Comparing 'real'job with stay-home mom
While I'm away, readers give the advice.
On comparing »the work of child-rearing with working at a job:
The most exhausting part of parenthood is the fact that for 99.9 percent of the various needs, you can't simply decide to "opt out," or even put them off until later; a child preparing to run into traffic takes precedence over anything else. It is the loss of the smallest measures of mental freedom and self-containment.
In comparison, a status report doesn't cry or scream if you are an hour late finishing it, nor feel abandoned if you put it aside until after lunch.
A typical staff meeting is unlikely to include your co-workers complaining when you bring snacks because they "hate bran muffins, yuck! Why don't we ever have anything good to eat? Billy's team in Marketing gets doughnuts" — accompanied by, in the case of toddlers, throwing of the objectionable food. Your boss is unlikely to wake you up at 2 a.m. and puke on you, nor need her diaper changed or a glass of milk, and if she does, you should definitely leave your job unless you are a live-in care nurse.
If your job begins each day at 6 a.m. with your boss wanting you to carry him downstairs and
make him breakfast, then subsequently includes a day filled with a host of never-ending, unappreciated and (socially deemed) menial tasks, ending somewhere around 9 p.m., if lucky, you would have lots of folks asking why you put up with it and hoping you get paid well, as opposed to an astonishing number of people wondering "what you do all day."
When a mother does her job, chances are she gets little recognition, and if she's doing her job "right," chances are also excellent that at some point she will hear with distressing frequency, "I hate you!!! " If you heard that coming from your boss after a successful ad campaign, you'd leave your job, right?
The consequences of failure are heavier for this job than most any other endeavor, with the irony being that because we are human, we are destined to fail with heart-rending frequency.
-"Relaxed"
