Did Your Mother Work? What Lessons Did You Learn From Her About Work-Life Balance?
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I was just talking about first generation working moms vs. second generation working moms the other day with a friend, and I thought it would make an interesting discussion here: Did your mother work outside the home? To what extent have you adopted or rejected her systems in your own life as a working mother? On the flip side, if your mom stayed at home (thus making you a first-generation working mom), what systems or practices of hers have you most needed to overhaul? What about your partner’s mother — if she worked, have you adopted any of the systems their family had in place? If she didn’t work, do you feel like you’ve had to reset your partner’s expectations? (And another super fun question: Do you feel like you get pushback from your mother or MIL over different choices and different systems?)
For my own $.02, my mother has always been a stay-at-home mom, so most of the home workload (and a lot of the parenting workload, at least in terms of pickups/drop-offs, etc.) always fell to her. She’s never had a cleaning service, and she rarely hired a babysitter. My mother-in-law, on the other hand, has always worked, and I’m grateful for that because my husband has never expected me to do 100% of everything — he’s a very willing participant in the household balancing act, including sharing parenting duties and even things like laundry. Personally, I feel a lot of guilt over things my mom did that I just can’t do — being involved in the parent/teacher association, for instance — and I often feel like a bit of a rebel in playing the “do, delegate, or nope” game and having a ton of lazy mom hacks. (However, technically, I’m probably not a first-generation working mother — my maternal grandmother worked!)
What about you guys? If your mom worked, have you recognized, adopted, or improved her own systems for work-life balance into your own life? If you’re a first-generation working mom, how have you had to adjust the experience you had growing up to fit your own family’s lifestyle now?
Stock Photo via Deposit Photos / pxhidalgo.
My mom worked and was the primary breadwinner (although I assumed it was my dad till middle school thanks to larger societal messaging). Now, when I see how little my dad does around the house and in the kitchen, I absolutely do not know how she balanced raising two kids close in age, a high stress job, and a house without murdering him. The are both surprised by how much my husband does with regard to housework, cooking, and childcare, and I absolutely would not have it any other way- thank god expectations for dads have changed in some regard. Plus, I don’t have to work as hard as she did because I have an equal partner and I think that makes a big difference in my day to daya happiness level. That said, I don’t think I will have as much career success as she did. My husbands mom never worked and I think is also surprised by how much her son does, but I am the only daughter in law who works and I think they have realized how much more financially secure our family is as a result, as opposed to his siblings who constantly need money.
My mother was a pediatrician when I was young, and she had au pairs and nannies living in our (really small) basement to help when we were young. My dad was striving to make partner at his law firm, and I remember one or the other of them would sometimes bring the three of us to work in afternoons and evenings and stash us in an empty conference room to watch cartoons.
It’s funny, though — I have strong memories of being forgotten at school by an absent-minded mom, but as an adult I now realize that those incidents happened after she had stopped working to care for my younger sister (her delayed 4th). She started to seem more harried and less collected to me at that age, and I wonder if that was due to the mental health impacts of losing her professional identity.
I’m now a striving young lawyer with a small child, and whenever I am tempted to step back, I remember that I pay our mortgage, but also that it’s possible my mom was a better mom when she was happy and fulfilled.
My mom worked, and the times I can remember it affecting me were when I was older and wanted more independence, but still relied on her to drive me places. I recall being super annoyed waiting for her to pick me up, when all my friends with stay at home moms got picked up right away. I could have taken the bus, but I wanted to be able to hang out after school or walk around town. Same thing when I started doing sports – I got annoyed when she wasn’t at my beck and call to take me to practice or pick me up.
Honestly now I would throw money at this problem and get a babysitter to ferry kids around to activities. I think my mom didn’t do this because she worked admin jobs and didn’t have the extra money to throw at the problem.
I feel like a lot of the frustration at felt at her work could be solved now with (1) cell phones (to relay when one of us was running late or getting out early) and (2) public transportation or a paid babysitter chauffeur.
My mom worked but, once my special-needs brother was born, she “steadily climbed her way down the career ladder” as she puts it, in exchange for more flexibility, shorter hours, etc. When I was young (6 and under) she was an equal breadwinner and I had a Nanny. Then she stayed home for a few years with my brother and gradually re-entered at much lower positions than she had before.
It has helped my guilt some because, honestly, what I remember from being small and her working/earning more is the awesome trips we got to take and stuff we got to do together, it never bothered me that she was at work. She even had to miss some holidays (she worked in a hospital) but it never bothered me.
