The Existential Crisis of the Wait-at-Home Mom
“I’m convinced these guys are not unique,” Clower says of the firm, which is why she’s thinking about starting her own business, Mom’s Next Step, that will match Philadelphia women trying to opt back in with local companies that don’t view a résumé gap as an instant reject button and don’t assume returning mothers are uncommitted or unreliable or unprepared. And that allow women to be flexible.
It’s certainly possible that by the time Clower gets this business up and running, the other five women at this luncheon will be ready to use it. But none are ready yet. All they know at this point is that they want the flexible part, so that they can still do as much mom-ing as they’re needed for. As for what they want to flexibly do, they have no clue, and are looking for guidance in books (they’re all pumped about Meg Wolitzer’s latest, The Ten-Year Nap, in which the main character laments, “I am lost in the woods in the middle of my life”) and in Myers-Briggs tests and the Landmark Forum and Friday-morning yoga classes. But the presumption is, basically, that the only things standing in their way are 1) figuring out their “passions”; and 2) convincing business people they have value.
That is, until the former lawyer pulls out a job application she’d started filling out that morning for a position at a nonprofit that needs lawyers for consultation. She practiced law for quite a while before quitting to become a mom, and in the 22 years she’s been at home, she’s taken all the classes she needed to keep up her law license. On the application, she explains to the group, she needs to check a box to identify which level of experience she has. There are three boxes: lawyer, layperson and intern.
“I feel like I should check off the spot to be an intern,” she says. No one says anything. She goes on: “I don’t feel I would be worthy of a salary to start. In the beginning, they’d be giving more to me than I’d be giving to them. And I really wouldn’t want the pressure of having to justify that I’m being paid.”
“You’re placing a lot less value on your life experience,” someone points out.
“No,” she says. “It’s a package.”
“But you’re bringing other factors and other skill sets.”
“Yes … but … ”
“Can’t you see that?”
“Yes … but … I’m intimidated,” she admits, reluctantly. “I’m totally intimidated.”
Everyone at the table silently nods.
CYNTHIA DRAYTON REMEMBERS the exact moment she decided to opt out. It was over a decade ago, and she was on business in the Philippines, starting to feel like she was always on business in the Philippines, instead of back home on the Main Line with her twin baby girls. She wanted to do both — be a businesswoman and be a mom. And she was trying to do both, running the multimillion-dollar clothing company she’d started on her own 15 years before, micromanaging her two nannies (one live-in, one live-out), spending time with her husband and girls when she wasn’t flying all over the world. But she’d recently started to suspect that living both lives to their fullest was impossible when you were just one 38-year-old woman.
