Staying Home

“Will you be staying home?”

Maybe this is an outdated question and people don’t ask this anymore of women who are expecting a baby. Maybe now it’s asked of the father, or the other parent, or not at all. I don’t know. It’s been sixteen years since I was pregnant, the one time that I was, so I’m out of the loop.

To lay the issue out on the table—perhaps on the dining room table, since that’s where the piles of stuff tend to collect in our house—that question sets “staying home” in opposition to “working,” as if they were mutually exclusive, divergent paths, which, I suppose, sometimes they are. My use here of scare quotes, as they are called, is purposeful, because those loaded terms really are scary, and I feel a bit safer, as perhaps we all should, knowing that they’re encapsulated in quotation marks.

I don’t actually recall whether people asked that question of me. People asked so many questions, most of which I came to realize were expressions of happiness and excited anticipation at the coming of a new baby, attempts at being helpful, and a means of seeking affirmation of their own life choices and decisions. Their questions were just a disguise.

Another aspect of the question “Will you be staying home?” is that the word home is part of it, an acknowledgement that it’s not just you and your baby on a day-to-day basis, it’s you, your baby, and the structure you live in, all cozied up together. Home is the set of arms cradling the two of you, keeping you safe. Or, when you’re starting your baby on solid food, or you’re still on a naptime schedule, or going through the business of potty training, home is the place you feel like you will never be able to escape from again. It’s a good thing babies and toddlers are so cute.

I had no grand plan, no clear-cut philosophy, with regard to parenting. Sixteen years in, I’m still winging it. But I have ended up choosing to Stay Home, in the capital-letter sense, at various points in my son’s life, which means that I’ve stayed home, in the lowercase sense. A lot.

I wasn’t new to Staying Home, though. I became part of the so-called gig economy even before it was cool, so I’d worked from home. In a room by myself. For two years. That meant that by the time I began Staying Home with my son, I was well accustomed to being the only adult in the room all day. In my first months of working from home, I had difficulty coping with all the solitude. I’d be weepy after spending so much time alone. And when my boyfriend-then-husband came home from work, I’d be pumped up to get out of the four walls of my house and my head and go do something among other humans, then disappointed and upset when he’d tell me he’d been surrounded by a whole lot of people at the office all day and he was just looking for some quiet.

But the circumstance of being home so much changed me, and eventually I became a convert to the lifestyle. The bubble I inhabited shrank. Rather than feeling confined, however, I found fulfillment in my self-containment. It got to the point where I had to actively make myself call someone on the phone, just so I wouldn’t lose that as a life skill. For the most part, though, I figured that if I wanted to keep my vocal cords in shape, I could just sing while I vacuumed.

Staying Home also influenced, or changed, other people’s reactions to me. In my milieu, and at that time, choosing to freelance from home was a fairly nontraditional path to take, and I found that my general status as someone flying solo drew attention. Not unexpectedly, I was aware of becoming the object of strong opinions and feelings and speculation on the matter of my work life. I was able to set my own hours, and when people witnessed me going for a run between the hours of nine a.m. and five p.m., or meeting a friend halfway through the afternoon just because I could, I was occasionally on the receiving end of derisive comments in the “Must be nice” vein. Sometimes the feeling was uncomplicated envy: for some reason, people really latch on to the fringe benefit of being able to work in pajamas.                                                          

At other times, my situation elicited confusion. My grandmother couldn’t make heads or tails of it, though to her credit she continued to ask questions and probe for clarification. My mother seemed mystified by it. My parents showed up once at my unairconditioned house in the middle of a hot summer weekday, and my mother, seeing my tank top and shorts, which I wore to stay cool in my basement office, asked me if I’d been exercising. Another time, she referred to my work as “whatever it is that you do.”

But the particulars remained shrouded in an air of mystery. My commute was down the stairs in the last house, up the stairs in this one, so no one besides my husband, and eventually my son, could see that when other people were tucking themselves in at night, I’d be tucking down into my home office to take advantage of the quiet and of my second wind, which I usually got around ten p.m. People also couldn’t see how much time I spent making cold calls to prospective clients, reading reference books so I could claim to know what I was doing, and ministering to the texts assigned to my care. To be fair, I couldn’t see other people at work either, but they at least bore the outer trappings of professionally appropriate clothing, spiffed-up grooming, and maybe even a briefcase. When I left the house, like on deadline days when I’d step out onto our front stoop and angle my face toward the sun to avoid turning into a vampire, I had to get into the habit of looking down to make sure I’d remembered to get dressed. I guess once I’d hung out a little too long in the shadows, I had to remind myself that others could see me.

