how many of us have a mother or MIL who never worked outside the home in her lifetime?

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08/17/2016 13:33

Subject: how many of us have a mother or MIL who never worked outside the home in her lifetime?

quote

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My mother tried a few half-hearted jobs but never really had a career. I hated it and always wished she worked. She was outrageously suffocating and just a total drag on the family. It got to the point that when I was a teen my brother and I told our dad we'd support him if he wanted to divorce her.

She's like the perfect example of everything NOT to do as a SAHM.

+1. My mom never worked. It was just because she was lazy, not because she cared about raising fine children. She now gets along with no one, takes everything as a personal insult. She's never been forced to get along with personalities as a result of work environment or anything of the sort. Also things like "having to go to an appointment" is a huge ordeal for her because she has to be somewhere at a certain time and it screws up her schedule of nothingness and tv shows.

I worked for many years before I had kids but my kids have no memory of me working because I stopped working after they were born. Does it matter that I ever worked if they never saw me working?

I'm the bolded poster. My mom had my older sibling when she was 24. She worked at the nursery school we went to for a couple of years. She was getting her Masters degree at night when I was in elementary school but stopped before graduating. She substitute taught here and there. I loved that, because kids behaved HORRIBLY for subs and then she'd come home and think we were WONDERFULLY behaved with all our "please" and "thank you" manners. Every time she subbed she'd come home at like, 3:45 and collapse on the sofa and we'd bring her an ice and Coke and sit in the floor listening to her complain about how disorganized the school was, how she got lost, the bad behavior of the kids, how exhausted she was.

Being an adult now who works, I know that when you start a new job, there's a ramp-up period of about a week, where you ARE exhausted when you get home - meeting new people, learning where everything is, getting up to speed on procedures, etc. But after the first week you find your groove. I think because my mother only worked one or two days here, and then two days there, she never completed that ramp up period. When she wasn't working, she was sleeping and leaving us notes of what to do around the house and what time to wake her (15 minutes before Daddy gets home!) which let her imply to him that she'd been up all day accomplishing things.

At this point she's 65, my dad is 68 and still working, and my mom hasn't worked at ALL since 1990. Her ability to accomplish anything on a deadline is nil. Literally. I was once meeting her in my city, for dinner. She was staying at a hotel two blocks away. I was coming from three miles away. I got there five minutes early. She was a half hour late. I was coming from work. She'd ... been napping all day (no jet lag). She's ALWAYS late, because there's zero sense of urgency. I just have very little respect for her. She's a total homebody, hasn't driven in over a dozen years so relies on my father to take her everywhere, and has minimal social skills. Last year at a dinner with other people, she told stories about me that involved a bathroom. People could be talking to her and she'll yawn and literally nod off right in front of their faces.

Oddly, she judges my SIL and brother for having a nanny for their baby. As if she was some great stay at home mom. Yet my mother never made my lunch for me. Never made my breakfast for me. There were never freshly baked cookies coming out of the oven as I came home from school. She went on two of my school field trips. I was rarely allowed to have friends over (fewer than ten times in my entire childhood). I grew up watching Donahue and As the World Turns because she watched it. She didn't do laundry. She didn't cook dinner. She didn't clean. Didn't ever put gas in her car. Never raked leaves or shoveled snow.