Go Ahead and Change Bodies; Just Remember to Take Your Soma
Interesting read that strikes home for me a bit.<p>As a kid, my mom was a working mother -- a terribly unpopular choice in rural Michigan where we lived.  My mom drove 30 minutes away from home to get me to a suitable child-care provider.  She didn&#x27;t pick the place because it was close to work -- she was a traveling sales-person -- she picked it because it was the closest available (located at a church because commercial daycare was non-existent where we lived).  When I started looking for a partner in life, one of my &quot;absolutes&quot; was to find a woman who would be OK with one of us staying home with our children (I was and still would be perfectly fine with being a stay-at-home Dad).  As a result, my ex-wife stayed home with the children (and my current wife does the same).<p>The tables have turned in my adult-hood.  It&#x27;s unusual to have a parent stay home.  The job is as hard as it was when I was a kid (if not harder due to social pressures that make women feel badly for <i>not</i> pursuing careers).  As a society (in the US anyway), we&#x27;re setup for both parents to work full time.  When my wife and I chose not to enroll our children in pre-school most of our friends thought we were out of our minds and holding our children back.  As parents we felt it was unnecessary to hire a professional educator for teaching our children the ABCs&#x2F;123s and were surprised at the reaction we received even from families who didn&#x27;t have two working parents.  As a child, preschool was purely the domain of families of working parents and enrollment was considered an unnecessary expense when mom or dad was available.<p>Personally, I don&#x27;t have strong feelings about stay-at-home vs. work full-time parents.  I knew I didn&#x27;t enjoy my experience as a kid but I knew that a lot of that was due to jealousy since nearly all of my friends had moms that stayed home.  Our kids are school-age, now, but we&#x27;re still a single-parent earning family by choice.  Having children is a <i>lot</i> of work and I personally don&#x27;t think we could handle raising them the way we desire if we both had priorities outside of the home.  Don&#x27;t read that as me saying that it cannot be done -- I&#x27;m sure it can, as my parents remind me &quot;you turned out just fine&quot;[1] -- I just don&#x27;t know that <i>I</i> could do it.<p>[1] People get <i>very</i> touchy about parenting choices.  When I told my family that we had no intention -- from the beginning -- to have both of us working, they assumed that we were calling them bad parents for choosing differently.  I know the situation my family was in when I was young.  They had little choice but to both work in order to keep the lights on.  And I&#x27;m not the least bit upset with how I was raised, but the added time we get to enjoy our children and the reduced stress that I experience knowing that our home life is taken care of while I&#x27;m working is worth the loss of income, especially since we live in a place where we can comfortably get by on my salary.