Every since I first became a mother, I’ve become passionate about the need to reform society’s attitude regarding the importance of a mom staying home to raise her children. Not a dad, not grandpa or grandma, not a friend and certainly not a daycare. A mom. A mom, at home, all day, with her children, caring for the home, making a home for her children and her husband. To tell you the truth, I always feel a little awkward, afraid to hurt people’s feeling, wondering if I’m being too radical when I share this passion that I feel to the core of every bone in my body. But then I keep going back to the children. Children need their moms. I have experienced it with my own children. God designed the family a certain way. God designed men and women a certain way. Both the father and mother are needed desperately by their children, however, each with distinctive roles. God designed women to nurture. He created breastfeeding as the most beautiful way to start off the relationship between child and mother. Through breastfeeding, the baby is a hundred percent dependent on his mother for his development and survival. But not only physically, but the bond that is created through breastfeeding is also the beginning of an attachment that is healthy and critical to the child’s development. Expressing, I don’t think, was a part of this original plan.
Through what I read, see on TV or simply live, I am always affirmed in this ideal. Just tonight, I watched Barbara Walters interview Oprah Winfrey. Barbara asked Oprah if she regretted not having children. She introduced this question with a description of the troubled relationship she had with own child. She basically admitted that because of the priority of work in her life, it prevented her from being a good mother. Her own daughter was always so sad for not having her home with her. Oprah responded that she is grateful she did not have children, because she knew her career demanded so much of her and essentially, she did not want to neglect a child because of it. So I find it amazing that two of America’s most powerful professional media women have admitted, however directly or indirectly, that work gets in the way of mothering and mothering gets in the way of work.
But you may ask, the rest of the population of mothers is not Oprah or Barbara Walters. To which I respond, it doesn’t matter what work you do, it’s the fact that your work is taking you away from raising your children. I know. I lived it. Circumstances demanded that I work from home. And, it took me away from my children. Besides taking me away from my children physically, it also robbed me of my energy and patience when I was with them not working. There are only twenty four hours in a day. So hours spent away working, mean that they are not being spent with our children and caring for the home.
Even now, being in the home full time, raising my children, taking care of the home and my husband, I can barely get it all done. So, throw work on top of that, and something gets neglected – the home, the husband or the children. It’s simple mathematics. There are only 24 hours in a day.
