About Mighty Mighty and her Letters to Us
This isn’t the first time I’ve kept a blog, but it is the first time I will have done so anonymously. In college, I kept up one relating my escapades as a chaste modestynik with the guts to say no to promiscuity, but not the guts to say no to awkward dates in the first place. (“You don’t have to love me, but please like me!”) During study abroad, I kept a blog about my life in Central America, the homesickness, the hardheaded refusal to be lonely, and my spiritual struggles. These were under my real name, and I had to deal with a lot of drama from my family. It wasn’t that I was spilling family secrets, but rather, that I was sharing my take on things; my family has a few dysfunctions, one of which is an overwhelming desire to rewrite history, and to control the content of other people’s memories.
So this time, despite the fact that many a blogger out there has told all, and told her family to deal with it, I am anonymous. In fact, you may call me Mighty Mighty, my husband Fierce, and our son Wolfie.
I’m not sure where this blog will go, but for now, I would like to share my journey from career woman, to working mom, to almost-a-stay-at-home-mom. When I first married, my husband and I were earning a combined six-figure salary straight out of school, while many of our classmates were waiting tables and temping. We were lucky, and rather sure that this was what we wanted. Maybe not these exact soul-sucking jobs, but certainly regular jobs with high salaries.
Then I got pregnant. Three months into our marriage, we were expecting. Doing the math, we despaired. How were we ever going to be able to afford an annual trip to Europe, a house, student loan payments, and a baby? More importantly, a baby was going to ruin our life. Two weeks before getting the news, we had babysat for two terrors for an entire weekend. Plans to have children were delayed indefinitely, or so we thought.
Within a few months, we were back in school, getting certified to teach. We had both looked at teaching while in undergrad, but the programs today are obcene. You spend 5 years taking 100 level classes, and education classes, which are boring, easy, and do little to prepare one for anything. Then you graduate with an overpriced BA, a year late, with no back up plan. No thanks.
But now, we realized, that corporate culture was very anti-family. Um, hello….two weeks paid vacation? Annually? That’s nice, unless your in-laws live in another state AND you want to ever go anywhere far away. Also, that part about being at the office for 8 ½ hours or more per day, plus commuting an hour round trip, and seeing my child from 5:30-7:30 each evening seemed a little off. I especially disliked the part where I added up all the hours our child would spend with the babysitter, and compared that to all of my hours, and realized that after childcare, expenses, and taxes, I was earning $4/hour (and hoping that my limited time as a parent would offset all of the dubious influences from which I could surely not protect my child).
So, by the time Wolfie was a year old, both of us were working as teachers. And still…something wasn’t quite right. I was working “part time” for a private school, but basically that meant no lunch, no planning period, and just as many classes as a fulltime teacher. Planning, grading, and conferencing with parents had to take place while I was at home, unpaid. I was tired, because not only was I teaching five classes and a resource period with no intermission, I was getting home two hours earlier than my husband, giving me plenty of time to do all of the cooking and cleaning. I had more time at home, but my hourly wage after childcare was now $2/hr.
As I was becoming exhausted by my routine, I was also becoming convicted that children really need their parents for as many hours as can be managed. The more hours, the better. But with my schedule, the time I had with my son was when I was tired and cranky. My husband’s attempts to spend time together felt like “one more thing to do.” His attempts to get me to leave some of the housework for him, so that I would be less exhausted were fruitless. I kept thinking “I know I can do it all, I just need to try harder to do it all with a smile!”
It didn’t take long for me to realize that there had to be a better way to manage this. Since the only day of the week I really made any money was the day that my dad babysat for free, it didn’t make a lot of sense for me to work the other four days. Either I could work at the school that one day, or work retail when Fierce was home, but working for free four days a week did not make any sense. How could I justify leaving Wolfie with someone else, as nice as she was, to do something so draining, for free?
The long story short is that my school needed a language teacher one day a week, and as of the start of this blog, I’m in my second week of being an ASAHM, or Almost-Stay-At-Home-Mom. I do some tutoring and odd jobbing, but we’re actually better off financially with this schedule because 1.) it lowers our tax burden, 2.) it lowers our work-related expenses, 3.) it reduces how much we need to outsource cooking/cleaning/various services, since I have more time and energy to tackle things here, and 4.) I am able to pursue higher-paying work.
Spiritually and emotionally, we have not yet seen all the fruit this tree will bear, but so far, so good. A large focus of this blog will be tracing the changes we go through as we recommit to family values.
Things you will find in this blog: lots of Catholic and Christian influence, lots of love of frugality and homemaking, lots of librophilia, and the occasional rant about the jerk who vrooms his motorcycle past our house at midnight.
Things you should not find in this blog: naughty language and celebrity gossip.