What I learned most from her, though, was what I needed in a partner. My dad has a niche job where he makes very good money but works from home and sets his own schedule. He hasn’t been to an office in decades and doesn’t really understand that you HAVE to go to work, you can’t “just tell your boss you can’t do a meeting that day”, etc. That makes things really difficult for her because he is not very helpful when it comes to things like appointments for my brother.
The biggest component to my success as a working mother is that my husband was raised by a working single mother. He can’t even imagine me staying home, to him OF COURSE my job is as important as his (even back when I made 50% of what he did), and OF COURSE he does half of the housework. The fact my partner was raised by a working mom has had more impact on my life than the fact I was.
My mother entered the work force for the first time when I was in high school and my father became permanently unemployed. Because she’d never had a job other than part-time work in college, her options were limited and she ended up working very hard in unpleasant conditions for very little money.
While working, my mother still handled absolutely everything related to the kids and the household. I grew up thinking that it was natural for the mom to have both total responsibility for and total control over everything, and it’s been hard for me to accept my husband’s “interference” in my domain. For example, I feel strangely threatened by his desire to participate in back-to-school night and parent-teacher conferences. I know he just wants to be an involved parent, but to me it feels like he is second-guessing my parenting ability because this is so obviously a mom function where dads have no place.
Both of my parents worked, but I was incredibly fortunate that they both worked jobs in education where they had the summers largely off — meaning that while I went to daycare, I didn’t have to go during summer break, which felt like an enormous win. I do remember hating daycare, but my childhood wish was simply that we lived close enough to take the bus home – I didn’t wish that my mom didn’t work.
My father is very enlightened in many ways and he does a fair deal of domestic work – cooked dinner a few nights a week, always did dishes when he didn’t cook, was a loving and involved father. That being said, I will never forget my mom observing once (when I was older, and with only mild bitterness) that whenever there was a child-related emergency, it always fell to my mother to deal with it, as “he never thought my work was as important as his.” Factually that might have been true, but it sucks to be treated that way as a foregone conclusion. As I have gotten older, I see a lot of learned helplessness, too – he refuses to go grocery shopping, depends on my mom for most meals, doesn’t do laundry, definitely leaves her to do most of the emotional labor like organizing stuff and birthday gifts and the like.
My MIL didn’t work for most of my husband’s childhood, but if I can raise my son in the model of his father, I will feel like I succeeded. He does easily half (if not more) of the work of keeping our home running and is also great at the emotional labor piece (I will never have to buy a Christmas present for his family, and most of the time he can help me with mine). The only minor similarity is that he cooks not at all, not even a little – but in NYC where takeout is so plentiful, that’s not much of a problem.
I was raised by a stay at home mom with a PhD and a “big” career up until kid #2 came along. Then she decided to step out of her job and focus on raising us kids, and, frankly, was a really awesome mom who derived a lot of joy from being able to be home with us. For a long time I thought I would follow a similar approach to things, but, life got in the way and I’ll likely be a single mom of one, and be a working mother with a nanny. My parents always emphasized that the money they had saved when my mom worked was HUGE for setting our family up to be financially ok and pay for college. So the main messages I internalized were that education is always valuable, whether you work or not, and that saving money and being financially responsible is more important than whether you work. That said, as life has gone on, I’ve also realized all the ways my parents got just plain lucky – they are still happily married, my dad never lost his job unexpectedly, housing prices in their area have gone up, etc, etc, and I sometimes bristle at their blithe ignorance that things don’t always work out even if you’re responsible. The money I saved back in the “saving up before I become a stay at home mom” days sure has been useful paying for a nanny, though!
My mom was single from when I was 4 until I was 12 and my father was not in the picture. She supported my younger sister and me by working as a legal secretary. From my point of view she had good work life balance in that she stuck pretty closely to a 40 hour workweek, had dinner with us every evening, and spent time with us on the weekends. She made the financial sacrifice of turning down most overtime opportunities so that she reliably got to spend time with us. We had a mixture of babysitters, before and after school care, and extended family care when she was working and we weren’t in school. For the most part this worked well, though the babysitters/summer nanny she could afford was not exactly the top of the line. She now cringes when I tell stories about the things our babysitter did/let us do. I understood that she was giving us the best she possibly could from a very young age, and even though we didn’t have as much as my friends I always appreciated her working to support us.
When she remarried she took a lower paying job with a nonprofit in our town so she didn’t have to commute into the city any more. I remember being worried about money, but it was admittedly nice that she had more flexibility at that point. My step-dad helped minimally around the house and did not take on a parenting role, so that aspect of my mom’s life sadly didn’t change dramatically.
