GUEST POST: Ask BN: Do Stay-at-Home Moms Really Work That Hard?
Benjamin | Monday, December 1, 2008 at 6:56AM 
We have a real special treat today - I'm honored to present you with a FIPS exclusive – a charitably donated blogwarming gift: the brand spanking new column by the greatest blogger in the world, Park Slope's own Blognigger!
Astute reader Carls Jr. writes:
Date: Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:25 AM
Subject: Stay at home bitching
To: Blognigger
yo bn
wanted to get your take on this - I'm a restaurant manager who works nights and has to sleep during the day. For the most part my wife is really cool about it. She gets up with the baby and lets me sleep and so on. Our older kid is 6 and in school so he's not an issue during the day.
The main problem is though, she bitches non fuckin stop about how hard her life is, and that I don't understand how hard it is to be a stay at home mom. And the crazy thing is she starts the arguments!!! I work 65 hours a week and make 100% of our income and I never mention the fact that she's not making any money, instead I treat her like a queen, but instead, SHE bitches at ME. The woman can not shut up about how hard her life is.
The funny thing is, there are times during the day when she needs to go out and I watch our son for hours at a time. Every time I do it I think to myself.....It's just not that hard!! Sure there's the occasional diaper explosion or screaming tantrum, but I swear on my life I don't see what the big fucking deal is. When he sleeps I can fuckin SLEEP or scratch my nuts or watch the wire dvds --- try doing that at a real job!! I wish that she could try managing a staff of 15 mexicans and at the same time dealing with phone calls from the owner and 5 customers having a meltdown over there missing appetizers...... I think it would put into perspective exactly how tough her work situation is.
How do you deal with these issues from your woman - I know she's home with the kids too, right? Granted I know you've got two kids so it might be rougher on your bird, but what's your take- is it really that fucking hard to be a stay at home mom??
--snip--
Peace bn,
Carls Jr.
What up, Carls-
Fantastic question! Sorry I let it rot in my inbox for 5 months, but such is the prerogative of a mostly-black male living under the Obama Administration-Elect: I can do WHATEVER I WANT all the time with zero accountability. Hopefully you're not already divorced, and I've still got a shot at helping you out here.
The answer to your question is that it depends on a bunch of factors- For example, as far as net difficulty of daily tasks is concerned, there's a huge difference between:
- an upper-east-side mink jewess who stays at home with her full-time nanny and takes breaks from her craigslist casual-encounters surfing to teach her kid which president's face appear on which dollar bills.
-AND-
- some poor jewish woman with 10 kids in crown heights who is gonna get face-slapped if Moishe gets home and one of the male children hasn't finished his chicken-liver or has accidentally touched a female human.
In your case specifically though, it's easier to assess because your wife is a lazy whore.
Totally kidding! I hardly know anything about you guys! Therefore, let's assume the "stay-at-home mom" in question is a married woman with two kids, no nanny, and a housekeeper that comes once every two weeks.
Now right off the bat: while I too get pissed off at my wife's insistence that she performs brain surgery while my office colleagues and I masturbate to internet porn, I've got to say that I've spotted a crucial flaw in your logic:
> The funny thing is, there are times during the day when she needs to go out and I watch our son for hours at a time.
Stop right there - that's unscientific. You can't just take what they do 24/7, do it for a few hours, and then be like "yo that shit's easy." That's like saying you could handle Ramadan just cause it's almost 3pm and you haven't eaten since breakfast.
So, there's a clue for us: In isolation, the following tasks are NOT as hard as the stressful restaurant-management activities you've described:
- feeding a kid breakfast
- changing a diaper
- cleaning a kid's hands and face with a washcloth
- dressing a kid (actually, bad example, that's fucking hard)
- getting a kid downstairs and into a stroller
- making a kid wear a hat in the snow so he doesn't freeze and die (another terrible example - also impossible)
However, in context, these tasks coagulate to form certain conditions that are far worse than the sum of the parts. These conditions ARE more difficult to bear than the tasks of most western, non-air-traffic-controlling professions, including your job of playing Hell's Kitchen with a bunch of mexicans:
- Serial deprivation of intellectual stimulus; prolonged exposure to extreme mental boredom.
