November 6, 2007 - Stay-at-Home Mom Versus Corporate LIfe

I have wanted to be a stay at home mom for a long, long time. As mentioned in earlier posts, my husband and I met and married somewhat later in life, so I had plenty of time to wish, pray and hope for this to happen sometime in my life.

Before we moved to Oklahoma though, I worked and had a career. My degree is in Computer Science, from Syracuse University, which is how I ended up spending many years living in the northeastern U.S., before finally moving to Texas. I graduated from S.U. in 1987 and worked in the computer industry until December of 2005, which is when I quit my last job working for a financial firm in Houston.

When I quit my last job, I was managing around 30 or so people. Our group had the responsibility of developing and hosting web sites for our company. Our company had branches all over the world so the web sites were expected to be up and running 24 x 7 and it was very very visible if a web site went down for some reason. I enjoyed my job. It was fun most of the time, very challenging and also stressful at times.

Anyway, I had a friend who was also a manager of a group at the time. I have not stayed in touch with her but she was a mom to some young children at that time and she knew we were planning to adopt two children. She was quite surprised that I did not want to continue my career but would rather be a stay at home mom. She could have been a stay at home mom if she had so chosen but she loved her job and wanted to pursue her career. She thought I would be bored and would miss the work environment. She also thought my husband would be bored with me. That really surprised me, quite frankly. She said I would not have anything to talk to him about, except the kids.

For some reason, I woke up thinking about this this morning. I had not thought about this in ages so I'm not sure what made me think about it this morning. The thought I had though was that what my husband and I discuss now is really not that much different than what we used to discuss when I had that job. To me, being a manager was more of a people challenge than it was a computer science or technical challenge. The people who worked for me were really smart people and they were more up to date on the latest and greatest web stuff than I was. I relied on them for their expertise in their various areas of knowledge. The fact that I had done development work before and had been a project manager of many projects over the years was important in my role as a technical manager. It helped me (hopefully) to make wise decisions, when I had to make a call, based on what my managers were telling me. But the biggest challenge of my job as a manager was people relations, including maintaining a good relationship with those who worked for me, helping to resolve issues between team members when people did not see eye to eye, listening to concerns and helping to resolve them when possible, listening to career objectives and providing advice when asked, etc.

I woke up this morning thinking about this and my thought was that the conversations with my husband are not all that different than they would have been if I was still in my last job. I still talk to him about lots of people management stuff:). Now it is about how Ben and Nick are getting along, how I am getting along with them, what I am learning as a mom and child of God, what the boys are learning, etc. I find it all very interesting and am normally reading something about either child rearing or home schooling. (Actually, right now I have taken time off reading about children to read War and Peace by Tolstoy and I am really enjoying it:). My husband seems very interested in what I am doing and reading and we talk about it and the boys a lot. I think he is just as interested in hearing about the boys as I am in talking about them. More importantly, I know he feels it is important for me to be here with them and he is thankful that I am committed to it. He is also very happy that I am committed to home schooling them.

My husband and I are partners. He is just as much concerned and interested in our boys' well being as I am and I am thankful for that. He is currently reading Raising a Modern-Day Knight by Robert Lewis, which is an excellent book about what it means to be a man and how fathers can instill that in their sons. (I picked it up yesterday and read a little bit of it, just to see what it was about. It is so good that I am still reading it!) I am very thankful that he is as interested as I am in our boys' lives. I don't think either of us will ever be bored with what we are doing.

I, for one, do not miss the corporate world at all. I never have, even during the year before the boys came home. After working in the corporate world for so many years, being out of it makes me feel like a kid who just graduated from high school or college. It is a very free feeling. For the longest time, I felt like a kid skipping school; like I should be somewhere and I'm not. I have been out of it now for almost two years and still feel this free feeling very strongly. Just the thought that I can decide what I want to do today is such a wonderful feeling. It still amazes me:). Another thing is that I am no longer in a rush all the time. When I had a job outside of the home, I was always in a hurry, probably because I didn't have much free time.

So I am very very thankful that we are able to allow me to stay home and raise our boys full time. I know there are many out there who would love to be able to do this and cannot and there are others who love having a career. For me, there was never a question. I feel called by God to do this, just as I feel called to home school. I am honored to be allowed to do this, I am thankful to have a husband who shares my dreams and goals in life and I am, truly, living my dream (as previously mentioned in an earlier post), thanks be to God:).