Remember When #16 – being a working parent in the ‘90s (Young Adulthood)
Post #16 in the Remember When blog series
Welcome back to the Remember When serial blog. In the last post we talked about parenting and working in the Early Adulthood stage of life. In this post, we’ll finish up our discussion and talk about what life as a working mother was like in the ‘90s.
If you missed any of the previous posts, including memories of our elementary school, junior high and high school stages of life, I recommend you start here as this blog is chronological.
Ok, let’s begin…
Helmer: First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.
Nora: That I don’t believe anymore. I believe that first and foremost, I am an individual, just as much as you are. –Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
Remember when…
…you had to decide whether to go back to work after having a baby (and deal with the guilt if you did)?
Single moms didn’t have a choice when it came to going back to work after having a baby. Finances dictated that they would. The same was true for couples that needed both incomes to get by.
In some cases, those women who had no choice were happy to go back to work, even if they might not admit it. In other cases, they reluctantly returned after their maternity leave was over, wishing they could stay home with their children.
Then there were those who had a choice because their families could afford to live on one income. Many of those women chose to be stay-at-home moms and it came naturally to them. For others, like me, not so much.
Of course, there were many things I loved about being a mom: the constant hugs and kisses from my children, the cute and funny things they’d say, their adorable faces looking up at me, their happy laughter, the smell of them fresh from a bath and the pitter patter of their little feet running around the house. I loved their innocence and perspective of the world around them. I loved the sense of completion I felt having a husband and kids.
But I didn’t love being a stay-at-home mom.
Because staying home was an option, however, I felt more guilt about working than women who had to return to work out of financial necessity did. I wondered if I was being selfish, if I was abandoning my children. I stressed about finding someone I could trust to take care of them as well as I did. Let’s face it, no one can wipe a snotty nose or clean a stinky diaper with as much love as a mother. (I mean, we didn’t even want to do it.)
Finally, I decided to work part time so I could balance being home with the kids with having something for myself away from them, a common choice, even today, for mothers of young children.
Did you know…
…during the 90s, us mothers felt more guilt about working outside the home than later generations would. A study found that in the 1970s, 59 percent of high school seniors and 68 percent of adults said they believed a preschool-age child would suffer if his or her mom worked outside of the home. By the 2010s, only 22 percent of high school seniors and 35 percent of adults would.
🗨 If you went back to work when your children were little, did you
feel guilty?
(Share your memories in the comments section at the end of this post.)
Remember when…
…you dropped the kids at daycare the first time?
When I first went back to work, there were no part-time positions in advertising (my college major) that paid enough to cover daycare, so I took a job as a legal assistant in a downtown law firm that paid a higher wage. I put the kids (age one and two and a half) in an in-home daycare that only had a small number of kids in it, run by a nice woman I trusted and the kids liked.
The problem was that working in a quiet, formal setting doing secretarial work was not a good fit for me. I missed the informal, creative environment of an ad agency and, 15 months later, decided it was worth it to work full-time to work in advertising again.
Because I had problems with scrambling for last-minute daycare when my in-home daycare lady was sick, I decided to put my kids in a large daycare center that had multiple caregivers so that would no longer happen.
At that time, when I wasn’t making a lot of money, my daycare costs were probably around 30-40% of my salary, a number that went down as my salary went up.
Dropping the kids off at daycare for the first time was one of the most traumatic days of my life. They appeared interested enough about all the kids and activities when we first got there, but when they realized I was leaving them there, my (almost four-year-old) daughter clutched my pantyhose-clad legs in fear and begged me not to go.
“No mommy, I want to go with you. Take me with you!”
Walking out that door was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, made even harder because I had a choice
Fortunately, my kids quickly adjusted to their daycare and I began to feel less guilty about leaving them there, especially when I saw that they had friends to play with and had fun playing games and working on projects. In some ways they too had a balance to their lives.
At least that’s what I told myself.
Did you know…
…today, the average cost of a full-time child-care program in the U.S. is $13,000 a year (for one child!), though this number varies widely by state.
🗨 Do you remember the first time you dropped your kids off at daycare?
(Share your memories in the comments section at the end of this post.)
Remember when…
…you discovered how stressful it was to be a working parent?
Working full-time, I quickly discovered, was a constant juggling act. There was the mad rush of dropping the kids at daycare and racing to make it to work on time. Then there was the equally mad rush of leaving work on time to pick them up before the daycare closed, even if I was in the middle of trying to meet a deadline.
There was the resentment of the coworkers without children who didn’t understand when I had to leave the job early to pick up a sick child or called in sick so I could take care of them. (In the ‘90s, working from home was almost non-existent.)
There was the constant fatigue of spending days working and nights and weekends taking care of kids, grocery shopping, doing the laundry, cleaning the house and making dinner. At that time, whether we “had” to work or not, the brunt of taking care of children and doing household chores fell on the women, as it still does now.
There was even some tension between women that worked and women that didn’t, for various reasons.
Yet, even with all that, I enjoyed working. I felt at home in the creative atmosphere. I liked making my own money, making friends, and having projects that gave me the sense of working towards something tangible.
Most of all, I felt a balance of family and work that I didn’t before.
🗨 If you went back to work when the kids were little, was the juggling act worth it to you?
(Share your memories in the comments section at the end of this post.)
That’s the end of parenting and working in our Young Adulthood stage of life. I know that was a heavy load to discuss. In post #17 – ‘90s TV and Movies - we’ll lighten it up again and talk about the pop culture of the ‘90s. It wasn’t quite as great as the ‘80s, of course, (was any decade?) but still pretty interesting. Then again, I could be biased.
Oh, and we’ll introduce some of the shows our kids watched, too!