- Deep isolation from adult contact and sanity-sustaining social interaction
- De-prioritization of personal hygiene and excretion processes
- Sleep deprivation
- Chinese-Water-Torture-esque exposure to punctuated nails-on-blackboard whining and demands every 3 minutes for (literally) years and years without significant respite.
I've seen the effects of these conditions on my wife, so it's obvious to me that being a stay-at-home mom is worse than my job as a highly-paid software engineer. I believe that also makes it harder, but you can see why the definition of hard itself is called somewhat into question- For example, What's a harder job:
- Being a slave girl in Pakistan and cleaning camel shit between beatings
-OR-
- Being a Front-Office Wall Street Trader.
Tough call on semantics, right? But the Pakistani chick obviously has it worse.
It boggles my mind to think that anyone would willingly be a stay-at-home mother - the inherent deprivation of basic human rights is just too great. I could never do it in 10 billion years, even though I love my kids enough to throw myself in front of a train for them that's different though, because throwing yourself in front of a train is far less boring, is over quickly, and takes far less dedication to execute than committing yourself to the complete and total ego suicide that stay-at-home parenting entails.
However: because of her severe dedication to our kids and unwillingness to have them raised by Caribbeans, my wife has chosen to be a stay-at-home mom.
Keyword: CHOSEN.
This brings us to the real issue in our household:
If my wife has Chosen this role for herself, and can reverse that decision at any time, is she really allowed to bitch about it nonstop and make everyone else's life hell with her nonstop martyring and complaining and whining?
Get the fuck outta here Carls, that's the stupidest question i've ever heard in my life. Who cares if they're allowed - they're going to bitch anyway so deal with it. Want a divorce? Go try telling them they're not allowed to complain.
Don't worry - your kids will be at a state university soon, and your wife will slowly assimilate back into society, though her skills at typewriting and woodworking and all these other twentieth century tasks will be meaningless and outdated, and she'll still be a drain on your income and society.
Even then however, as she'll have taken the ultimate bullet for the team - you'll still be the asshole, and in debt to her forever.
Btw, if your answer in the first paragraph was "too late, we're already divorced," then please ignore all of the above. In fact, if you would forward me your ex-wife's contact information, that would be optimal - totally saves me a sketchy-ass trip to craigslist casual encounters.
Thanks and be well - hope this helps.
Blognigger.
Stay-At-Home Moms, guest post, kids, ongoing beefs 
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Reader Comments (44)
I've been waiting for this for a long time, and it was worth it.
p.s.
Don't think you can fuck with us, we have you by the nuts
That's like saying you could handle Ramadan just cause it's almost 3pm and you haven't eaten since breakfast.
LOL u bitch
good assessment man, but I still maintain that I'd be able to do their jobs much more easily and with far less complaining.
there are ways to combat the boredom- pick up a fucking book! start a blog! in 2009, why do they need to be so painfully isolated?
Bullshit. We all have to deal with shitheads at work, and yes work is also stressful, but on your deathbed are you going to say "damn, I wish I spent more time at the office and less time raising my kids"? Fuck no. And that's why stay at home parents have it better. QED.
FUCK THE FUCK outta here cable guy!
did you even read BN's description of some of the things that a stay-at-home deals with? how many children age 4 and younger do you know that can play by themselves for more than 5 minutes without a) screaming/whining/looking for mom or other caregiver to help/entertain/feed them or b) keep from hurting themselves, someone else, or breaking something valuable?
one of my best friends is mom to a toddler now, and she used to blog a lot. USED to blog. she also used to be an avid reader. she still tries to get in a few pages before bed, but usually passes out from exhaustion first.
again, she CHOSE this, and she loves it, and NEVER complains about it. but her mommy job is challenging, non-stop, and she looks forward to our daily emails (among other adult, intelligent activity) to keep her from going completely bonkers.
