The cultural weirdness of being a breadwinning mom

I've started realizing that the label "WOHM" does not work well to describe what I do. Recently, I've run across the phrase "breadwinning mom" - and it's the phrase I was looking for in this post on searching for labels that fit me well.

So, why is it weird to be a "breadwinning mom"? Well, first of all, there's my friends. My husband and I have relatively traditional family values, and believe that having a parent care for the children is important and that family comes first. Because of this, the families we get along with are traditional families - including lots of SAHMs. In other words, my closest female friends have a schedule that is very different from mine. During the times that the working spouse traditionally gets the kids out of the SAHP's hair, I am caring for the kids and they may be getting a much needed break from their children. Is this impossible to work around? Well, no! Of course not. But still, it's just one more thing that takes a little more work.

Then there is that reoccuring theme of "expectations". Our society has some really weird expectations of breadwinning moms, a strange mesh of working-mom and breadwinner responsibilities that has a lot of wrinkles to iron out still. A lot of this is based in our strange expectations of SAHD's, which is a blend of working-dad expectations and SAHP expectations. Basically, what I see is that breadwinning dads expect a SAHD to do everything a SAHM does (and call him 'lazy' if he does anything less, although he may do it in a "manly" fashion, or with less precision and tidyness) - but women (two-income, breadwinner, or SAHM) are more likely to expect a SAHD to care for the children and do a little housework. In other words, they expect him to treat child care as a day job, and not try to integrate in the many other responsibilities of a homemaker. The problem is that this means that the breadwinning mom carries the responsibility for managing the home, according to these expectations. It's taken me some time, but I'm starting to realize that men - naturally - have a better grasp of the breadwinning role and how to make it work. I need to look to their lifestyle first, and then modify it to fit me as a woman and mother. Unfortunately, there really aren't mixed gender support groups for breadwinners the way there are for stay-at-home parents; support groups are more a "female" thing.

Finally, there is the new appreciation I have for the life of a breadwinning dad, for the role that men have filled for generations. There has been a renaissance of appreciation for the SAHM in recent years - a long-overdue celebration of a role that has lately been viewed as mindless, unchallenging, and unimportant. However, there are challenges for breadwinner dads that I think many moms don't understand. I'm going to put a line divider here, because the rest of this post is about breadwinners, in general.

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CHALLENGES OF BEING A BREADWINNER

Firstly, a breadwinning parent is placing his or her home and children largely into someone else's care. It helps that this person is a loving spouse and a partner in life's journey, but there is still that lack of control over so many small aspects of life that is very stressful: Everything from your daily nutrition to the values demonstrated to your children is put into another person's care. Having a spouse who doesn't value something you do - from having clean clothes for work, to healthy meals, or to letting you know about the family's day - is much more difficult when that person is in charge of caring for your clothing, shopping for and cooking your meals, and providing for your children's healthy growth and development. I'm beginning to understand why traditionally men need to be the head of the household: Otherwise, it is easy to have your needs neglected or feel like you don't matter as much because you aren't home as much. This plays out differently when the gender roles are reversed - women stay more involved in family life and parenting as breadwinners, including even having the children turn to them first when they want comfort, even though children are around Dad more. However, it's still a factor for women, I think.

Then there is the stress of having THE job for the family. Even a small reprimand from my boss gives me the jitters now (especially since I was so close to being fired so recently). Even when my husband didn't earn enough to cover our expenses if I was fired, I knew we could stretch our savings or use the credit card to cover the gaps until we fixed the hole in our income. This is true no more, and it changes my responses to household issues. When my clothes are not washed frequently enough, my first thought is "How am I going to keep this from impacting my job? No one wants an employee in stinky clothes". I worry more about my health, and want to excercise and good nutrition so that I can do my best at work. I care more about getting sleep, and am less patient with dealing with the kids in the middle of the night or bedtimes that run late and cut into my sleep. Because I am more stressed about my job, I am also more stressed about those aspects of homemaking that impact my ability to hold my job.

And finally, there is the challenge of context-switching, from the busy office where I *need* to know what's going on and be "in tune", to the home environment where I really am out of touch with the details and my frustrated spouse is having trouble understanding why I don't know where the pepper is (made more confusing by the fact that I once knew where everything was). I understand, now, why breadwinning men are so "useless" around the home: It's not incompetance, it's simply that locating daily objects requires tons of tiny little facts and bits of knowledge that someone who is outside the home ten hours most days and who doesn't manage the home just doesn't pick up.

Some of these breadwinning-men difficulties are more difficult to deal with as a mother, since there is an absurd expectation that I will, through my womanly magic, not have these same problems and continue to be a homemaking maven, the working Super-Mom extrodinaire! At the same time, I have a key advantage over most men: I've been on both sides (all three, if you include two-income homes seperately), so I can see how these attitudes develop. I could head off my husband's frustration by showing how our different sippy-cup locating skills were caused by his skill, not by my incompetance. I'm understanding now how women are actually more likely to sell traditional female work short than men, resulting in the strange expectation that anyone should be able to jump into homemaking work at the drop of a hat and do it as well as an experienced full-time homemaker. I'm understanding that homemaking work isn't as easy as homemakers think, but it is, in fact, years of practice and thoughtfulness that give them their unrecognized expertise.

So curious, that appreciation for breadwinning starts with appreciation for homemaking - but it does. Once you grok fully that "Homemaking is hard, important, and has a huge impact on the family" you suddenly understand why breadwinners can feel unwanted and out of place at home if they don't get some say over the family - why, basically, giving men respect is so important in traditional families. In reverse-traditional families, this seems to play out more as having strong communication between the man and the woman, so the woman doesn't feel out of touch and gets listened to. You get why breadwinners may complain about homemakers who don't take charge of the household fully - we complain because it MATTERS, and impacts us and our ability to care for the family as breadwinners (understanding how complaining shows respect for the work a person should do and communicates valueing that work - when phrased appropriately - was important, in our family). You can especially understand why us breadwinners seem to be less "with it" at home than second-income parents (most working moms) or SAHPs - that it's not incompetance, but rather unfamiliarity with a job that relies heavily on prior experience homemaking in that specific family and house to truly excel.

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I know I keep covering similar ground to this post in my blog, but I'm trying to refine what it is about a reverse-traditional family that is so difficult for so many people trying this family style - and why we have so much trouble discussing these problems openly. SAHDs who don't do their housework duties (and, if you look deeper, home management in general) without a huge push is a reoccurring theme among many families I've talked with (interestingly, mainly in relatively new SAHD families), but a woman who says HER family is experiencing this gets a significant backlash in many circles where she should be able to get support. For a breadwinning mom to say she needs support, even, is to invite criticism. Needing support implies that she is doing something challenging and worthwhile, and somehow that seems to take away from the challenges her husband is facing as a male homemaker and from the worthiness of his work. I believe the truth, of course, is that open support for breadwinning mom challenges would add to the support available for men - but that's another post, and this post is already long enough to be three posts.