Every once in a while I have to step outside myself and take a critical look at how I’m feeling about this stay-at-home-mom thing. It’s a checkup, an "Are you still okay with this? Haven’t snapped yet?" So far the answer is "Fine, thanks, no regrets, can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing." I keep checking because intellectually I still find it a bit hard to believe that I can really be content in this life — two dozen years of jobs = exciting, motherhood = stifling conditioning dies hard. When I first found myself at home, which happened before my PhD diploma even arrived in the mail, I must have asked myself every day or two. The need to peek is getting less and less frequent as the months and now years (a bit more than 3) go by. Maybe every two or three months now. I guess I’m very slowly getting over myself.
One part of this examination is the question — Why am I content? This is an interesting question because the answer keeps changing. It seemed at first to be because I was getting a badly needed break from working so damn hard, like I was on vacation with my kids. After a few months of that, the answer seemed to change; now I was content because I recognized that my chosen field didn’t suit me, nor I it; it was good to be at home, where I could get my head together and figure out what I was really going to do with my life. A few more years in and it is finally sinking in that this is what I am doing with my life. Whether it’s what I should be doing is kind of irrelevant; every morning I wake up and I do a certain set of things, and what they make me is a parent at home, a homemaker, a homeschooler.
Not someone on vacation (though many days still feel that way) and not someone taking time off from real life. This is my real life. Sometimes I like to imagine that I can go back in time and find myself when I was a senior in high school and tell her what lies in store. I have some bad news and some good news. Well, actually, most of it is really good news, but it’s not going to sound good from where you’re sitting, Little Miss Excellent SAT Scores. Heh.
So I guess the question why am I content is even more interesting than before, to me anyway, because the answer used to be because this bizarre situation I find myself in is not really my real life, and since then I’ve realized that I was wrong, it’s a permanent condition. I don’t have to answer it, it’s wonderful enough that I am content, but I still keep holding this curiosity that is Erin-at-home-at-peace up to the light and squinting at it, looking for the flaw.
I don’t do it for very long, though, and each time less. Eventually some perspective intrudes. I should be embarrassed to be so self-absorbed. The world is full of people who have dull, or difficult, or physically exhausting, or hateful, or painful, or treacherous jobs because they have to. My "job" (whatever some may think) is not any of those things, at least no more than life must be once in a while. All I need to remember: How it would be to want to stay home with my kids and be unable to. It’s a swift kick in the butt that makes me especially thankful I’m where I am.
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