Why you kissin their ass? What're ya in the dog house or something?
Is this a big apology letter?
Nigga please, you know you could do her job with your eyes closed.
well he is quite right, staying at home is very depressing. but i still think working with assholes all day is worse. you know, all packed in an office, waiting for death to free us. man, i hate that feeling.
the question comes down to this : what's worse between staying with yourself or staying with the others?
Listen - you all can bemoan it all you want. At the end of the day, society has set a price for what it believes the value of a stay-at-home mom is, and like it or not, that price is around 30k a year.
I'm not saying it's right - I think teachers are underpaid too, but the fact is, that's where the valuation stands.
I made it clear to my wife from the very beginning (and here's where you went wrong, bn) that staying at home was a privilege, and that I'd be more than happy to take on the task if my wife was capable of going out and earning the high six figure salary needed to allow us to live in Park Slope.
She's not, and so she's home with the kid and not me - but that said, she doesn't bitch, she's happy, and feels lucky that I make enough money to make it possible. She knows it's a privilege because I made it clear to her early on.
It doesn't matter which is harder - it matters which lets you live the lifestyle you want. Sorry ladies if this sounds harsh - but no matter what they say, your working, providing, sweating, thanklessly treated husbands all agree.
It's funny because as someone who doesn't have a kid (and doesn't want one) AND lives in park slope, I almost feel as if culturally we have gone to the opposite extreme: i.e. being a stay-at-home seems almost deified as a way of life.
Maybe its because I live where I live (and occasionally do watch Oprah), but I feel like I need to be very careful about who I actually admit that I don't want children to (almost as if I'm the one being judged). I do have a lot of respect for stay-at-home moms, mostly because it seems like a shit ton of work, and I could never, ever, ever handle it.
The flipside of this, of course, is the special treatment that moms seem to be afforded withIN the workplace. It's almost like a "get out of jail free" card: first you get the maternity leave (family leave for dads if you are really lucky), then you are afforded a lifetime of leave early/come in late free passes for various kid-centric reasons, or perhaps even the creme-de-la-creme: a shortened work schedule (or work from home option!).
I understand that having kids requires an additional output of time/effort/energy on a working mom's part, however: they chose to have a kid in the first place, AND as a result of this now seem to enjoy far more perks than I get. It's not something I think about often, but now that I am, its not really fair.
I've worked as a nanny and I've done office work. I can say that both have their ups and downs.
I had a job where I was making scads of money and had no time to enjoy my life outside of work and had to spend a lot of money having things done for me. When I was a nanny, I didn't make a lot and the job was mentally taxing but when the kid did cute things or something new and cool it was so much better than finishing some random report or project at the office job. Both jobs have the ability to kill brain cells and both can be really exciting. I think you can't really compare one to the other.
It's too bad she's bitching so much since she made the choice. Maybe it's not really what she wants to be doing and should go work in an office so she can figure out that the grass isn't any greener over there. Or maybe Carls Jr. doesn't show any kind of appreciation for what she does and finds ways of telling her she's a lazy whore. Whatever. Sounds like they need marriage counseling or something.
I actually did the stay-at-home dad thing for 5 months. That shit sucks. I think the problem is it makes you lazy and makes you hate everyone who works.
Thank god my husband and I both are FT Wage Apes in Manhattan all week, and the Russians raise our kids. But comparing "how hard" it is to be a SAHM versus a Wage Ape, let me just tell you what I observe on weekends in our house.
What my husband does on weekends when the kids are awake: lies on the floor reading Goodnight Moon 24,375 times in a row.
What I do on weekends when the kids are awake: synchronized cookie baking, craft making, small appliance repair, playdate coordination, meal preparation, and minor cleaning.