I’m just about to have my first child. I jumped from being a child of a single working-class mom to being a HYS-educated lawyer with a very supportive partner, so things will be very different for me. I will try to emulate my mom in that I want to spend quality time with my kids while balancing my work load– but it will be a lot easier with my disposable income and my partner’s help.
My mom worked (in a prestigious, high-powered career) but had a bit of a unicorn situation. She took two years of unpaid leave when I was born and then worked part-time from home while I napped (as a toddler) or went on playdates (as an older kid) so I never went to daycare or had a nanny. She returned to full-time work when I was in kindergarten, but even then adjusted her hours to be home from 3-5 pm so I never had to go to formal after-care programs or be a latchkey kid. She’s one of those people who thinks her way is the best way, so she’s very critical of both daycares (your kids are neglected!) and stay at home moms (they’re financially dependent on their husbands!). It was hard when I was pregnant because she kept acting like all the choices I was contemplating were bad – she really wanted me to go part-time, which I would have loved, but is just not an option in my field. Ultimately we settled on a nanny for our infant daughter and my mom was satisfied with that compromise – it’s allowed me to continue in the workforce but our daughter has one trusted caregiver and gets lots of adult attention. I went to preschool at age 3 and my daughter will probably start daycare around age 2.
Even once my mom was back at work full-time, she did essentially 100% of the household chores – she scrubbed the toilets, cooked dinner every night, did the dishes. My dad took out the trash. Like others, I don’t know how she didn’t kill him or why she didn’t put her foot down and demand he do more. She was also the ultimate Pinterest mom before that was a term – homemade Halloween costumes, elaborate homemade birthday cakes and decor for parties, writing and illustrating her own children’s books, etc. Admittedly most of that was before she returned to work full time, but even as I got older, she was also super involved in my life, which I really appreciated. She led my Girl Scout troop, volunteered in my classroom, drove me to lessons for my sport an hour away etc etc. I have no idea how she made it work and it’s a daunting example to live up to, but I hope to try.
Both my parents worked full-time from the time I was ~2, my mom in public health, my dad as an oncologist. They were in public service/ government hospitals (not in the US), which meant they had relatively decent work-life balance. At the same time, we had significant help. My dad’s parents lived with us and we also had a live-in housekeeper. Honestly, that is so far removed from our reality here in the US (we live near neither set of parents and daycare 8-5 is our only childcare) that it’s not all that relevant, except that I am Team Childcare Without Guilt.
On the partner front, my husband’s mom was a SAHM while his dad bounced around a variety of jobs. Once the kids were mostly out of the house, MIL went back to school/ work and now has a career she loves. Amazingly, he and his brothers are all staunch feminists and genuinely equal partners at home – my theory is they saw their mom getting dragged around the country after their dad’s dreams and resolved never to replicate that in their own lives. (Plus there are 6 siblings; they each did their fair share of chores, something my sister and I barely had to do, so husband is better at cleaning than I am, though I’m tidier.)
Great topic! My mother worked an ~80% schedule (sometimes a bit less) until I was in college. It was great for our family — she could always help with extracurricular activities, volunteer in our classrooms, etc. A downside is that working part time did limit her career; in the twenty years since I’ve graduated college and she’s been working full time, her career has absolutely skyrocketed. I’ve discussed whether she regrets her decision to stay part time for so long, and she absolutely does not. She feels she had the best of both worlds: a professional career and opportunity to be actively involved in my and my sibling’s lives. Another downside was that money was tight growing up, with no room for outsourcing — and she did the bulk of the housework and 1000% of the emotional labor (like, I love my dad, but I’m not sure he would remember our birthdays if she didn’t remind him). But that probably would have been the case whether she was part time or not.
Her example helped me internalize that being a working mother is possible and even preferable. She made the whole thing look easy (from the outside; I’m sure it wasn’t!) and as a 70 year old she still has more energy than me. I’m very grateful to have had her as an role model.
Interestingly, my husband’s parents maintain very traditional gender roles, but my husband is one of the most mature, equal minded partners I can think of — to the point where I often look like the typical “manchild” that some women complain about. His mom seems baffled by how much childcare and housework he does — not in a judgey way toward me, more of, “wow, he cooks! whodathunk it?!” way.
My mom was a SAHM. She’s really really smart and hard working and I think if she had been born in a different time and place she probably would have had a very successful career. She was the only one of her 12 siblings to go to college (many didn’t even finish high school), and got a master’s degree in chemistry in the late 1960s, when women going into hard sciences was basically unheard of. She married “up” out of poverty when she married my dad, who was also smart and driven and an only child from a well off family. He joined the army and they moved every several years, which kept her from ever having much of a career. She worked in hospital labs, taught science, and did whatever she could find to do. She waited until her late 30s to have kids.
