So, someone has calculated that being a stay-at-home parent is worth roughly $160,000 dollars per year? Well, that’s great! After 13 years at home raising my three children, I guess somebody owes me just over two million dollars. Who is it? My husband? He doesn’t have it. Trust me, I know. The government…? I’m sure the taxpayers can’t wait to cough that up.

This trend of affixing dollar values to homemaking actually makes me feel a little patronised, as if somebody is patting me on the head. Staying at home involves looking after the chores that exist whether you work outside the home or not! More than a decade ago, I traded a salary and office clothes for baking bread and building castles out of wood blocks with preschoolers, but life just seemed to hum along more smoothly that way, for everybody involved.

How can you put a price on the luxury of your mom or dad sending you off to school in the morning with your lunch and a peck on the forehead and still being there to greet you when you get home with a plate of cookies? My mom did it for me, and you can’t buy memories like that…or comfort…or the sense of security that comes with it.

I admit that I feel very unsuccessful among my peers. Thirteen years is a long time to be out of the job market. It’s difficult to break in again, as I have been trying to do lately. I am faced with the necessity of reinventing myself. How many women have said to me, “Oh, it’s so great that you stay home with your kids…I could never do that, but good for you!” Was that a compliment…? I’m not sure.

The fact is, keeping the home fires burning is a thankless job, full of necessary, repetitive tasks, plain and simple. We only notice the waitress at our restaurant table when she doesn’t show up, when she’s late, when she makes a mistake. While she’s doing her job, we take her for granted. (If you’re a polite guest, you’ll thank her when you leave.)

Stay-at-home parents must be prepared for the personal and financial sacrifice. While your friends are going on vacations to Florida and Cuba, you’re going camping at Fundy. The two-income childless couple down the street drives an SUV and just renovated their home, while you drive a ten-year-old minivan and hope that your leaky bathtub doesn’t come crashing into the kitchen below until you save enough money to fix it!

So why did I give up a career in public relations for a solitary existence of dirty dishes and laundry? Because my kids were only going to be young once, and I didn’t want to miss a minute. I wanted to greet them at the door with a plate of cookies, like my mom did for me. Nobody pays you to do that…you pay for the privilege of doing it.

What I thought was really interesting was a portion of audio the producer dug up from interviews with Canadian women in the 1960’s. It seemed they echoed women’s concerns today. “If what I’m doing is so important, why do I fight feelings of inadequacy?” “Is the world passing me by while I look after the interests of others?” It seems the old adage, the more things change, the more they stay the same, is correct.

I was pleased to find that my modern counterparts share my struggles, case in point: labelling yourself in social situations. Recently, my husband sold his business to a much larger company, and so our lives have returned to “executive professional” status where wives must be dragged to business-social occasions where everyone is going to have a good time, dammit. And you go, as a dutiful wife, because you love your husband and you want to fulfill expectations for his sake. Why do I hate those activities so much? Other people seem to be comfortable. Perhaps you can guess the first reason: I’m terrible at small talk, a characteristic which has nothing to do with being at home all day. But the other reason is because as a stay-at-home mom (a.k.a. house frau, household facilitator/manager/technician, domestic engineer) I feel like an underachieving mouse on a wheel in the presence of other wives whose lives positively spin with activity, children or no children. The conversation often goes something like this:

Tiffany (Part-time teacher, wife of company president): Stacy, I didn’t see you at ballet class. Your daughter is really improving! I couldn’t stay very long had to rush right back for a staff meeting at the school.

Stacy (advertising executive, wife of senior comptroller): Oh, I would have loved to go, but I had an emergency meeting after work—I’ll be so glad when this project is completed. The client is impossible to please. I didn’t get home until 10:00 pm. We ordered chinese and revamped the entire proposal. Gary had to take Jocelyne to ballet, because I just couldn’t get away at suppertime.