What my husband does on weekends when the kids are napping: plays World of Warcraft.
What I do on weekends when the kids are napping: mentally inventory the apartment for food & other necessities, major cleaning, run from room to room to confirm mental inventory, order groceries online (thank god in heaven above for delivery), head out to shops for anything that can't be delivered, take care of assorted Wage Ape related weekend work.
He says that being a parent is really hard, and is "killing him."
@pslope non mom:
Let's do this. Let's have ALL the women who are smart enough and driven enough and lucky enough to be successful in the workplace just forgo having kids. We'll do that by making it impossible for them to do both, i.e. no "get out of jail free" cards to get the kids their vaccinations, and we must make sure they are back in the office a couple of days after childbirth. Instead, leave the child-bearing and child-raising up to the under-endowed, under-motivated women for whom "staying at home" is a huge career boost, way up from getting trampled to death at Wal Mart. Are we set? Right? Where's that going to leave us in 25 years?
Damn Brosti, you're my hero. Not just your smackdown of non-mom, but your comments re: your husband!
I swear to god you've nailed me to a tee as well.
That description IS me except replace "world of warcraft" for "iphone / laptop"
@brosti: I'm not even sure exactly what you are saying? I was merely pointing out that we all have choices; the difference with moms is that their choice to be a mom affords them a number of additional perks (excuses, allowances whatever you want to call it) in the work place that I am not afforded because I didn't make that choice. I am not even necessarily saying that they *shouldn't* be afforded those extra allowances, however, all things being equal, you HAVE to admit that there is an element to it that is not quite "fair" (fair meaning that everyone is afforded the same rights, opportunities, etc).
I certainly did not say (or even imply) that stay-at-home moms or moms in general were under-endowed or under-motivated. That is not my belief at all (perhaps, those are your own insecurities?). I was merely bringing up the point for discussion that some inequity does exist (a discussion which, I might add, I've had with working mom friends of mine who all agree that they do, indeed, get a special pass in the workplace). In the end, I think women should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do (work or not, have kids or not)...and I, for one, am very glad that we all have a choice nowadays. Are you?
@Benjamin: trust me when I say that when it comes to methodologies of dadding, not only are you not alone, you are Legion. Can some biologist please isolate that gene for me? Or is it a hormone? The makeup of gut flora? WTF? When I was in my teens and 20's I used to hold forth that biology <> destiny. These days, notsomuch. Call me Pollyanna, but I truly, honestly believe that if my husband were ABLE to do the parenting/household that I do, he would, gladly. Or maybe this is just how I get through my marriage. Six of one...
jeez brosti, I remember back in the day when all the bn boys used to fawn all over you...
I'm not as brazen as them, but nonetheless I'd like to ask you to please explain how it was that you came to be familliar with the terms 'legion' and '<>'
This knowledge makes you a special girl to say the least...
It is a complicated issue, and one I've been coincidentally thinking about a lot. But you're right, it IS taking a bullet for the team. That is some seriously bullshit self-sacrifice.
Why do people love kids so much? They're monsters. Horrible, horrible monsters.
I am a mom who stays home with the kids during the day, and I work evenings and weekends. So..I am not sure where I fit in..Anyway..I have " chosen " to be a SAHM because my elder child it autistic. As a " full time wage ape " I would not have the freedom to transport my son to and from various therapies. Or the freedom to go on field trips because riding on a bus makes him freak out. Or..the freedom to go to his school and clean him up when he has had a toileting accident. He is almost 9, and still has accidents. I am home with my 3 year old while my elder child is at school. I am lucky to have the
" privilege " to be a SAHM. I am more privileged to have a husband who works a shit job because his health benefits cover our son's autism therapy.
@ Ford MF:
"Why do people love kids so much? They're monsters. Horrible, horrible monsters."
No shit!
