Guest Post: I Am Not Planning on Being a Stay-at-Home Mom (part I)

Last updated on: June 25, 2015 at 7:36 am by Libby Anne

Guest Post: I Am Not Planning on Being a Stay-at-Home Mom (part I) 2015-06-25T07:36:00-04:00 Libby Anne

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Originally posted on I Turn and Burn

I was never planning on being a stay at home mom. When I was a kid, the thing I wanted to be when I grow up changed almost daily and there were so many possibilities, so many dreams that I had and I always just assumed that I would become everything. When my gymnastics coaches were mean to me, I would think “when I’m a gymnastics coach, I’m not going to act like that.” When I had to sit in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, I would think “when I’m a doctor, I won’t make people wait so long for me.” When my mom told me that I couldn’t go to public school because they teach about evolution I thought “well when I’m a teacher, I’m not going to teach about those things.” Things got more complicated when I told my dad “when I’m a pastor, I’m going to have my sermons be more fun to listen to”. My dad told me that I can’t be a pastor because only men can do that, but I can be whatever else I wanted. I think that was the moment I became a feminist even though I didn’t have the word for it at five years old. It never once occurred to me that I was not going to have every career in the world, and it definitely never dawned on me that many Christians at my church believed that as as a Christian woman, my role was to be a wife and mother and nothing else.

My parents were fully aware of my many ambitions and they never wanted to discourage me from my dreams. I’m sure they were concerned about how I was planning on doing all of those things and getting married and having kids and of course, home schooling them. My mom once told me not to have kids if I wasn’t planning on home schooling. She had a strong belief that you shouldn’t have kids and then send them off to someone else to raise them. The school is just going to indoctrinate them and why would you send them to learn all of that anti-Christian stuff and then have them come home and have to reteach them everything? When she said this I did not see it as an attack on any of my dreams. I figured I would just not have kids and it would be as simple as that. In my youthful naivete, I had not yet realized that nothing in Evangelical Christianity is ever that simple.

As I grew up, I started to realize that people in my church think that people who choose not to have kids are selfish. They are lazy because they don’t want to take care of kids, they are only concerned with the status of their high powered careers and they don’t want pesky kids taking time away from that and they want all their money for themselves and don’t want to deal with the expenses of childcare. Most importantly, they viewed faith as heritage and people who don’t want kids are not bringing another generation of faith into the world. I was at a total loss for what I was supposed to do; if I don’t have kids I’m regarded by some as selfish, but if I have kids, I have to give up all of my dreams and home school them. Nobody ever wanted to discourage my dreams, but their ideas of what a good Christian is supposed to do with their lives made my dreams incompatible with what I thought it meant to follow God.

One day it dawned on me that there was a way that I could do all of the things I wanted and still follow God. All I had to do was find a man who wanted to be a stay at home dad! I mean, who says it has to be the wife who stays at home with the kids? The husband can do that too. I felt that I had found the solution to all my problems and I didn’t think about it or worry about it until a few years later when I was trying to decide where I should go to college. I was about fifteen or sixteen and already thinking about it because I just knew it would be the most exciting thing in the world. My parents never had any objections to it because if my husband were to die or if God forbid, I never found a husband, I would need a degree to fall back on.

My youth leader did not see things this way. He asked me if I really thought it was a good idea to spend thousands of dollars and several years of my life on an education that I wouldn’t end up using. My initial reaction was “excuse me? You did not just say that to me!” He explained that he wasn’t trying to imply that I wasn’t capable, just that I wouldn’t have time for a career when I am home schooling my children. I laughed about the misunderstanding and assured him that he didn’t have to worry about that because I would just marry a man who wants to home school the kids. He told me that a man shouldn’t have to do that job, the woman is the natural caregiver and not only will a man not be good at that but it would emasculate him and eventually it would end up making him resent me and probably even want a divorce.

I normally try to avoid being dramatic at all costs but the only words I can use to describe that situation was that something inside me died when I heard that. My will was broken and became depressed over the next several weeks and then I became angry. I lived for years in silent, outwardly submissive rebellion and decided again that I wasn’t going to have children. If that made me a selfish bitch, then so be it.

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