Now I can give birth, manage a household, care for a baby, AND HAVE A JOB!
Warning: This post will probably piss you off. You have been warned. Now I’m off the hook.
You know what I like about the “olden days?” Being a parent was actually recognized as the full-time job (at minimum) that it is. You know what I don’t like about the “olden days?” That it HAD to be the woman who sat home all day and magically made the world turn round. And got ZERO help, because supposedly microwave meals made life easier.
This topic has been swirling in my head for months and I just haven’t had the balls to say what I want to say. I have no idea what the FUCK we have done to ourselves in this country, but we’ve gotten to a point where we have kids, simply to say, “Great! Now who can I pay to take care of them so I can go back to work?” As if kids fit perfectly into our life pockets without making any sacrifices to the size and shape of the pocket.
This blows my mind for two distinctly different reasons.
I’m starting to seriously resent how much shit we think we need. How we’ve gotten to the point where two people must work so they can have their mortgaged home, two iPhones, cable TV, two cars, blah blah blah. In order to maintain a life which is within our “means”, we decide that it’s perfectly fine to dump our kids at daycare all day. Or because we like our jobs and don’t want to sacrifice it to be a parent. Because that’s what everyone else does! To make ourselves feel better, we sometimes call this baby school or something along those lines. We just want our kids to “socialize with other babies.” That’s why we do this! RIGHT? And the cost of this? For my two boys, in small-town Wisconsin, USA, it would be $1400/month.
I understand that most of you are reading this right now and getting seriously pissed off. I WARNED YOU.
If we aren’t throwing kids in daycare because we HAVE TO, in order to LIVE, it’s because taking care of kids is stressful. Yes, it is stressful. There are times when I get so damn tired of this crap that I just want to run away with a giant bottle of whiskey and never come back. But that’s what being a parent IS. IT IS STRESSFUL. What did we think we were getting ourselves into when we decided to have kids? That is was some magical fairyland where we could live our lives, just as we had, with the simple addition of an adorable baby that would never require work?
What really blows my mind is the thought of adding a JOB to the multiple full-time jobs I already have. As if all this isn’t hard enough, why don’t I throw a job into the mix and see how THAT GOES. Now wonder why we’re all so goddamn stressed ALL THE TIME. We never stop. We have given ourselves so many distractions, that raising kids just becomes another thing to do, rather than THE THING. Which it probably should be.
I have no idea how to reclaim what’s been lost. And maybe I’m the only one who wants to? I only know that today is just another day for me. It isn’t the last day of a weekend with the boys before it’s time to wake up, dump them off at daycare, and pick them up again, just to put them to bed. What a life we’ve created in this country. JESUS CHRIST.
In related news, I do think that parents who get to drop the kids off at daycare probably like their kids better, but that’s another post.
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I agree with you, that is why I stayed home with Logan until he started school. Now that he goes to school I got a job, simply because I need to get out of the house too and with him not here I don’t see the point in staying home any longer.