You know the idyllic story of your parent’s (or maybe grandparent’s) youth—a small neighborhood where all the children played together in a pack all day long while moms stayed at home to take care of the babies and have cookies and lemonade waiting when their children came home in the afternoon. While I know that idyllic stories tend to gloss over painful realities, the basic concept of mom staying home while children played together (and I mean played—they did not participate in group sports in faraway towns), was, in fact, the reality. I don’t know when that changed, exactly; I just know that by the time I had my first child, every mom I knew went back to work. This makes sense—I previously only knew working mothers, being a working person myself. But I looked it up: only 45 percent of women choose to stay home and raise their children, and that’s an improvement in the last ten years!
            The fact that the numbers are improving surprises me a bit, because the going-back-to-work trend has given rise to so many unintended consequences. I’ll use my own example—when I decided to stay home, I was the only woman on my block doing so. Each morning I’d walk around the neighborhood with my baby, and each morning was a completely solitary experience. No one was home. Even the families with under-fives were gone. Now what? You’re alone with your baby and without a community of adults to keep you company. Not only do you go nutsy from lack of adult contact, you have to single-handedly figure out this raising children thing.

            Once you remove yourself from the group of people who choose to stay at work, they don’t have a moment to spare you, so you have to look around and find other stay-at-homers. How do you do it? I was lucky, because a cousin of a friend and I hit it off and she’d already done all the hard work in gathering a community of stay-at-home women. But I’ve talked to so many women who decided to stay home, but they didn’t really enjoy it. They felt isolated and lonely, and many didn’t manage to find any kind of community for several years.
Staying home can be lonely and solitary, but really, it’s worse for your child! A woman stays home to raise a child for the first time knowing next to nothing about how to parent, and there is no one around to even be a good role model. Now I assume there are people out there who had younger cousins or siblings or something to help give them an idea of how to parent. I was not one of those people. Besides, I can see where it doesn’t matter what you learn on other people’s children, because it’s always different when the child is your own. You read parenting books and talk to your own parents, though they tend to not remember much about raising you—there seems to be some post-traumatic stress amnesia involved. You look around in public places for examples of parenting, but you tend to only notice the poor examples, since they are noisier. I’ve thought about being one of those poor examples myself in the hope that some total stranger would approach me and tell me what I should be doing… But that only happens in reality TV.
It’s a bit worse when you have twins, because even your friends don’t presume to give you advice. You’re in a class by yourself, and so long as the children aren’t wearing rags and looking gaunt, everyone thinks you’re doing beautifully. I admit, there are some specialty problems that come with two babies, but I could definitely use the advice!
What ends up happening, in my opinion, is that by the time women give birth to their second child, they’ve found some community for themselves and their oldest. Of course, by the time you’ve had your second, you don’t need as much advice on raising your infant. And hopefully the advice I get from the community will help me from breaking my kids too much!
So hooray for us, the pioneering women who are turning our backs on the get-back-to-work trend, despite the exhausting work of raising our children almost single-handedly AND starting communities and friendships from scratch. We know truth of the matter—that the struggle to stay home and do the work is more than worth it, more than can be expressed!

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