Remembering . . .

When I was eight years old, my mother went to work full time outside the home. I wasn’t very happy about it. During the subsequent years, I often dwelled upon the situation with some bitterness. I was a latchkey child before it even became prevalent in our society. Until she went to work, my mother was a stay-at-home mother who baked, cooked, sewed and was ALWAYS there for helping with homework. I would come home from school secure in the knowledge that she would be there. She did everything I now do today.

My mother didn’t actively start an all-out, job-hunting campaign. She did her work as a full-time mother very well. Gradually, however, she found more satisfaction in volunteer work outside the family. Volunteer work eventually turned into a job offer and she took it. The job did provide more income but the security of finding my mother home when I needed or wanted her was gone. Don’t get me wrong, she still loved us deeply but her desire for intellectual stimulation and perhaps even prestige called to her strongly. She was a woman of the nineties in the late fifties.

My own first child came along and he seemed to take away a lot from me---freedom, solitude, time to be artistic, intellectual stimulation, money not to mention sleep! I felt trapped and then guilty because I felt that way. When my baby was four months old, I got a part-time job. Actually, it was the best possible deal. I could take the baby with me to work, I only worked one day a week and I worked for someone I loved and respected.

Even though I worked for a sympathetic person, the work I was hired for came first. I remember instances of trying to nurse the baby AND get a typing assignment completed. Paperwork came first and a living, human being was a definite second in the business world. Whatever I typed, filed or wrote is long gone and forgotten. My baby is now an intelligent, young man. By the time I became pregnant with my second child, way back then, I was more than ready to quit the job and had finally found appreciation for my God-given place in life. I am a mother. I found I couldn’t divide my attentions for that responsibility and still provide the best for my children.

That year of trying to work and be a mother opened my mind. I came to discover that I wasn’t giving up a single aspect of my life in taking up a career in motherhood. I was actually enhancing my life greatly. I found freedom in taking my children with me on errands and enjoying their growing up as we went about our daily tasks together. I made the most of my solitude while they were napping and appreciated it more. I started incorporating my artistic abilities in the baking, cooking and sewing I did for my family. Money went very low on the scale of necessities for happiness. We had sufficient.

When people ask me if I ‘work’, I can reply truthfully, “Yes, I work very hard and I LOVE my job!” I don’t have to look outside my home to find fulfillment. And my mother’s job actually helped make my life better. Unknowingly, she showed me what is important in life. I no longer harbor any bitterness. I am thankful that God showed me how any childhood unhappiness could be used to build a more productive and happy present and future. Mother’s Day is everyday if you let it happen.