Parenting is not a job

This Anne Romney dust up has me thinking, what if someone who was one of those stay at home types and actually came clean and said, you know what, I’ve been in the workplace and I’ve been a stay at home parent and the jobs are not equal, going to a job and earning a paycheck is a million times harder than staying home with kids.

I wonder what would happen then.

I often tell my son that when I was in my late teens/early twenties I worked in Southern California as a landscape laborer. I was the lowest employee on a pretty low totem pole. I dug holes for one gallon plants to fit into. The ground in much of Southern California in the summer time can feel like rock, especially if you spend every single day trying to dig holes for one gallon plants. That may have been the worst job I ever had. I kept it because I needed the money for rent and food and gas for my old car. At the end of every day and at any point during every work day, I would dip my hands in buckets of ice to relieve the pain and soreness. That was a job I hated, but it was work and it paid me money.

My wife and I had a son in 1990 and I injured a bone in my spine in a bike accident in Alaska. I returned to Seattle for medical treatment, she was working for a biotechnology company and as my treatment wore on, at some point it became obvious that we had switched roles, she the main breadwinner, me the stay at home parent. I picked up a job that allowed me to work out of our home while also being home with our son and his baby sister. This arrangement stayed in place when the baby sister somehow managed to acquire a baby sister of her own. That meant that in the span of just a few short years I had gone from full time journalist to all time stay at home father to three children all under the age of 5.

Guess what I learned? Easiest job I ever had.

Easier than digging holes in the Southern California desert. Easier than trying to find stories in boring small towns in Southeast Alaska. Easier than chasing mind numbingly idiotic politicians around New York State. Easier than anything I had ever done to earn an actual living. Our days were basically glorious. We painted and swam, we walked and rode bikes. We napped, my lord, we napped. Yes, you people in your cubicles, talking endlessly on your headphones trying to close a sale or offer advice to people needing technical advice without the least ability to understand it, my children and I napped on a daily basis, sometimes more than once.

We cooked dinners too. Sometimes we cooked great dinners, but sometimes we threw together simple salads and ordered pizza. Often times, and this is another dirty secret, when my wife got home from a hard day of actually working, I would hand the kids off to her and go for a bike ride, or just a walk, or some other alone activity to “clear my head” because I had been “burdened” with the kids all day.

I think one of the reasons people like to think that the “mothers job is so hard” is because mothers are great PR machines. As children, when we would return home from school, our mothers would say things like, “oh I have been busy all day, cleaning and washing and making you a snack,” and we never really bothered to ask how long a peanut butter sandwich took to actually make. No, as adults we are amazed that out long suffering mothers had the time to make us these amazing snacks on a daily basis, as if it were a miracle to somehow come up with enough time to put some sort of spread on one side of bread, some peanut butter on another and push them together.

As a stay at home father I did take the time to make my children healthy snacks, often times creating plates of fresh fruits mixed with cut veggies and a bagel. The plates would even have a presentation value, everything looked perfect. Actual time it took to do it all, including picking the fresh plums from our front yard tree? Five minutes maybe. As they aged I started making healthy cookies for the kids, so when they came home from school they would have a warm cookie, except these did not have refined sugars, but instead they had granola and natural peanut butter, little healthy miracles in each bite. At the most, these took 15 minutes to make and 10-15 more for baking time.

I get it, parenting is not easy, but it’s not a job, it’s not a full time gig, it’s not equal to a wage earning, office working, sore hand making job sort of job. Stop being silly. Hanging out with your own kids is a blessing, it’s a gift to be able to stay home and raise your own kids in any way you see fit, it’s a joy to paint and ride bikes and play with your kids, kick soccer balls and play catch and yes, nap when you get tired. But it’s no where near a job.