-at-home parent. Your job is thankless. No one is grateful for you. Your community of stay-at-home parents is judging you. Will they be there for you when you need them? For many years, they had for me, but when I needed them most, they let me sink and then they pulled me deeper. My children aren't grateful for me. Maybe they will be one day, but for now they wake me up all night, they complain about their food and clothes and schedule and bicker endlessly. Many of my working friends don't understand life as a stay-at-home parent. My spouse, after all these years, does not and did not recognize what I do.
I was angry. I felt very let down and alone. I talked to my friends, working and stay-at-home parents. Turns out, I'm not alone in any of those feelings. There has to be a shift in thinking. Feminism isn't about submitting to the patriarchy's rules. You aren't fighting the patriarchy by refusing to do traditional female roles or by having a non-traditional gender fulfill a traditional role {such as, a male stay-at-home spouse-- a stay-at-home dad}. If your feelings regarding the work of a parent-- working or stay-at-home-- remain judgmental or shrouded with stereotypes, nothing is really changing. We need to shift our thinking to be more accepting of women's health, women's reproduction, and the role of parents-- working and stay-at-home. Parenting is important to our society and better incorporating women's health, childcare, and parenting into our dialogue will help fill those gaps.
Reflecting on my own experience, I briefly felt embarrassed of my role as a stay-at-home parent. How could I dedicate so much of my life to someone who took me for granted? How could I feel raising my children was important? How could I think I was actually doing something with my life?
I took a step back and thought of my childhood. What did I want to be when I grew up? I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. I wanted a big family. I wanted a house near the beach and woods and I would take walks and write books. I wanted a sturdy writing desk and my hands constantly covered in ink and kids running in and out of the house all day. I thought of who I am as a person-- not what people say about me and not what my spouse may or may not think about the role I've filled in our marriage for nearly 12 years. But who I think I am, how I view the world and how I want to interact in it. I thought about my professional goals. In some ways, I've been a stay-at-home parent longer than I felt I would be, but that is partly because my pregnancies all went different than I thought they would {miscarriages, trying to get pregnant, complications}. I haven't completed the things I thought I would by this point in my life. My book still isn't finished. My degree isn't finished.
I look at my kids, and I know how I feel about them. That's where I feel fuck the patriarchy. I don't care if people want to say a woman's work is her kids. I don't care that I'm a woman and I don't care that they are my children. I love them and I am incredibly proud of them. If a man doesn't feel that same sense of pride looking at his family, then fuck him. Because I love their faces. I love who they are. I love the time I've spent with them. I've gone back and forth-- would I change the time I've spent with them, with everything that has happened in my life over the past couple years? I think maybe. I think I would pursue my goals a little more. But, no, I cannot say at the end of the day that these years have been a waste. I think it is a waste that the world doesn't recognize what I've been doing with my life and I think it is a waste that stay-at-home parents do not have better support networks. I am shifting gears in my role as a parent. I will no longer be the stay-at-home parent I have been over the past decade. I won't be as available to my spouse and children as I have been, tailoring my time around theirs. I am sad to see that chapter close, but I am looking forward to the next chapter of my life, a chapter I expected to have naturally started before now.
Being a stay-at-home parent for all this time, supporting my spouse in the military, has taught me that feminism doesn't belong only in the business world. Feminism belongs at home, in day-to-day life. In your relationships with your family and friends. Feminism is what is going to change the world and bring true gender equality to the next generation of peoples. Feminism should not be recognized by certain haircuts, outfits, or protests. Feminism should be breathed daily and characterized by our small, unknowing actions. Feminism should bridge the gap between working and stay-at-home women, working and stay-at-home men, working and stay-at-home parents of both genders, and expectant parents-- whether by adoption, surrogate, fertility treatments, or traditional pregnancies. Women's health topics don't deserve blank stares and embarrassed avoidance. Women's health is life changing, not just to the women directly affected, but to the people around them. The gaps need to be filled. We can be the people to fill them.
Note: If you are interested in someone actively working to fill those gaps, check out Mother Pukka on Instagram {@mother_pukka}.
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