Reply to SAHM’s - anyone successfully convince DH to support their staying home long term?

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "SAHM’s - anyone successfully convince DH to support their staying home long term?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote][quote]we have great life insurance but if he died I would definitely need/want to work and I would not want to have to start from scratch after years out of the workforce. Stuff like that keeps me up at night, so I have continued to work part time in my field and maintain contacts and skill sets so that I could return to full time work if needed. [/quote]

Absolutely. Your model (part time work for me) would have been my favored plan but my biggest two issues were 1) my DH job is pretty inflexible/work day pretty long and 2) my own field did not encourage part time work. Some of the things you have mentioned are of real concern to moms (layoffs, illness, death, divorce). As a woman and a mom, my kids and I are financially vulnerable until we actively work to make sure that concerns you raised were addressed by taking concrete steps.

I would never question a mom's need to be at home with her children but the finances and their own life reality needs to be first accounted for. There cannot be one solution fits all for anyone.[/quote]

(shortening quotes for space)

PP here. Just wanted to note that I really, really lucked out with work. I was gearing up to return to work full time when my youngest turned 2.5, and then I randomly got offered a super flexible part time position by a former colleague. It was not at the time exactly the work I wanted to be doing, but the hourly rate was so good that I had to take the offer seriously. Even with the high hourly rate, I don't make as much as I would if I were full time (may house can be a bit variable). But I am so glad I took the job. What it means is that I get to do fairly high level work in my field, but I work from home on a completely flexible schedule. Also, because they headhunted me for this job, I was able to come back to them and negotiate a very favorable work arrangement that allows me to prioritize my kids pretty much whenever I need to. It is a unicorn job and I'm fully aware of that -- when Covid closed schools, I spent months working from 9pm to 2am in order to complete projects because I figured at some point schools would reopen and the last thing I wanted was to lose this job. I think it would be next to impossible to replace.

My dream is actually to find ways to pay this situation forward as my kids get older, and ramp up my work until I have enough of my own business to be able to offer this same opportunity to other women in my field. I work mostly with other women who have kids (mostly now grown) and I think that's a big reason why the stars aligned on this for me. Women who have been through it get it. I would really like to see more opportunities for women to be able to work flexible and part-time jobs when their kids are small without having to sacrifice a substantive role in their field. Most of these jobs are largely administrative and dead end for women, which makes it harder to justify returning to work if you previously were working at a higher level. I remember when I was starting to look, a lot of the full time jobs I was looking at were largely administrative and earning potential was severely limited. As someone who used to make more in bonus than in salary and has a pretty impressive CV, it was depressing. The mom penalty is very real and the expectation that women can just hop back into the workforce after taking an extended break to have children is really unrealistic.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics