Another tactic that helps with the guilt is to reframe the aspect of the situation that is making you feel guilty and look at it from a different perspective. For example, a CWM in my group was lamenting about how hurt she felt that her toddler, when asked where his mommy was by a friend, said, “At a meeting, working, working, working.”
I asked her, “If he had that same reply when asked where his father was, would that be equally as hurtful?”
She said, “That’s a really good question … and helpful to consider. I don’t think AS hurtful, very true.”
It’s a fact that kids with working parents are missing out on time with them — but that is true whether the parent is the mother or the father. I’m pretty sure that same child would also miss things like healthcare, good food, reliable shelter, and other necessities that his mother’s income helps to provide if she did not work.
The Daycare Dilemma
By and large, the biggest source of guilt for reluctant working mothers is putting our children in the care of others while we work. It seems to be somewhat more acceptable if we have husbands who are SAHDs, or if we have relatives who care for our children; but if we put our children in daycare, we are “paying someone else to raise our kids” or “letting our kids be raised by strangers.”
Unless you take your kid to a new daycare every day, or you take your child to a center where turnover is unusually high (as in, new employees are hired and fired on a daily or weekly basis), strangers aren’t raising your child. Instead, your child is forming close bonds with an adult who cares about him or her.
Furthermore, even stay-at-home parents aren’t engaging their children one hundred percent of the time. A stay-at-home-parent does housework, reads, visits with friends, shops for groceries, brings the kids to playdates where they play with other kids, perhaps does volunteer work, blogs, spends time on social media, etc. What’s the metric for gauging how much one-on-one time constitutes raising versus not raising? Is there a mathematical formula?
“Honestly, I put staying home out of my head. For me it was an impossible pipe dream that would have required winning the lottery because my husband is disabled; but still it was something I had always wanted, and I was disappointed. Happiness is more about perception than reality. If your heart is somewhere other than your reality, you’re going to be unhappy. If you can’t change your reality, change your heart.”
— Carrie K.
If we want to foster a culture of life in this country, we must stop denigrating daycare. Most single moms need to work to support their kids, and a lot of mothers who choose life and keep their children instead of giving them up for adoption must, by necessity, place their child in daycare.
If it is the quantity of time that parents spend with their children that equates to “raising” them, then logically only mothers raise their children. Fathers do not, since (presumably) the father is working forty or more hours per week and only sees his children evenings, weekends, and holidays. Yet Catholics speak about both parents raising their children, as does the Church. How can this be, if the mother is the only one doing the raising?
What those with this mindset do not realize is that a good daycare complements our parenting; it does not replace it, much as schools do not replace parents as the primary educators of their children, but instead serve as a supplement to a child’s education. Those who criticize daycare seem to be under the impression that all daycares are designed to expose young children to secular modernism and hedonism.
While centers like the ones they envision may exist, they certainly aren’t like any of the ones I’ve had experience with, or have sent my children to in the past. They’ve obviously never seen my kids’ former daycare, which was a home daycare run by a Mormon husband-and-wife team with four kids of their own. I know from experience that they shared many of the same moral values that I do as a Catholic, and they were also very respectful of our Catholic Faith (just as I was respectful of their Mormon faith).
Their house was clean and neat (much cleaner than my house, for sure!). They had a huge playroom with lots of toys, and a big backyard with artificial turf and play equipment, plus a misting system for hot months. They took field trips, played games, and read stories with the kids. They provided two nutritious meals a day plus a snack in the afternoon. My kids were in their care from 2011 to 2017, and they’ve cared for all six of my children — three of them since they were eight weeks old, and one since she was a year old. They became good friends, and I felt blessed and reassured that my children were in excellent hands while I worked to help support our family.
Similarly, the daycare we used from 2017 to 2018 was an inhome daycare run by a wonderful Christian woman who loved our kids as if they were her own. My kids loved her in return, and we remain friends to this day.
The stories from other Catholic working mothers are similar. We aren’t tossing our kids into gulags while we traipse off to work every day. We put a lot of time and effort into finding a daycare situation that is a good fit for our family and complements our parenting. Some CWMs choose to employ nannies or au pairs. Some have relatives watch over their children. Some CWMs don’t use daycare at all, and work opposite shifts or have their spouse stay at home with the children, or even work as daycare providers.
Whatever situation we choose, we make sure that our children are happy and well-cared for — and if we have concerns, we resolve them or find alternate arrangements. We can plainly see that our kids are happy, healthy, and thriving in the care of people we know and trust.
Resentment Is the Greatest Enemy of Contentment
Guilt isn’t always bad, though. Our culture likes to joke about “Catholic guilt,” but guilt can be a positive thing when it is the result of a certain situation or action clashing with our well-formed conscience. It’s a good idea to analyze any situation or incident that is making you feel guilty and explore what changes you could have made or can make in the future. Sometimes there are no changes you can make, and you’re doing exactly what you need to do. But there might be a step you can take or an action you can perform that will bring you closer to what your ideal is, and alleviate some of that guilt.
If you are desperately longing to be a SAHM, to the point where it’s causing anger and resentment in your life, talk to your husband. Go over your finances together — your income, your expenses, your debt-to-income ratio, your short- and long-term financial goals. Discuss what needs to be done to make your dream a reality. Sometimes just having a plan and a goal to work toward can help ease the guilt. Even having a clearer picture of what circumstances would need to change in order for you to stop working can make you feel more confident in knowing that you’re doing the right thing in your current situation.
Sometimes, however, the above approach isn’t feasible (for example, if you’re a single mother). I saw a quote on Twitter last year that said, “Resentment is the greatest enemy of contentment.” If you are actively resenting your job, your boss, your coworkers, your general situation, or other aspects of your life, you’re going to be much more susceptible to guilt, and it’s going to be a lot harder to enjoy what you have if you’re constantly obsessing about what you don’t have or want to have.
I remember one day that was really rough for me. I was tired of commuting three hours round trip every day, tired of working, tired of constantly feeling like I couldn’t keep up with the laundry, the dishes, the cooking. I found some satisfaction in my work, and I knew that my salary was necessary for my family’s financial survival, but trying to balance a full-time job with full-time motherhood of (at that time) four young children seemed more difficult by the day.
“The concept of ONE or TWO people (the mother and father usually) being the sole nurturer, provider, caretaker, driver, supporter, etc. of their child is a completely new concept. For years we had generational caretakers. Multiple generations in the home would take care of the whole family. It was a group effort. In places like India and Japan, this is still a very common practice. In America,