Once I became a mother, I slid farther down the rabbit hole of being At Home. But it struck me as ironic that just as I was retreating into a private and inward-looking world of nursing our new little family member, I became a kind of public figure people felt they could express their opinions to or about, especially when we were standing and chatting at the intersection of parenthood and work, where the road signs can get a little confusing.

A former neighbor of ours with whom I am still peripherally friendly and whose son is the same age as mine made a few comments over the years about how privileged I was to be staying home and not working. Never mind that I did work, though I think that’s beside the point. I would explain that in fact I often worked at night after my son went to bed, even after he eventually went to daycare and preschool part-time, since deadlines don’t always care that you’ve already put in a full day at your desk. I don’t know why I felt the need to explain myself—maybe because I like her and wanted her to understand, maybe because I wanted my efforts and struggles acknowledged. But there was no easy way to respond, especially when I couldn’t get a clear read on the feelings or motivations—Envy? Competition? Awkwardly expressed kindness?—that prompted her to say these things.

By staying home a person can sometimes avoid coming face-to-face with that particular form of peer review and all those unsought-after assessments of one’s life choices. If I step outside, my way of being in the world might rub against your way of being in the world, creating friction. Or, restated, when someone else’s superhero force field that keeps their identity intact comes in contact with my superhero force field that keeps my identity intact, our energies might clash. It hasn’t escaped my attention that even the Avengers haven’t taken on the Mommy Wars.

The battles are ongoing, although it could be that I’m the only one fighting them. Probably the best defense is a thick skin. Since I’ve never managed to develop one, I’ve swapped in the buffer zone of a spacious backyard, doors that lock, and a porch light I can turn off. The quiet spaces in the house and gardens dampen the noise for me. Although if it gets to be too quiet, I can hear all my own judgements of myself and my life echoing back at me. When that happens, it’s time for a change of scenery and perspective, and so I switch the porch light back on, unlock the doors, and venture out of the house, through the gate in the side yard, and into the world beyond it.

Inevitably I retreat again, but I have learned over these nearly two decades that it’s crucial to keep my foot in the door to the world so the door doesn’t close. In the book House Lessons: Renovating a Life, Erica Bauermeister wrote that in this country “stay-at-home mothers are disregarded at best” because it’s viewed “less as a choice than an inability to do anything else.” Ouch. These observations do ring true, though, and they are surely among the reasons so many of us who have at times been Home write magazine columns or books or blog posts, or something seen by someone somewhere: to offset the further irony of how just as your actions and choices when you become a parent—or, more especially, a mother—are being pinned up on some sort of public comment board, you simultaneously become a little bit more invisible.

And while I’m standing there at the door to the world, foot firmly in position, I hang on to the door jamb for dear life. Otherwise, housework will pull me into its vortex. And then, instead of accruing billable hours or honing a book chapter or enjoying a walk with my dog or gleefully helping my son embrace his creativity in all its messiness, I’ll be prepping and cooking dinner, cleaning the bathroom, or trying to restore order to the kitchen counters. My proximity to the scene of the action has meant that I’m often the first responder to these small fires. I find dust and dirty laundry and disorder distracting, so it’s probably just me imposing this expectation on myself. Or it may have come from my grandmother, who used to quiz me on details like whether I pulled the oven away from the wall to properly vacuum under it. Then again, maybe the pressure came from the other stay-at-home parents and the work-from-homers who were writing books or blog posts or magazine articles about cooking that perfect midweek meal or about life hacks for keeping a perfect house. They set the bar a little too high for the rest of us.

Sometimes I reach for that bar and get a good grip; other times, I reach up and miss, or I can’t even be bothered to extend my arms. In the matter of raising a kid, though—an indisputably very important and impactful job—I take comfort, however, in the adage that to be a good parent, the best thing you can do is to show up. I have most certainly shown up, if only by default, since I’m usually home anyway. Sometimes working in my pajamas, sometimes not.