I Loved My Flexible Work-From-Home Schedule, Until I Realized the Message It Was Sending to My Kids
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“Why does Mommy always get me after school?” my 4-year-old asks one Sunday.
“I can’t because I’m at work,” says his father, who works abroad up to two-thirds of the month and long days the rest of the time.
The next morning, my son continues the conversation with his father, who takes him to pre-school that day because he happens to be home and can. “Some daddies pick children up after school,” my son observes, looking at the faces of the handful of dads who are there and trying to figure out which ones appear at the end of the day, too.
It’s not meant as a wound, but it hurts anyway. Because I’m always here, my son’s categorizing of what his parents do goes like this: Daddy lives on the train. Daddies work. Mommies don’t go away. Mommies don’t work.
Except I do work. From the minute I rush home from school drop-offs to the absolute last minute before picking up my 2-year-old and 4-year-old, I’m at my computer, filling every billable minute I can. If there’s an emergency — which there often is, as 4-year-olds seem to bump their heads at recess a lot — I drop everything and pick him up early. If there’s a chance to go into school and help out with an excursion or craft activity, I juggle my deadlines and sign up. So far, I’ve never been late to pick-up nor missed completing a project on time because, well, because I’m pretty good at both of my jobs.
But maybe that’s sending a message to my children that I never intended to send. One that reinforces gender stereotypes and masks the 50/50 contribution my work makes to the rent, childcare, and utility bills.
The job I work 25 hours a week, squeezed in between school runs, is invisible to them. I write content for the web and academic books that even I probably wouldn’t recognize if I came across them again — but some of my work is visible, if you know where to look. Six of the books on the bookshelves in our living room carry my name, and two of those have won awards. The honors sit in a pile of paperwork somewhere, along with tax and social security documents — I've never showed my son my awards.
I don’t “go” to work because I work off a laptop balanced on my knees, curled on the sofa or bed. I don’t have work friends, I don’t have any amusing stories that happened at work, and my little victories in negotiating higher hourly rates don’t make much sense to children who don’t understand money yet. I stopped working in front of my eldest son when he was about 12 months old and would get between me and my standing desk and push at my knees until I had to step away from my laptop. For some reason, he never disturbed my partner doing the same. I didn’t want him to compete with a screen for my attention, so I switched my work times to after bedtime and, later on, during daycare hours. It never occurred to me that, in always being there as a mom, I was creating an idea in my children's minds that I don’t do anything else.
And it's not just at home where I feel unseen: Work-at-home-moms (WAHMs) seem to be just as invisible when it comes to labor statistics. Most studies and articles that report on stay-at-home-moms (SAHMs) make no distinction between WAHMs and those who don’t do any other kind of work. Research, when it's available, frequently refers to just two types of mothers: those who work outside the home and those who stay at home, sometimes mentioning that a portion of the latter may opt to “return to work.”
Many of us never stopped working, though — it's just that our "office" is the same couch where we nursed our newborns. One survey about the desirability of working from home reports the participation of 13% SAHMs and 3% stay-at-home-dads, yet still didn’t report the number of WAHMs. When looking at the 3.7 million employees who telecommute in the United States, stats note the ratio of men to women working from home is roughly equal. And while there are many benefits — including less stress, less money spent on commuting, and higher levels of productivity, the same study reports — I wonder if more of the women than men are choosing to work at home for childcare reasons.
A review of the data on the gig economy concluded that fewer women than men earned more as freelancers than salaried employees, and that women were more likely to prioritize control over a flexible schedule than pay. The missing information here is why women prioritize this way. Is it because they are more likely to have to fit a job around their children? I only have limited anecdotal evidence to go by, from a three-month remote job I did this year for the automation industry. Of the team of ten, seven women and three men, the five mothers would mention their children on our daily stand-up calls. We were splitting our hours around school runs and naptimes or doctor’s appointments, sometimes caught off-guard by the late or non-arrival of a babysitter. Of the men, neither of the two dads ever said anything that suggested they were juggling childcare and children.
That's not to say there are zero work-at-home dads in the world trying to balance career and kids. And while I can’t do much to raise the profile of WAHDs and WAHMs in general, I can do something to make my own children more aware that Mommy works, too. We recently started a bedtime ritual of asking each other about the best and worst parts of our day. So, even if the best part of my day has been getting a joint cuddle from my two kids, or seeing their faces light up when I arrive at school, I mix things up with work-related successes every once in a while. Even though most of my work is too routine and dull to remember by the end of the day, and even the 4-year-old is too young to understand much, I sometimes put a narrative together about how I managed some catastrophe or bounced back from a disappointment.
And, next time a book or a web page has my name on it, or I win an award, I’ll be sure to show them when I pick them up from school.
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