Transcription
[Music] How do I cope with being a working mom when I've always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom? Tell me, tell me about, um, your dream to be a stay-at-home mom.
Um, so, I mean, it's just, it's what I've always wanted, like growing up. Whenever other kids are, "Oh, I want to be a doctor. I want to be a lawyer." Just being a wife and mother has always been what I've wanted. Mhm. Um, I always just kind of expected that to happen for me, and so now that it hasn't, I'm struggling with it.
So, do you, do you have kids? Yes, I have a 10-month-old. A 10-month-old? Oh, no. Have you already gone back to work? Yes. Oh, man. It's horrible. That, yeah, the, the number of like absolute amazing executives and professional women I've worked with over the years who come back to work after having their first kid or their second kid, and they're six, six months to a year in, and they're just dying inside. I can't tell you how many I've talked to. And I'll be honest, some of it has surprised me, right? Like I've been shocked because before they had their kid, they're like, "I'm never, I can't wait to get back here." And then it's like, "Yeah, I quit. This is stupid." You know what I mean? Absolutely.
Um, so tell me why you're not staying at home. Um, so my job is the one that provides our health insurance. My husband has like a very good job, but it just doesn't have that benefit. But he kind of fell into it and makes a lot more money than he probably should doing it. And so moving to a different job for like insurance benefits isn't much of an option. And then just paying them for them outright is crazy expensive. Yeah.
So, if you've listened to this show for a while, you know, one of the things I always challenge married couples on, anybody, but especially married couples, is this: When you feel like there is only an either-or option, I want you to put five crazy options on the table and seriously take pen to paper or keyboard to Excel and explore the realities of those other options. Because I feel like you and your husband have possibly trapped yourselves in absolutes. "I have to." "We can't." "This would never work." "Can't." "Never." "Have to." Those are all absolute words that bury people. And they're root words rooted in fear. Sometimes they're rooted in math, right? If you told me, "Hey, we, I have a nurse practitioner degree and I owe $95,000 in student loans and my husband owes 50." Like, y'all have a math problem that y'all backed yourself into before you had a kid. And so that's, there's a reality to that. If you're saying, "No, we have enough money. We would have to go do something different, or my husband would have to get trained in something else and we'd have to take a pay cut for a while until..." Like, those are all options that you can explore.
What I will tell you is, um, and I'm going to say this and it's going to sound like I'm, I hate to even say this. Um, can I just call out? You are now officially a card-carrying, um, member of the American Woman's Industrial Guilt Complex. That sounds accurate. If you stay at home, you're feeling guilty about your family. And if you are working, you're feeling guilty about being a bad mom. And if you talk to your husband about maybe getting another job, you feel like a bad, like, there you are in a situation where emotionally, right this second, you can't win. Okay. Mhm.
So, knowing that we are not going to feel good right this second about any of our next move, we can then start being honest about what would the next right move be? You get what I'm saying? I do. Okay. So, I'm telling you all that as a preface to, I'm going to tell you something and you have to promise me I won't get off the phone and spiral out. Okay? Okay. I promise. By the way, you can spiral out if you want to. I do it on a weekly basis, right? I promise you two years from now, five years from now, your husband would rather be married to somebody who loves the life she is co-creating with him, even if that means less money. I promise you, your kid, your 10-month-old will do better over time if she has a mother who is regulated in her own skin. Meaning, every minute she wakes up in the morning, she's not already having to reapply makeup because she's tearing up thinking about dropping her kid off at a daycare center. And so knowing that, I'd rather you have a season of, "We don't have very much money. We are broke. We are struggling. We are grinding it out. Husband's taking a second job. Whatever. You're working part-time. Whatever we have to do to make this next season," because it's just winter, right? Spring will come, but right now it's winter. We got to bundle up. It's annoying. It's hard. I would rather y'all explore the realities of those things. Then you wake up in three or four years and just hate your life. And for all the moms who always wanted to be stay-at-home moms and they just have a 10-month-old and they're going stone mad, then I would tell you, consider the other alternative. Right? So this isn't just for moms who are working who want to stay home. It works the other way, too. But it's so easy to get trapped in those can'ts, nevers, have tos that I want you to be honest about exploring other alternatives, even if they're really uncomfortable for the next six months or next year.
So, how does that all hit you? Oh, just the idea of it, like the idea of in a few years like absolutely hating my life is terrifying, but then also like having to change so much and, um, take that pay cut and have to, because right now we don't really worry about money too much, but then kind of having that worry also stresses me out. So, it's, it's just a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. It is.
