Amy Glass, feminist blogger recently took her war on women to the home front literally in her post, “I Look Down on Young Women with Husbands and Kids and I’m Not Sorry.” This is my response to Amy Glass:
Dear Amy,
I read your article and several of the comments that accompanied it. Most expressing the disgust I felt when I read your piece. I think that disgust is based in the injustice people like me (a SAHM) have experienced from people like you.
I have a Masters in Elementary Education. I realize this is a traditionally feminine profession and am unsure of whether teaching measures up to your standards and puts me on equal footing with women who work and take care of themselves or not.
I did choose to get married to a man who I thought hung the moon in the sky – maybe that is where you would see my first mistake.
Shortly after the marriage, I got pregnant with our first child. I was also coming to the end of my year teaching fourth grade and was hoping to be rehired for the next year. Sadly, we lost the baby and were told we may not be able to have children. To compound our pain, veteran teachers said that, because I was planning a family, I would not be rehired by that district. It didn’t matter whether I was planning to be a stay at home mom or not.
While in some ways I understood, I mostly found it incredibly unfair.
We were blessed however and went on to have four boys in the next six years. Boy, did we prove that obstetrician wrong!
But I’d wager a guess that you would consider those children to be my second mistake – or maybe they’d be mistakes 2-5!
And things were not easy.
My husband tried staying home with our first child since I had the better job, better salary, better benefits, and better hours, but he was a miserable stay at home dad and, by Baby #3, he returned to work; I became a stay at home mom to save the cost of daycare (even though my mother-in-law was our babysitter) and (primarily) because we wanted to raise our children with our beliefs, our faith, and our love.
And maybe that’s where you think my third or eighth mistake came in (I’m losing track of the mistakes; as a SAHM, I usually count on my fingers 😉 ) – the mistake of wanting to pass along my Conservative values.
I’m sure by now others have told you a typical stay at home mom works 95 hours/week and should be paid a salary of just over $112,000/year (Salary.com). I’m sure you know the list of job titles stay at home moms could put on their resumes (chauffeur, accountant, CEO, judge and jury among others).
I’ll skip those details.
But I will say that you painted stay at home moms with a wide brush; those statistics are not for stay at home moms of five boys.
Nor are they for stay at home moms with autistic children
or children with cancer
or children with learning disabilities
or children who have countless other challenges that only the child’s mother can best soothe.
I could go into how, as a stay at home mom, my house was always spotless, my kids never got a cavity, and their clothes were always clean and pressed.
But I’d be lying.
My house is always “lived-in,” there are plenty of nights my kids didn’t brush their teeth, and whole weeks at a time during which one of my boys ran around in nothing but his Winnie the Pooh sneakers (but that’s another post!)
While home with my four children, my teaching license expired due to convoluted state licensing laws, but my family had connected my husband to a job he enjoyed, and, as he began climbing up the ladder, life got easier…Finally.
And then I got pregnant with Baby #5.
And I got very sick.
And there were concerns for the baby’s health.
And suddenly, my husband announced he was leaving for a woman he met on Facebook.
And he was gone a week later.
And I received a text message when our baby was three days old saying he had filed for a divorce.
And we lost our home due to lack of child support, an inept judicial system intent on promoting feminism and absentee parent’s rights even when it is they who broke the marital contract.
And I was a stay at home mom.
And if you call that baby a “mistake” I’d say you’d have to answer to me but you’d have to get through his brothers first!
And I really don’t want to think of what God might have to say to you one day.
And I thank God again for His ability to forgive our human failings.
You are probably sitting home thinking I have just proven your point, shaking your head at how pathetic I was to have fallen for the – how do you say it – “super easy tasks, literally anyone can do,…the most common thing ever, in the history of the world…average.” I could go on.
Your piece, while brief and lacking substance and evidence, does have plenty of bitterness for its brevity.
Or maybe you’re not sitting home thinking that at all. Truthfully, I know nothing about you – just as you know nothing about me – so I will try very hard to not judge how self-centered you seem to be, but to instead put my being a stay at home mom into terms that will resonant with you best.
I will tell you how graced YOU are that I was a stay at home mom.
You see, it is because I spent years as a stay at him mom that
I knew how to handle the family bills,
I knew how to do light plumbing, electrical, carpentry, and many other trade jobs several men (and ALL the professional women I know) call someone else to do for them,
I knew how to make $100 purchase diapers for that precious baby and groceries for six people for a week
I breastfed my babies – giving them immunities, lowering healthcare costs, and increasing their IQs (if you believe the feminine resurgence in breastfeeding reports)
I taught my children to eat their vegetables (sometimes) play a game (and shake hands at the end – win or lose), hold hands with each other (and the joy of holding tighter when angry), to help with family chores (even when they have better things to do), and to bow their heads before sleep every night.