She quit working when I was born and went back to work as a math and science teacher after my sister went to college.
Unfortunately, my dad became an rx pill addict and alcoholic and started openly cheating on my mom, which really freaking sucked. I saw our family struggle financially as dad was the breadwinner and mom hadn’t worked in many years by that point, and we were just really stuck. My mom did absolutely everything around the house, managed our finances, took care of my elderly grandfather (my dad’s dad) who lived with us, etc. while my dad made demeaning remarks about her spending his money.
I had this burning feminist rage moment (though I would not have even known those words) at some point in my childhood, and decided that I would never ever be so financially reliant on a man that I couldn’t leave with a moment’s notice. And that’s what I’ve done. I have never wanted to work part time, to see my child more, etc. if it means that I can’t support her and myself. I love and trust my husband, but I will never forget what I saw my mom go through. And what I see a not-insignificant number of my SAHM friends go through too. I’m in this mom’s group on facebook and there is so much crap that SAHMs put up with because they’re stuck. My sister quit her lucrative science job to be a low wage barista when her husband joined the navy, and now stays at home with two young kids and doesn’t plan to go back to work until they’re in college. It absolutely boggles my mind. Different people have different levels of risk tolerance, though.
When my husband is present, he’s very hands on and involved in a way that my dad was not. But he has traveled or worked odd hours so much that I’ve ended up doing the bulk of parenting since my kid was born. He’s finally back to a non travel job, so hopefully we’ll figure out a new normal. We had to have a come to Jesus talk about emotional labor about a year ago, and since then he has really grasped that he needs to take initiative. I think seeing my mom’s situation really helped me have very little guilt or hesitation about being a working mom. It also gave me very little guilt about making pragmatic choices to help me stay in the workforce happily (things like using formula, sleep training, etc).
My mom left the workforce when I was 2 and my brother was a newborn; dad was in a severe accident and required a lot of home-care around that time … he was also an alcoholic and they ended up divorcing when I was about 6. She remarried shortly thereafter to someone with some money, and never rejoined the workforce.
There is some tension in our relationship now that I am a parent. I credit this to two reasons:
(1) The things that she is really good at are not the things I have the time for / interest in as a working parent. I don’t have any interest in hand-making a Halloween costume – Target is fine. It hurts her feelings that I don’t try to do some of the same things for my kid that she did for me, and takes it as a personal rejection of how she parented.
(2) The lesson I learned from her was not, “stay at home parenting is a worthwhile and fulfilling life choice” but rather, “financial dependency sucks and can leave you stuck in a really bad situation.” I can’t really talk to her about my opinions on the topic without her getting super defensive. She’s proud of my professional achievements, but she also sees them as my personal efforts to NOT be like her, which are difficult feelings to work through.
This is an interesting topic and something I think of whenever someone brings up “mom guilt” for working outside the home. I don’t really feel that ever and I think it helped that from as far back as I remember, both my parents worked and neither really fit the standard gender stereotypes (i.e. my dad cooks, cleans, had a more flexible schedule and my mom is not into crafting/baking/Pinteresty things at all, and didn’t really feel the need to be at all my school events) so I didn’t grow up thinking I had to be a certain way because I’m a woman. I also went to daycare and afterschool care so I have no qualms against those, especially considering our kids will be in much higher quality care centers than I went to. My husband had a SAHM but despite this is a completely equal partner/co-parent and probably takes on more of the childcare due to his more flexible work schedule.
I guess I’d be a third-generation working mom, since my maternal grandmother worked full time for the majority of my mother’s life (maybe starting around Kindergarten?) and my mom worked at least part-time, moving to full time when I was in high school? I’m the oldest, and she was getting her master’s when I was a baby, she started teaching when my youngest sibling was about 6mo. She didn’t move to a tenure track position until we were adults though.
My MIL was a SAHM, but her mother was a professor, and she talks fondly of the housekeepers and nannies who stayed with her. MIL is now our main childcare, and she does the things with the kids I don’t have the time or inclination for, like seasonal crafts and bird-watching. (DD1 is a bird person, who knew?) A lot of this is because she was left in a pretty rough financial place after FIL passed away, and with no real job history, she doesn’t have many options. MIL sometimes makes a ‘I don’t know how you do it’ type comment, which depending on the tone and my mood could be taken as ‘why do you do it’ but I usually deflect and move on.
DH is super supportive of my career (a shared goal is for me to make more than him, which we’re close to, even though he’s in a higher paying field) and does more solo childcare in a week than I do. But a lot of this comes from a more logical place than an emotional one, as we’ve seen the differences in our parent’s financial situations, and really want to be on surer footing.