Reply to Does you relationship change if you stay home ( for moms)?

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[quote=Anonymous]Different experience here.

I did almost exactly what you are talking about -- I intended to go back after my leave, discovered I was very much not ready to leave my baby, extended my leave, and then wound up just staying home for a couple years. I have zero regrets about it -- it was 100% the right choice for me.

It did change our relationship but not for the worse. One thing it did was really force us to reckon with what it means to "work" in our family. We realized that even though we'd been contributing equally financially for a long time, I'd been doing a lot more of the housework and "invisible load" well before we had a kid. Sure, some of that was because I like it and because I worked at home and it was convenient. But it was also a lot because of gender expectations, and we had to talk through that and discuss what it means.

The upshot was that we all (but especially DH) became a lot more aware and appreciative of the unpaid work of taking care of the house, dealing with finances, planning vacations, as well as now, childcare. We are more explicit about the fact that this is valuable work even though it doesn't technically earn us money. And my DH has started going a LOT more of it. He's had to grow up a bit as a person. It's been good for us.

I will also say that one of the best things I did was continue to keep a toe in my career even though I was mostly not working. That first year, I took on a couple small freelancing projects for my old employer that were easy to do while my baby was napping or playing. As she got older, I started taking on more work but also realizing she needed more focused attention, which led to me starting to get some childcare, until eventually I was working close to full-time and she was in close to full-time care. It was a gradual progression that wrapped up around the time she turned 3. I did not experience that feeling of having to start from scratch to go back to work because I was already working. I kept my work contacts. I maintained a website for my freelancing. I only earned a few thousand dollars in freelance income those first 2 years, but I stayed in the game enough that I honestly never felt like it was hard to return to work.[/quote]

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