That may not seem like much of an accomplishment to you, and I am again guessing you can’t see how this matters to you, but here is how it fits in with your life, with your success, with your ability to follow your dreams.
All that time and money I saved using the skills I learned as a stay at home mom, I put to our journey toward success. My being a stay at home mom saved you thousands of tax dollars because I laid the strong stone foundation, raised strong kids, and therefore never used your tax “donation” in the form of an EBT card or childcare (although I did have to use WIC for a while)
In the four and a half years since my husband left:
I gave birth to that precious, beautiful, wonderful, amazing gift of a baby,
researched ways to take classes for little or no cost to me AND without costing tax payers additional money!
taught myself material, took, and passed CLEP tests, testing out of several college level classes.
passed my certification tests with TOP (and on some tests, PERFECT!) scores
became certified in 7-12 math to be more marketable AND was granted my elementary certification too – go figure!
And when job prospects still didn’t turn up in my liberal, economy declining, tax-to-death home state, I refused to accept mediocrity and started my own business teaching college prep classes both locally and internationally via Skype.
No Amy Glass, I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed. I have made some big mistakes, and I am still making some pretty big whoppers now.
I am no Einstein, but I am no dummy either.
And I propose that what I’ve been through would have crushed a lesser woman, with lesser faith, with fewer reasons to live, to work harder, to inspire, to love and to be loved in return
It may have crushed for example, a corporate woman, such as yourself – and that fear of being crushed is truly why you have hardened your heart.
And if you had to ask me what has enabled me to reach my success and to keep striving for better???
I would say I owe a lot to being a stay at home mom.
Because when life fell apart, my children pulled from the values I had been there to give them every day and they learned
to cook dinner, do laundry, mow the lawn, and straighten the house (or at least hide stuff under the couch!)
to create their own jobs shoveling driveways for neighbors when I they could not commit to outside work because they needed to watch younger siblings (another result of my mistakes in your eyes?)
to be responsible for their own school work and rides to and from practices and school and church activities
to work harder, to laugh more, and to love better.
My being a stay at home mom has produced no ordinary children here! They are living up to responsibilities and ideals most adults could not handle – and I couldn’t be more proud of each of them!
You Want a Shower for Individual Adventure?
I won’t discuss how some days I just want a shower – period! Again, that would reinforce your already warped ideas of my less than human position, but I will say this…
Forget backpacking on your own through Asia! Traveling with children is much more adventurous!
Together, on a tight budget, my boys and I have driven to and camped at Niagara Falls, near Clemson, South Carolina, Erlanger, Kentucky, and Warren Dunes, Michigan. My boys know the value of the people of this country, the beauty of the scenery, and the treasure of her tales.
My three oldest are hoping to make Eagle Scout. My 16 year old hopes to become an engineer. My 15 year old hopes to study law (I often pray about that career choice!), my 12 year old wants to become a professional athlete (what 12 year old doesn’t?), my 10 year old wants to be a cop or an “Army Guy” and rid the world of evil, and my 4 year old, well right now, I am just thrilled watching every new discovery he makes, hearing him laugh until he can no longer catch his breath, and feeling his skinny little arms around me when I tuck him into bed each night.
So Amy Glass, when you go to sleep tonight, dream of all of the money you’ve given to support the many single parents your feminist movement has produced by promoting sex without consequences, permitting fathers to leave families because individual happiness is a lofty goal, and encouraging tax payer funding of the killing of innocent, unborn babies.
And then think of all the money strong, stay at home moms have saved you.
And look at the odds stacked up against my kids.
And then ask yourself if my kids are the kinds of kids your tax dollars will likely support one day or if my kids have a chance to make it – or better yet, if my kids are already making it! – because their mom was a stay at home mom working harder than you ever imagined possible, learning more than you ever knew there was to know, and taking calculated risks and sacrificing more than you ever dreamed.
I’ll bet you, or someone else out there, are thinking that despite the odds, my boys have a good chance to make it and that a big part of that chance results from having the solid, loving foundation that can only be provided by having a mom who was always there, the strong, intelligent, compassionate, faithful loving woman who is the Stay at Home Mom.
I’ll bet on my kids will come out faithful and victories. Hands down. Any day.
God Bless…