Deborah (nurse, wife of Senior Project Manager): Never mind my kids activities: I’ve missed a whole month of pottery classes! Bill and I have been working opposite shifts for about four weeks. I never see him anymore, the kids only see us one at a time. I can’t wait for July—we’re going to Cuba for three weeks, and we’re bringing a babysitter!

Here I am, listening to the other three, (who by the way, are chic, skinny, probably about ten years younger than myself, driving very nice vehicles) and the inevitable question comes as they aim to be polite and ask the stranger (who bought her dress at a second-hand store) the inevitable get-to-know-you question:

“So, Rhonda, you’re Kent’s wife…what do you do?”

I clear my throat and glance down at my drink, wishing the ground would swallow me up. “I’m at home with my kids,” I answer. Home with my kids is the more palatable euphemism for “housewife”. Housewife denotes a 1950’s June Cleaver archetype, subordination, underachievement, lack of ambition, and the execution of menial tasks that have no end.

There’s a brief silence and then the obligatory rejoinders. “Oh…that’s really great.” Stacy tilts her head. “I wish I could do that.”

Tiffany agrees. “That’s the most important job, isn’t it?”

“My mother stayed at home with us. It’s so nice that you do that for your kids.” Deborah comforted.

I shrug and smile one of those it’s-probably-not-very-interesting-to-you-and-besides-we-have-nothing-in-common-smiles, and they continue their chatter about difficult clients, students and patients, vacations abroad, and their busy children who they transport to 20 different weekly extra-curricular activities.

Okay, I have to be fair. Maybe they weren’t being patronizing. Maybe they really meant that they wish they could be content at home. Isn’t being a full-time mother the most important job possible? Isn’t it really great? Isn’t it so nice that I do that for my kids? Well, yes. Otherwise, why would I be doing it, in this age of equality for women?

So why do I feel out of place when I encounter this situation? Why do I feel like I don’t fit in, like I missed my opportunity to achieve, to carve out my place in the world? Why can’t I be comfortable in my own skin regardless of the perceived success of those around me?

The answer is simple. I did miss my opportunity to achieve. While my counterparts used their twenties and early thirties to study hard and build a career, I got pregnant and realized I couldn’t handle both, despite financial strain. So I dropped out, and put my energies towards giving my kids the best start possible. Twelve years later, technology and business has moved forward exponentially. My last full-time job was as a production manager at monthly business paper. Back then, we were still doing manual paste-up of pages. Now the whole process is digitized, it’s almost paperless. In addition, people’s lives have sped up—they communicate very little face to face, favouring email and instant messaging. The language of twenty-somethings is a dialect I don’t speak, full of computer jargon and shortened phrases. So even though my children are getting older, and I’m ready to think about my own goals again, I am faced with the difficulties of retraining to fit into a new business world. I have to reinvent myself.

But the deeper problem is that, like the rest of the world, I don’t get my value out of who I am…I get it from what I do. I’ve got it backwards, in spite of my sacrificial decisions, which I think were good ones. When achievement is the measure of value, intelligence, importance, and success, self-acceptance becomes a daily discipline.

So, in honour of Mothers Day, I want to thank all the faithful mice out there, running on their respective wheel, with no fanfare or recognition, including my own mom. She is now in her sixties. A couple of years ago she urged me to go back to work and make a living for myself. She was looking back on her own life, convinced she hadn’t achieved anything, because she quit work to stay home with my older brother and myself. She has reaped very little financial independence from all those years of investment. I understood where she was coming from—we all have a voice, and we want to use it. We all have talents, and we want to be appreciated for them. But I assured her that she achieved a great deal indeed. She produced two really great kids (if I do say so myself) who also have really great kids, and she made home a comforting place to be at the end of a stressful day. Home was the place you were expected, held accountable, the place you were loved, the place you would be missed if you didn’t show up. It was the place where bread was baking when you got home from school and someone said, “How was your day?”

Thanks, mom. But I have to go, my kids are getting home from school.

