Even as I type out the title I hear voices (loudest of them perhaps my own) saying “But Stay At Home moms work too…at HOME!”

And even as I say that I shake my head to myself and say “But you know what I mean?!”

A dear friend sent a bunch of us friends this article and invited us to comment and share our thoughts. Even before I had read the article, my brain was abuzz, my hands shook and my thoughts flew rapidly around in my head, colliding with each other. This certainly isn’t the first or even the most well written article on the subject. Yet, it effectively scratches at the scabs of an old argument.

I remember that when I was a teenager I would often comment (with a shrug of the shoulder and flick of the wrist as only a teenager can) that I would never ever be a working mom. My mom was a stay at home mom and she was pretty good at it.  What I now realize is that a lot of my conviction came not from my well-thought out arguments  but from what I had seen and heard at home. My parents often commented on a specific time period in my childhood when my personality had apparently undergone a huge change. For a few months my mom, who was always at home when I got back from school, had to take over supervising the construction of our new house. I would come back from school and stay at the neighbors until mom would return home in the evening. It seems I became a bit withdrawn and quiet in those few months. This fact was often mentioned and elicited many a sympathetic nods from whoever was being told this story making the child me really see it from that point of view too. The line between truth and “desired truth” is blurry at this point. Did I actually become uncommunicative? Had my studies really begun to suffer because mom was not around when I got home? How much of it had to do with the fact that I was bored stiff at the neighbor’s house? What about my constant tiffs with my older teenaged sister (who got back home before mom did) which left me feeling traumatized. What about the fact that I was growing up and my personality was undergoing changes anyways. Maybe mom being home would have helped me tide over a difficult phase. Or maybe, just maybe, it was my mom’s own guilt that constructed that idea of my missing her and turning into an introvert.

Looking back, and with the benefit of hindsight (more than a quarter of a century!), I think I gained something special from the experience too. In fact its what I remember more than anything else about the period. I saw my mother, a woman who does not have a college degree, take charge of a very tough and demanding project. My father had to be at work all day. Mom negotiated with contractors, architects and labour. She held her own (and still does) on the basics of home construction like no one else I know. With many years of stitching and sewing experience, she’d learned the importance of scale and precision. Late into the night I saw her take a scale and pencil and draw up blue prints and mark instructions. She argued and often proved her point to her husband (being from a generation where this wasn’t common or desired). I saw my mother shine in the role of a woman in charge. Had life given her an opportunity, she could have been a formidable architect. Its almost a better memory than that of mom being at home everyday. But then we customize our memories to suit our present, don’t we?

Cut to many many years later. Here I am a woman with two Master’s degrees, over 15 years of work experience and several accomplishments under my belt, the most recent of them, being the mother of a bright little girl. I say its an accomplishment because that’s what it feels like when the child laughs and smiles and seems to engage with the world around her. I have not had a full time job for nearly four years now, so I can’t say that the arrival of the little one a few months ago, has in any way upset my apple cart that much. Given all things, and looking at it from the outside, I have it fairly good. My husband and I run our own thing and I am able to work from home. I have family that stays close-by and is always ready and eager to help and I have fairly good (albeit erratic) house help. That’s all good but that’s not all.

I am one half of an entrepreneur couple, but I know I am the half that’s not pulling its weight. Its not that I don’t want to, its just that when I should be answering emails, I am usually wiping drool. When I should be making phone calls, I am making exaggerated “yum yum” faces so the baby will learn to chew her food. I hate that these antics, however cute and enjoyable, can not replace the high of an “adult” achievement. To add to that when you run a business, things happen slowly. Its two steps forward and one back. In that sense it is worse than having a full time job. With a regular office and its deadlines and pressures, achievements become quantifiable. That is how we are trained to measure our successes. Being with the baby can make hours go away too quickly with very little to show at the end of the day. In a world where until yesterday one got a pat on the back in the form of a good Report Card or a GPA score or good raise, how will we now know we are doing okay? “A well brought up child should be a reward in itself”, some say. Wrong. For one it takes too darn long and two, its too much pressure on both mom and child. That argument just doesn’t cut it for me. There has to be something else.

Not a day goes by when I don’t find myself missing “work”. I long to be able to get up and go. Just pick up the bag and leave! I hate not being able to have conversations with friends on the phone (because babies have a sixth sense about it and will demand attention right that minute). I hate that I am a thinking person enough to know that I have little financial freedom (the start-up is…well a Start Up). I hate that I am cynical enough to know that marriages today are what they are and that even though mine is working out so far, all the crumbling nests around me make me insecure. I hate that I have become one of those women who I swore I would never ever ever become- you know the kind that never read the newspaper and forget to comb their hair and go out dressed in mismatched house clothes and seem at once too self-absorbed and distracted. I dread to see myself as that woman in my gym who is desperately trying to lose the flab on her tummy but keeps getting off the treadmill to take calls from her kids and husband. She wants something for herself but they want something from her too…urgently. She is unable to let go of either. Its sad. Its real.

I find myself unable to pick sides in the debate because the very nature of the argument takes me back to the world of “measurable”. Raising a kid is not good or bad, more or less, better or worse, its different. Working a full-time job isn’t always what its chalked out to be either.Being a work from home mom isn’t a perfect solution either. Its apples and oranges and pears. And like them all.