Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples: What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us about Work and Family

NINE. The Professionalization of At- Home Motherhood

114 chapter nine  The Professionalization of At-Home Motherhood I choose my choice! Sex and the City, 1998  So what do you do? This question, which most of us might write off as “small talk,” is anything but trivial. It reflects the importance we attribute to one’s occupation as the primary source of our public social identity. So normally when we answer the what-do-you-do question, we identify ourselves by our occupation. We might say, “I am an attorney at Crawford, Ward & Neal,” or, “I am a teacher.” Many of the at-home moms who left behind a career described the challenges of maintaining status in a society that dictates that so much of one’s self-worth is created at work. Acknowledging their at-home mom status was something most of the women continued to grapple with or had struggled with in the past. This chapter delves into this topic of struggles with identity and describes some of the strategies these women developed to maintain their public social identity and private feelings of self-worth when they left their jobs, including how they frame their early exit from the labor force and how the changing demographics of at-home moms are professionalizing motherhood. The Invisible Woman Although most Americans don’t like to admit there is a class system (we prefer to believe we accept people for “who they are”), we actu- The Professionalization of At-Home Motherhood 115 ally, and often without thinking, rank each other on the basis of our occupational identity. The women we interviewed point quickly to how Americans attach so much of their self-worth to their work. In the words of one, “If you’re talking at a cocktail party you feel like a very boring person if your answer is, ‘I’m at home with my kids.’ Because in our society, most people tend to value—well, they define themselves by what they do. Even though I think raising children is very important and I wouldn’t trade my choices, it’s hard to hang your hat on that and define yourself in that way.” When some women left their jobs, they soon discovered that they became “invisible” in social settings. A former lobbyist noted that when she tells people she’s now at home with her kids, the response feels to her like, “‘I could have sworn there was a person there, but I guess not.’ So you really are invisible to the rest of the world. You have to have a strong ego, and you have to be willing to have people turn and walk away because you’re just a mom and, so, you’re boring.” Another mom echoed this sentiment when she said, “It’s hard on my ego to be the stay-at-home mom. . . . It’s painful to see people’s eyes glaze over when I say what I do.” Another said, “One of the biggest challenges of being a stay-at-home parent is you have to have a really strong ego, because you essentially drop off the face of the planet as far as the rest of the world is concerned. You don’t exist.” But unlike H. G. Wells’s character in the science fiction novella, The Invisible Man, who becomes mentally unstable when he cannot become visible again, the women we interviewed resisted society’s attempts to recategorize them in some sort of diminished role when they left jobs for home.1 In other words, they categorized back.2 Here we look at the different ways women manage their identity in response to this societal tendency to marginalize them for their decision to stay home. “Home, for Now” and Early Retirement One of the key strategies women said they used to counter being relegated to the invisible focuses on the temporal aspect of their status. 116 Chapter Nine That is, they emphasized being home as a transitory status, or as a new phase in their life after putting in their time at work. Some women emphasized their at-home status as a temporary hiatus from the labor force: “It’s so painful. I say ‘I’m home right now.’ I think I catch myself using that modifier a lot.” Another said, “I am a doctor, but taking a sabbatical for now.” Whether these women intended to return to work sometime soon, sometime later, or...