Work-at-Home Parent vs. Stay-at-Home Parent

Do you find a way to blur the lines between

working at home and staying at home?

Photo by Carlos Porto

Disclaimer!

This post is in no way intended to insinuate that one of these should be construed as "better" than the other or more noble in any way, shape or form.  For that matter, the same thing goes for parents who work outside the home.  As a parent you are the only one who knows what is best for your family and situation and nobody ever has the right to tell you otherwise!!

Okay, climbing off the soap box now...

As much as I would like to claim that I ditched my full-time job and went into freelance writing out of some romantic starving artist notion, it simply isn't the truth.  While I didn't go into this kicking and screaming (and rather enjoy it, in fact), it was a decision that involved a lot of discussion, testing and compromise.

The driving force behind the decision was the fact that I was needed at home.  My son has special needs and I am frequently needed to deal with situations at the school.  When you work outside the home, phone calls from the school and leaving frequently to pick up a child from school isn't exactly the best way to score points with the management.  An FMLA is helpful, but it can't solve every situation.

As the situation got stickier and stickier and I spent more time "visiting" with human resources, I realized that I was going to have to make a decision.  At the time, I had started dabbling in freelance writing and I'd had some success earning money.  Could I do this full time?  I wasn't sure, but I suspected I was going to be finding out soon.

I took a sabbatical from work in May to try and see how leaving work would go.  I felt lighter almost instantly.  Having the ability to get up and go whenever I needed without running it past my boss, which usually involved a great deal of anxiety on my part, complete with hammering heartbeat and dry mouth, was such a freeing experience.  I knew right away that, for the sake of my son and for my own sanity, we were going to have to find a way to make this work.

For many families, the story would end there.  One parent stays home to handle the situation with the child while another goes to work.  In our case it wasn't quite that simple.  One paycheck simply doesn't cut it.  Bills still have to get paid, especially since our medical bills can be quite high.

I'm fortunate enough to have a talent and a desire to work from home.  But I've found that separating "work from home" with "stay at home" isn't quite as simple as I initially thought. I've indulged myself numerous times, starting work late, taking the kids to the park, procrastinating to watch a movie with my daughter, stopping work to play a game with my son...  everything still gets done on time, but I could probably get a lot more done if I would do better about buckling down.

And then I remind myself that my daughter won't always be three, and she won't always think that snuggling on the couch with mom is a great way to spend a morning.  My son won't always want to show me his new guitar chords or his latest science experiment.  So maybe it's okay to blur the lines between working at home and staying at home.

So maybe it's not such a black and white issue after all.  Maybe it's a spectrum, like this:

<--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Stay-at-home                                                            Work-at-home

And I'm happily somewhere in the middle.

If you are a parent working home, where do you fall on the spectrum?

Women, Writing and Money

Not a measure of self-worth, but you should charge what you are worth.

Photo by: worradmu

An excellent conversation is taking place over at AboutFreelanceWriting.com.  After an article discussing the ways to get paid what you are worth and the value of directness in pricing, I had a question.  "Are men more likely to be direct about getting paid then women?"  Writer Anne Wayman took the time to explore the question, believing it to be tied in to self-worth, rather than gender.  As she points out though, isn't that a bit of a gender issue as well?  If you can, by the way, take the survey to express your opinion.  I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

I think this is a really important subject to address.  It's well-known that women are still earning less than men working in the same position.  In 2010, TIME Magazine reported that women only earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

What on earth is going on here?  While on the surface it appears to be a bias issue, the bias wouldn't be allowed if women weren't willingly settling for less.  Granted, wages aren't usually something that is talked about -- I know people who would happily report all about their sex lives but would never tell me what they made last year -- so it's hard to compare.

Are women as a whole more willing to accept a first offer?  Do some of them feel grateful to be hired at all?  Do they not feel worth more?

I'm the first person to confess to feeling a sense of gratitude when someone wants to hire me.  Sometimes the validation that I'm not a crappy writer gets in the way and almost becomes part of the payment.  I'm also still rather new to the game.

I've been working jobs that paid crummy wages for the past 20 years.  The idea of making $50 an hour frightens me.  Could I possibly be worth that much?  I have no college degree.  Enough credits for two separate degrees, but not in the right combination and not at the right schools.  According to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, the average yearly pay for a woman who has only a high school diploma is $25,000 per year ($32,900 for men -- couldn't you just cry?).  At the job I left earlier this year I was making about $40,000 annually.  So, statistically speaking, I was doing really well for someone with no associate's degree.

Am I crazy to want more?  Am I crazy to think that I am worth more?  I have a skill.  I can write and edit.  I can research.  I can put thoughts together in a logical stream.  I can do these things well.  I had an inkling this was something I might be good at, but until I jumped in and began getting feedback from those who had no reason to coddle me, I could only suspect.

And here we are again.  I thought I was good at writing but I wasn't sure until other people told me so.  As a writer you won't succeed unless other people think your writing is good enough to buy, so there's certainly a point where other people have to think you're good.  So how do you deal with this issue when your creative process must have a dollar amount assigned to it and that dollar amount is determined by whether someone will purchase it at that price?

I know this is a point that has been bandied about for several decades and one blog post isn't going to solve the problem.  It's probably also a good question for my therapist!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.