I hate to make decisions. Really, it is one of my worst qualities. It’s a funny thing actually. I have a lot of faith that things will work out for the best. Given that philosophy you’d think I could leap and not worry so much about where I might fall.
Before making any decisions I ask myself a series of questions. I try to list out all of the pros and cons and think as hard as I can about best and worst case scenarios. It drives me crazy. It drives my husband crazy. It drives everyone around me crazy.
Given my reluctance to make decisions it is no wonder that I have been pondering my decision to stay home or return to work for nearly six months.
If you’ve followed my story you know that I was laid off last summer and that I was thrilled with the idea of staying home with my son. In fact, some people told me I was the happiest they’d ever seen me in my life.
Well I’ve been home for nearly six months now and I’ve finally made the decision to stay home. I was offered a job that would have paid me more money than my previous position and offered comparable benefits, but at the end of the day I decided that I really wanted to stay home. After all, I can always work but I can never get back this time with my child.
It was a hard decision to make and as I contacted the folks who offered me a position I actually cried. I think there were a lot of mixed emotions in turning down the job, including feeling dependent on my husband, realizing that I’ll need to cut back on my savings goals, wondering if this is a mistake for my long term career and fearing that time out of the workforce will make it that much harder to find a job in the future.
Despite all of those issues and concerns I decided to stay home with my son. There are so many amazing things about being a stay-at-home mom and I simply wasn’t ready to give any of them up for a boring job in a cubicle. (Not that there is anything wrong with boring jobs in cubicles.) A good friend told me to “jump off the ledge” and that’s exactly what I did.
In my heart I know that this is the right decision for me. I know a lot of women would make the decision to return to work. In fact, I don’t have any friends who stay home with their children, which made it that much harder for me to decide to stay home.
I made this decision with two key things in mind. One: This is a point in time decision. I can, at any time, change my mind. If I get bored, if I feel this isn’t the best decision for my son or my family or if I just miss the working world I can always look for work again. Two: Sometimes despite all of the intellectual reasoning and questioning you have to listen to your heart. I have prepared and saved for years for something special. I just didn’t know exactly what that something special was. With the birth of my son. I now know.
You did the right thing, OFG. You thought this through carefully and weighed all the positives and negatives. I honestly think in the long run, you won’t regret it. One bit.
Congratulations and good luck. It is tough work to stay home with your child but very rewarding. It does take time to learn to reduce your spending, change your goals, etc. And you will learn to be creative in your spending, saving and earning to make things work for your family. Enjoy your time with your little one!
I am a horribly waffle-y decision maker, too, but even if the decision ends up being mistake in the end, I can always point to the intense debate that was going on in my head, and say, “I made the best decision I could at the time, given the information I had.” It is nice to know in retrospect.
You’ll be saving heaps in daycare/nanny/other costs and get so much emotional currency in return.
On another note, we need better parental leave policies in the US. In NZ, it’s 14 weeks paid leave, and they are trying to increase that to 26 weeks! They also offer a lot of flex-time and up to 12 months unpaid leave, guaranteed job return (after the paid leave runs out). Investing in children and families early on can only help the state of, well, everything. And I say this as someone who will probably never have a family–that is worth raising my taxes for.
Congratulate yourself on all the work you’ve done to make this possible and ENJOY! I don’t believe you’ll ever regret this decision!