She settles into bed, with pillows arranged around her so she is completely ensconced in their quiet embrace. I lay next to her, twisting her hair around my fingers as we chat about our day.
I tell her about a blog entry I’m posting tomorrow, and she murmurs an acknowledgment. I turn to kiss her goodnight, and as we hug she says, “I’m proud of you, Mommy.”
Thirteen years earlier, I tucked the framed photo of my little girl under my final paycheck. Hoisting the box in front of my swollen belly, I waddled out of my office without looking back. The child care bill for my newborn and preschooler would nearly decimate the thin paycheck, and I imagined that being home with my two children would be all the fulfillment I needed.
As my children grew, however, so did my ambivalence. My master’s degree stared at me from the den wall, unused and unappreciated. Each time I collected outgrown baby clothes to be donated, I threw in a blouse and skirt from my own dwindling closet, until jeans and T-shirts were the only garments hanging next to my husband’s suits and dress shirts.
During the annual holiday party at his firm, I dreaded the inevitable question “And what do you do?” from his colleagues.
“I stay home with our kids, but I did have a career,” I answered.
I was angry at myself for feeling the need to explain, and for feeling inferior for being a stay-at-home mom. I was still an educated, intelligent woman, and I had no desire to return to my profession. So why did I feel like a failure?
I sought out adult interaction at my children’s elementary school, immersing myself in book fairs and memory books. The responsibilities temporarily invigorated me, but balancing the PTA’s bank account didn’t fill the void left by my job. Most days I didn’t notice it was there but when I did, the inadequacy swallowed me.
I am a counselor by education and training, and introspective by nature. I held countless therapy sessions with myself in my head. Detached, professional me tried to explain to emotional, invested me that my struggles were not unique, and that a job outside the home would not make me a better person.
I embraced home projects with enthusiasm, much to the chagrin of my husband. Our kitchen remodeling made me giddy; so many plans and decisions would keep me busy for months! Sitting across from the kitchen designer, I opened my brand new notebook and ran my palms along the blank, pristine pages. As I began to fill them with notes, I decided I would blog about my experience, making the information available to anyone who hated doing the legwork.
I threw myself into research, spending hours combing the internet for tutorials and advice. Unexpectedly, I discovered a love for writing that had lain dormant all these years.
Friends and family became loyal readers and, to my surprise, my daughter became one of my first subscribers. She and her brother tolerated my chatter about my new venture, and I assumed it was simply background noise in the self-centered lives of teenagers. Anything about Mom and Dad that didn’t involve them rarely appeared on their radar.
Yet when my daughter whispers, “I’m proud of you, Mommy,” I am clearly on her radar. My actions have made an impact; she has witnessed me being “not-Mom” and likes what she sees. I kiss her goodnight and climb into my own bed as the therapy session in my head begins in earnest.
This was what has been gnawing at me for years: the fear that I am not being a strong role model for my children, particularly my daughter. Her declaration of pride is an acknowledgment that I am that role model, despite my belief that I need to work outside of the home in what others would consider an important job.
It hadn’t been the money I was looking for or the small talk with strangers, or even ways to fill the lonely hours. I was looking for validation that I was more than just Mommy, even though just Mommy was all my children asked for.
Dana Hemelt’s first published work was a logic puzzle picked up by a game magazine in the early 1990s. Since then, her essays have appeared in the anthologies “The Mother of All Meltdowns” and “The HerStories Project: Women Explore the Joy, Pain, and Power of Female Friendship.” A Baltimore native, Hemelt lives in Howard County with her husband and two teenagers, blogs at kissmylist.com, and tweets @kissmylist
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