Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to If parenting is a career, where's the retirement?

re: If parenting is a career, where's the retirement?
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Listen, Mr. Wonderful, I stayed at home with my kids for years because I thought that it was valuable work. I still think it was, for their sake, but it didn't get me anything at all for myself. You know what it got me? Invisibility, that's what.

I honestly have no idea what you mean by "invisibility." You are about as far from invisible as anyone I know. And I dare say you're certainly not invisible to your kids. I think the problem is with whoever or whatever is telling you the time you took for your kids got you "nothing at all." By what standard? Look at your kids. You honestly think that's true?

The first thing you have to understand when you become a parent is that it's not about you any more. This is not easy. It's not easy for me, or anyone else. But that's how it's supposed to work.

I'm not "Mr. Wonderful." I'm just doing what the job demands.

It's amazing the number of people who will honestly be willing to step in front of a bullet for their child, but won't risk losing their valuable college education by leaving the treadmill to bring them up.

It isn't about us when we have kids. Our lives are now about them, until they are at the point where they can go ahead on their own. And with any luck, pass your values and your ideas about the importance of family to their own kids.

Men didn't go down into coal mines, or work in fields, or stand on an assembly line for hours on end because they were doing something "fulfilling." They were feeding their families, and you did what you had to. Same goes for women scrubbing floors, or trying to fit a work schedule around school.

In our modern society, for a lot of people, kids are something you "do." Like a hobby. For every poor woman who has to use day care because she has no choice, there are probably several two-career families who use day care because their career track and their lifestyle is more important than hands-on child rearing. It's beginning to show in our children, too.

No parent ever died wishing they'd spent more time at the office and less with their families.

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