Stay-at-home mums get a rough deal. Its's literally a full-time job that's unpaid, underappreciated and often very isolating. But one thing we do know is that while all our experiences vary, we're all in it together!
All our kids are different, our home lives are different and our support systems are different, but our role has a lot of problems in common.
Never being off the clock
Working from home is nothing new for stay-at-home mums and we’re all too familiar with the idea of not being able to switch off from ‘work mode’. Work has neither a start nor finish time for mums, and often you even end up taking night shifts, especially when there are infants in the house.
We get no lunchtime or even commute to or from work to ourselves and play the constant keeper of the house and children, no matter the time of day. Often, even if our partner is around, we’re still the go-to for all the kid’s questions and needs, meaning there is rarely a break even when the ‘relief’ worker comes home. The struggle is far too real.
Feeling underappreciated
Because our jobs don’t necessarily ‘bring home the bacon’, we can often feel unappreciated, not only in our own homes, but by society. People say ‘mum is the hardest job of all’, but rarely mean it because they don’t see the realities of it.
Being a mum is expected of a lot of women, even today, and when we stay at home to look after children, it’s seen as a choice, perhaps even a choice of the allegedly ‘easy life’, which anyone who has actually done it, knows it is not. If anything, it’s just as difficult if not more so than choosing to go back to your career.
Feeling isolated
Finding a community of people isn’t hard. But finding a community of people that you click with is another story. You can be a part of every mummy group in your area and still not find your tribe within those mums.
Being a stay-at-home mum means your main people in your day-to-day life are your children and we love them, but God, we miss the adult conversation. Our partner comes home exhausted from being around people in work all day and might not want to have major chats, but if you’ve been at home with no one but baby all day, all you want is someone who can pronounce more than two syllables to have a conversation with.
Envying your partner’s freedom
Speaking of partners coming home from work, we envy almost everything they come home and talk about – even the complaints! The commute home was a nightmare? More time to yourself with some peace and quiet. Lunch wasn’t nice? At least you got to have it with people who have been on this earth long enough to know how to speak!
We know it’s not fair to imagine this amazing life they’re off living while we’re home, because they’re working hard too and have their own struggles. But sometimes we don’t love every aspect of being a stay-at-home mum and look back on our career days with perhaps rose-tinted glasses – and that’s allowed too.
Justifying your day’s work
We cannot describe how much we hate, hate, hate the dreaded question that comes out of our partner’s mouth every evening: ‘So what did you do today?’
We know they’re probably just asking to catch up, but a day looking after kids is not like a normal day. Everything with kids takes ten times longer than usual, so our list at the end of the day is rather short and often full of tasks that sound like they take mere minutes to complete, when the reality is very different.
But it’s even worse when you say something like ‘We went to the park’, and they respond with ‘Oh, that must be nice.’
No. We went to park and I sat on the park bench in the freezing cold, the youngest tripped and bawled, the other two got into a fight about who went down the slide better and it took an hour to bloody get there between getting them dressed and buckled into the car and we stayed all of ten minutes before it started to rain. Only professional ‘stay-at-home’ mums know the park is never just ‘nice’.
