‘Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.’ – Ted Turner

(also attributed to my friend Jane J )



Nothing to do with work -
Me on the Brooklyn Bridge

I struggle pretty regularly with the fact that the primary work of my life at the moment (and my longest running ‘career’) is unpaid. My husband and I have a very traditional social contract in which he earns enough money to support our family and I am on the front lines of childcare, and to a lesser extent, housework. There are some very real practical implications of this choice for me, in terms of future earning potential and cost of delaying retirement savings. However, the crux of the problem at the moment has more to do with psychology than finance.

Because financial considerations are not currently pressing, I get to explore my options regarding a return to paid work that prioritizes an increase in my happiness more than in our bank balance. To that end, I have been reading a book called ‘The Joy of Work?: Jobs, Happiness, and You by Peter Warr and Guy Clapperton. Peter Warr has done research into job happiness for decades, and has also written a much bigger, and much denser, textbook on the subject. In this more user-friendly model, the two authors identify 12 things that are important to job satisfaction (including such things as money, valued role, reasonable and safe work environment, etc.) I am finding it very helpful in exploring the idea of returning to paid work.

However, I felt that the two areas of value and money were not addressed well in conjunction with each other. I agree with their assessment that once you are reasonably well off, additional money doesn’t add drastically to your happiness. But the happiness leap between poverty and reasonable income is significant. Then, presumably because the money issue had been covered, it is not discussed at length in the section that articulates a need for a ‘valued role’ in your workplace. They do not address the way that being paid for your work is part of how the value of work is expressed. Of course there are many examples where the market value of skills doesn’t reflect the actual relative value of the job (ex: school teacher vs. movie star.) But as a general rule of thumb, there is correlation.

My happiness, according to the discussion by Clapperton and Warr, should not increase significantly should I receive reasonable money for whatever job I choose to pursue. However, I am pretty sure that being financially compensated is crucial to my happiness with that job. I am not poor. I can afford to eat at nice restaurants, travel a bit, and I don’t have to worry about affording things for my kids. But my personal life score in terms of dollars in, dollars out, is deficient. There is a poverty of recognition at play.

That poverty of recognition is exacerbated by two things for me – 1, in the broader culture, being a stay at home mom is not valued and 2, I don’t especially enjoy the job and I don’t feel that good at it.

The first of these is a little tricky. The media fueled “Mommy Wars” in which stay at home moms feud with working moms about who is doing it right, and which way is harder, is disheartening to say the least. And while there are pockets of support for the value of full time mommy-hood, they aren’t my people. I am not religious; I am not socially conservative; this is not what I wanted to be when I grew up. Feminism, I sometimes feel, is kind of a bitch on this subject. In the push to give women opportunity in the workplace, they added to the disrespect for the things that are traditionally ‘women’s work’. I have never been to a party in which the what-do-you-do followed by the I’m-a-stay-at-home-mom does anything but stop conversation.

"Not Rocket Science"

In some ways I can’t blame them. I find much of the job to be boring and repetitive (see number 2 above.) There are parts of my job that are hard, but so much of it seems like it should be easy – wash and fold laundry, load the dishwasher, etc. But I am still not good at getting them done. Not awesome for the self-esteem. And if laundry, diapers and dishes is what the phrase ‘stay at home mom’ conjures, there isn’t a ready follow up for the cocktail party convo.


"Things I am not good at" (this was the 'after' cleaning picture)

Then there are things that I really can’t tell if they help or hurt my mommy-morale. One is that I didn’t have an established career before taking off work. That means that a return to work is an entrée into a new field of some kind. At age 37. I have a degree in history, of little use. And I am qualified to be a midwife, but that is imminently impractical for life as it has unfolded for my family

Which leads to the elephant you didn’t know was in the room – my daughter’s autism. She is a big reason why midwifery won’t work right now (for the next decade at least), and she is a big reason why it is hard for me to conceive of hiring out the bulk of my childcare duties. I want to be the one who is picking her up from preschool and therapy – to directly track her progress and programs, coordinate everyone’s efforts. (Though I would be ok if that person was her dad, though market value of our relative skills makes that unfeasible.) But she is also why the job is harder.

So, I am stay at home mom (to 2 children), housekeeper (only marginally, thank you husband-who-likes-things-clean), and also unpaid education and therapy coordinator for an autistic child. None of these roles has job training, professional status, or income. Intrinsic value, yes. But not so much that it alleviates that poverty of recognition.

My son, 10, still sometimes misspeaks and asks ‘How much is it worth?’ instead of ‘How much does it cost?’ So, he has heard our little mini spiel about the difference between cost (money) vs. worth (value) many, many times. I am starting to wonder lately if I have been listening to what I have been telling him all these years. Separating value from dollars is very hard to do. The notion of scorekeeping is hard to shake. Perhaps there is a way we can change the game?

  


The family feet