Not only are children "horrible, horrible monsters" they are fucking retarded as fuck. Can't do shit I tell them in perfect, top-tier collegiate English. Fuck's wrong with them anyhow?
My blessed wife was telling me about the NY Times article about surrogate motherhood, blah-blah. I'm all, why you want a baby so much...fuckers are retarded and horrible monsters?"
She hasn't answered me yet.
BN scores again FTW. You completely broke down why when I had the option of being out for three months, I think I actually stayed away from work email for maybe 3 days and was back in the office within 6 weeks. I now fully understand why people decide NOT to have children. Not that I would trade having my little guy for anything, and not that I would let just anyone watch him while I out-earn my husband 9-5.
And what brosti said. Most men think it's "easy" b/c they don't do it as well or as thoroughly and they don't have all that other assumed shit to do that they think happens magically on its own.
As for the bitching, I think that's just a trait some people have and is a general personal problem.
my mother worked full-time during the week, had a part-time job on the weekends, cooked and cleaned the house and yard until her three children were old enough to do the chores. she had absolutely no financial help from my biological father. from age 5 on up, i was a latch key kid.
she never once bitched. not to us, not to her friends. and if she wasn't going to bitch, i wasn't going to bitch. she gave up any sort of a social life until my brothers and i were well into our teens.
my belief: the ones who don't bitch are the ones that should be bitching. the ones who are spoiled and have no reason to bitch - they bitch the loudest and most often. this ensures that the poor working slob of a hubby remains somewhat guilt-ridden (why, he's never quite clear, but he is nonetheless) so that she can continue to enjoy her CHOSEN, cushy fucking life.
when it comes to this shit: doling out sex, staying home and taking care of one or two kiddies, women have got men BY THE FUCKING NADS.
men basically walk around their marital homes APOLOGIZING FOR WORKING FUCKING HARD AND FOR HAVING A FUCKING DICK. WAKE UP, MEN.
and when it comes time for these bitchy women to leave, these will be the same ones who neeeeeeed alimoooooooony. thye will bleed you fucking dry. it's a mindset. live it, learn from it, wake the fuck up.
and i'm a woman, so don't call me a man. i've heard too many women's tales to keep quiet any longer. men's too.
Pslope non mom, where do you work? ~ An earth shoe factory?
My experience as a single mother who worked (at a real corporate job) was that far from there being breaks or "extra perks" in the work-place for parents; corporate rule numero uno was to never, NEVER EVER even imply that you had to leave work, be late for work or take off work because of your child. ALWAYS claim that it was yourself (even if you started to risk people thinking you were a bit of a hypochondriac). To say that your child was having an asthma attack for the 4th time and needed you with him at the ER would be greeted with kindly nods and “sure, go right ahead,” followed closely by being fired at the next available seemingly unrelated opportunity. Trust me I worked as a Vice President and was in the room for conversations with HR where things like “she’s always taking off to do something with her kid” were tossed out and the business of how to get rid of the person was discussed. It’s sick really.
I do find the people without children have this bizarre fantasy that parenthood gives you this weird entitlement in society. It so does not; I can’t begin to tell you.
pslope non mom said:
"I was merely pointing out that we all have choices; the difference with moms is that their choice to be a mom affords them a number of additional perks (excuses, allowances whatever you want to call it) in the work place that I am not afforded because I didn't make that choice."
My brain cringes everytime I hear this or a similar argument from non-parents. Did it ever cross your narcissistic mind that the option not to procreate is a privelege?
Now you can of course argue that parents CHOSE to have kids out of selfish reasons, but that doesn't really fucking matter does it? We, as a society - a concept you might be unfamiliar with, want people to want to have kids because if they didn't we would have a population problem on our hands (no population). So we bestow priveleges on parents in order to signal to social retards like you that what they do in spawning offspring and caring for it is commendable from a collective viewpoint whatever their initial egocentric insentives for not aborting the foetus were.
Grow the fuck up.