Of course, when a girl starts opening doors, what she’s really looking for is a boy (she may or may not admit it), and she’s usually successful. Poor Kent. He was just standing in the doorway, minding his own business. And then bang! As fast as you can say Bob’s your babysitter, we’re married, it’s 15 years later, and our three kids have staged a coup d’etat over the long hallway with doors.

Not that I regret it. I’m happy with the doors I walked through. Perhaps it’s just that the Robert Frost poem (Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…) has only started to resonate with me now, after building up some equity in my life experience account. I analyzed that poem in front of my grade ten English class. Ha! What did I know about choices in grade 10 except, “should I use the blue pen or the green pen when I write my Social Studies test?” or “should I tell Denise she’s rude and ignorant, or shouldn’t I?” I suppose when I’m 80, I’ll laugh that I had the audacity to write this at age 38.

Anyway, back to my kids. This is a typical day in our house, perhaps you will recognize a similar:

“Robyn, come play Barbies with me now.” Sophie pleaded on her knees.

Robyn didn’t answer. She rolled off the couch with her book in hand, and walked towards the stairs.

“Robyn, answer me! You promised you would play Barbies with me in a little while.” Sophie persisted.

“So?” Robyn retorted.

“So, it’s been an hour. Please come and play with me, I’m bored.” Sophie clasped her hands together. “Plee-eese?”

“Sophie, stop bugging me! I’m not seven anymore. I’m twelve and I’m too old for Barbies.” Robyn yelled, and tromped up the stairs.

“You weren’t too old for it yesterday!” Sophie retorted. She heard Robyn slam her bedroom door, and started to cry. Sophie ran out to the kitchen, where her little brother (suddenly) smelled poopy and was screaming for juice. “Mo-om! Robyn won’t play Barbies with me, and I don’t have anything to do!” she cried, tears streaming down her face.

Mom looks up from the stove, where she was stirring the spaghetti sauce. “It’s almost dinner time. Why don’t you play with Caleb? Caleb will play with you!”

“I don’t want to play with Caleb, he doesn’t know how to play Barbies. He just hits me with the dolls and knocks all the furniture over. He’s only three! Please mom, would you play with me? Plee-eese?” She stopped for a moment to consider what her mother was doing. “Are we having spaghetti again?! Why do we have to have it every day?”

Mom sighed. Why bother arguing? This was only one of 15 thousand arguments that day, all of which have no solution. If I intervene, I am viewed by at least one defendant as an especially brutal and unfair judge, which is why I try to avoid that mantle unless something clearly criminal is occuring.

It seemed like they were at each other’s throats all day. But later, we watched an old (old–snort. It was Back to the Future part three) movie together, the five of us, in the living room. I’ve been sick for a couple of months and was concerned that it was serious. Perhaps that made me sentimental, but I didn’t watch the movie. I watched the kids on the floor, sitting comfortably together without argument, sharing the same event. I savoured the moment, grateful that we’re together and we love each other. Life is just a series of moments all strung together. I tend to look forward to the next hour or the next day, but I don’t stop to appreciate the present. Pictures tell the tale. That roll of film in the cupboard that you haven’t developed yet–it’s only a couple of months old, but already your kids look older. The stress of our daily activities makes us wish time away, but I try not to give into that temptation.

I learned a lesson from a former neighbour, Mary. She was healthy and fit and still living alone in the home she had shared with her husband for 40 years, and at 90 years old, she was lonely. Her family didn’t visit much, and many of her friends were gone. She had just buried her brother at age 92. I visited her with the kids one day and after staying awhile, complained that I needed to go home and do my dishes. She looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, dear. Someday there’ll be lots of time for dishes.” Now, each time I’m tempted to refuse my children’s requests to play or read because I’m busy with a chore, I’m reminded of Mary’s words. Children grow up and leave, the opportunities to grow with them spent. After that, you’ll have to chase them for a bit of attention. Let’s make the most of our moments. We don’t know how many of them we really have.