Can we dig into the word worry? Is it worry or is it be intentional? I'd say it's more worry because, I mean, growing up, my parents were always stressed out about money, and I don't want that for my son. Yep. Okay. Um, and yeah, I don't want him to have to see us with that stress either. Okay. When I say worry versus intentional, is it worry like, "We will not have enough money to pay our bills," or is it intentional like, "This is going to be super annoying because we're going to have to watch the budget very, very closely for 24 months"? With that? I'd say it's more intentional. Okay. And I would tell you, often intentionality is the right next move for almost all of us in almost every situation. Mhm. It is very annoying that I have to get up to exercise for me to feel good like a whole person. I hate it. Like, I would much rather just wake up really late and run out the door and go to work. But that intentionality saves my marriage. It saves my relationship with my kids. It saves my employment. It saves my life. So that intentionality, that frustration gives me the life that I want to live.
And so what does your husband do? He is a video editor. Okay. And you say he just stumbled into that. What does that mean? Um, so he, without too much detail, he had a pretty popular YouTube channel actually for a little while. Okay. Um, and his employer found him through that and just offered him a job straight through that. Um, whereas normally he'd need to have the degree and apply and all that, but they just found him. Okay. So, what you're telling me is he won the lottery one time playing the YouTube game. And I say won the lottery tongue in cheek. He must have been very good at what he was doing, 'cause that's a very hard place to be successful in. I know, 'cause I live in it, right? And then he was so good at what he did, somebody came after him and found him and made him such an offer that he shut that one down and went to do something else. Right. Yes. What that tells me is you, you are married to a very talented, very hardworking, very savvy man. Is that fair? Yes, I am. Okay. So, to say this is our only shot is not honest. Yeah.
It's also just guilt because, I mean, he's also told me, 'cause he wants this for me as well, and he's told me he'll do anything to make it happen. But then it's the guilt of, I don't want to make him get a second job or leave his job. And I want to tell you, choose guilt over resentment starting today. Because as I told you earlier, you're going to feel guilty about every move that you make. Mhm. Or every move that you don't make. If you have a man who's saying, "I want to be the guy who gives my wife and my young son the life they want," then that is the life he wants. Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. And by the way, he, like, if my wife came home tomorrow and said, "We have to be done with this." Kelly just looked up and she's like, "Please don't quit." But like, if she, my wife came home and said, "We have to be done with this. It's too much. It's too big. It's just, I can't handle it anymore." There's not a question in my mind that I would opt out of this thing. It might be us being real and saying, "It's going to take us six months. It's going to take us a year. It's going to take us, I got to figure out what comes next. I got to start reapplying." Like, all that. There would be some logistics to it. And I would be frustrated. I'd be annoyed because I love what I do. And that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be the right thing to do. But what I would tell you as a husband, if my wife is silently suffering and not telling me and trying to, I mean, slowly burning like an old cigarette with ash of resentment, I would, I would be really frustrated because I would lack integrity. Because when we both said we're both all-in, that meant we're going to be honest with each other. We're going to do the next right thing for each other, and we are going to build the life together that we both want. And so just know, if you keep going to work and it's breaking your heart every morning and it just feels in your guts this is wrong, you're going to feel guilty about that. And if your husband says, "I'm, I'll quit this job today for you and the kids, and we're going to have 24 months and we're not going to make very much money, and you're going to have to be really savvy about where we get groceries from for a while, and we're going to have to get non-cage-free eggs, or we have to eat eggs from chickens and cages for a year." Like, I don't know what y'all do, but like, then you're going to feel guilty about that. And if you don't change anything, you're going to feel guilty about that. Like, there's not a path that you can take right now where you're not going to have some sense of frustration. And so let's then, then go do the next right thing. And I'll tell you, on behalf of husbands, man, you, it sounds like you married a great one. Sit down and have an honest conversation about, okay, what would a transition actually look like? And just be honest about, okay, we've said we can't do this and we can't do that. Let's put five options on the table and really imagine what would that look like. It might mean we have to move. It might mean he has to go back to school. It might mean any number of things. It might mean that he sits down with his employer and says, "Hey, if you really want me, I got to get some health insurance. I'll split it with you." I don't, I don't know. I'm just making stuff up. But through your silence, I'm hearing a woman who feels trapped. Yes.
Were you trapped growing up? Um, I mean, yeah. Okay. Yeah, kind of. Was it your job to make sure everybody was okay growing up? Yeah. I had a sibling that was a lot younger than me, and he was kind of my responsibility. Okay. What I would ask for you, on behalf of your husband who's not on the phone here, I would ask that you not take that into this new marriage that you have, this new role as a mother. You have this new world y'all are co-creating in real time. Tonight, I want you all to sit down and say, "Okay, let's imagine he puts three on the table and you put three ideas on the table, and they're all nuts. Let's go through each one of them. All right, what if we moved? What if I just took this other job, or I've actually secretly been applying for? Or what would it look like in six months, come Christmas, that we're in a different place? Maybe we have to sell our house and rent. Maybe we have to, like, fill in the blank." But let today be the day that you sit down and say, "Honestly, I, I, I don't want this to be my future, and I want us to begin building an off-ramp here so we can get into, go a new direction in our, in our marriage." Let him step up and be the husband that he sounds like he wants so desperately to be for you. Pretty awesome.