parenting

The Stay Home Mom Economic Trap

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     I went to college over a decade ago, where I took entirely too many classes in Political Science and English.  I studied entirely too hard and graduated from the Honors Program with Honors.  Those classes and honors never directly secured me any sort of employment.  They did get me two of the most miserable years of my life in law school.  Luckily, I escaped in time to have to endure year three.  At least that is the way I choose to look at it.

     If you ever wonder what happens to people who go to law school but don’t get a J.D., some of them become paralegals at ridiculously low pay in absolute desperation.  That was a friend of mine.  Some of them go home and become waitstaff.  That happened to another friend of mine.  Some of them re-apply to a different law school, end up in a real estate law office, and hate every day of their life.  Yet another friend.  In my case, I went on the administrative assistant track, quite by chance.  I needed a job, and by chance, I got hired on the first try.  I was so sick of law school at that point that I didn’t want to step foot in anything that remotely resembled a law office.

    Fast-forward a few jobs and companies.  I established myself as a pretty capable assistant. On the side, I went and got a paralegal certificate just in case.  That was many years ago.  I haven’t been completely idle.  I volunteered at a hospice.  I volunteered on a suicide intervention hotline.  I’m apparently excellent in a crisis.  I’m finding that this quality doesn’t matter so much on a resume.  Job continuity is the only thing that matters on a resume, and by golly, it is the one thing that I just don’t have.  

     Over and over I hear the tale, oh but you haven’t worked in so long.  Yes, technically no one has handed over a paycheck to me in several years.  I haven’t been cramped up in a cubicle while trying to meet deadlines, but I have been working.  My brain didn’t just up and leave my body because I decided to stay home for a while to raise my daughter.  I have not lost my ability to speak on a phone, work on a computer, or interact with other human entities.  On most days, if I have at least two cups of coffee in the morning, I can even do math still.  I remember the quadratic equation by heart as well as how to calculate a derivative.  

     I have been doing this job search on and off for a few years now.  I’ve yet to get anywhere with it.  I’ve applied for and been rejected by all kinds of employers because of the end date of my last job.  My resume just goes into the big black hole of a server somewhere, or else in the garbage.  I’m so invisible that according to the government’s economic spin doctors, I’m not actually one of the unemployed.  

     My other dilemma is that should I actually get a job, I probably won’t earn enough money to cover the childcare costs to make the job worth it.  I don’t want to work just to pay a sitter.  It is absolutely insane that I have to be afraid of being unemployed and be afraid of being employed at the same time.  How am I going to pay for all the antacid I go through worrying about this ridiculous situation?  Have you noticed the effect of inflation on a giant bottle of TUMS?  

     

     

     

 

Looking for the Middle

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Today, my daughter’s lesson to me was have a little more faith in her.  My 5 year-old has been ice skating since she was 2 1/2 years old.  She saw a cartoon of Minnie Mouse and Daisy ice skating and that was it, she was hooked.  She won 1st place in a recent competition although it surprised everyone, including her coach and myself.  When she has lessons, the focus level can be negligible.  Sometimes, I really wonder about what goes on in her head because it is literally like talking to a brick wall.  Her coach has to come up with extremely inventive ways to keep her going like making up completely silly stories or crazy adventures on ice.  

In the past, it was the violin. She absolutely begged to learn violin with a passion rare in a kid so young.  It was about a year before we agreed to let her take violin lessons.  When her teacher demanded that she actually get down and focus after several months of playing, she wanted no part of that.  She quit ballet as well.  The two things she has stuck with are ice skating and karate. Both of these are activities that require a high level of dedication.  She persistently refuses to practice karate outside of class even though she loves karate and talks about getting her black belt when she is older. She talks about how important it is to practice, but that is as far as it goes.  If I take her for extra ice time just to skate for fun, she sits on the ice and plays with the snow she makes with her skates as if it was a snowy sandbox, oblivious to anyone around her.

I want her to have fun with her activities.  All work and no play makes for absolute misery.  At the same time, I want her to learn how to practice a skill.  Today, after the lesson, her coach asked her to practice doing figure skating pumps around in a circle 5 times.  Then her coach went to go teach another student.  To our delight and complete shock, she just kept going.  She kept practicing for half an hour entirely on her own without any additional coaching, a complete first!  I’m just sorry I didn’t believe she would even stick with the 5 times around the circle.  But then, it wouldn’t have been such a great surprise.  

I have loads of confidence in my daughter, and my goal is that she can have confidence in herself.  But I find myself looking at her with a critical eye, just like my parents would look at me.  I am furious with myself for it.  I think my daughter is amazing, and I know I am blessed with a very special child.  I always swore if I had a kid, I wouldn’t be critical.  I’m learning the great extent to how a person is raised is totally imprinted onto the natural parenting style.  I never realized the critical voice would be so automatic and persistent.  I find myself biting my tongue quite a lot.  I try so hard to remember what it was like for me. I never felt like I would ever measure up to an invisible bar that reached way past the sky.  I don’t want my daughter to ever feel like that.  I want her to have self-confidence that I didn’t get the chance to foster when I was young.

I am concerned because she recently began having lengthy conversations with her My Little Pony toy.  In her make believe play, Princess Cadence is a bully.  The pony is quite insulting to my child.  For example, if my daughter is painting a picture, the pony says it’s a terrible picture.  My daughter then reports Princess Cadence’s insults and bullying to me.  I tell her Princess Cadence is a toy, and even if she wasn’t a toy, she shouldn’t let words get to her, or allow herself to be bullied.  Then my daughter runs off to yell at Princess Cadence for being a bad friend, then all is fine.

I don’t know if these conversations stem from genuine worry my daughter has, or if they are just because projecting confidence is a subject that is frequently spoken of in her karate class as way to avoid being a victim of bullying.

I am constantly trying to find the balance point between teaching my child about fun and working on something diligently.  The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but the more one works on a skill, the more fun can be had with that skill.  I know she desperately wants to learn spins and jumps like she sees the bigger girls doing. In karate, she loves doing kicks and working with nunchucks.  All of which require practice.  

I’m learning that the maturing process is one step forward and ten steps back.  So is learning how to parent.  Where does encouragement become criticism? How much do you push?  I don’t believe constant praise does a kid any good either.  Kids have to learn to accept some form of criticism, otherwise they aren’t living in reality.  However, the constant criticism I was raised with didn’t help me at all.  Where is the middle?