Web Original: Suburban Mom Roundtable

KATIE: A lot of my friends are having babies now — in their early 20s — which is really scary to me. I don’t even know where I’m going to work next month or whatever, so I have no idea what I would do with kids. I guess I’d like it if one of us would stay home.

VICKI: Your ideal, then, would be to have a parent at home?

KATIE: I feel like my mom and I are not as close as we should be because she was never there when I was growing up. She worked too much. She still works too much. She was very career-driven, she was building a business, which is very important. My dad would come home and do all the cooking, all of the cleaning.

SANDY: Did she come to special events?

KATIE: Well, the Tuesdays at the zoo.

SANDY: Sports?

KATIE: Yeah, she made me do all sports.

SANDY: Did she come?

KATIE: My dad did. She didn’t attend so much, but she wasn’t absent. We always had dinner together as a family. That was good. I want to do that with my family. My friends didn’t do that.

IV. CAN YOU DO BOTH … AND NOT IMPLODE?

SANDY: Vicki, you’ve worked out a schedule that seems to be pretty ideal.

VICKI: Well, it’s important to note that I never intended to stay at home with my kids.

JESS: Was it because you didn’t want to?

VICKI: I enjoyed what I was doing to the point where I just never thought that I would. And when I got pregnant, I asked to work a four-day-a-week schedule only because my friends were asking to work four-day-a-week schedules, and I thought, “Oh, maybe that’s what I should do.” And that worked. But when I got pregnant again, I ended up being able to just quit working in the office. I write out of my basement, on contract, but my kids still go to daycare Monday through Thursday.