Homemaker vs. Breadwinner

This is for all you stay at home moms out there and for the men that love them.

My sister in law posed a hypothetical situation to me yesterday that started the rusty wheels in my brain to turn again.

Pretend for a moment that you have to go to work. You are the person who needs to earn the money in your family. But you still have your children. In this hypothetical situation you are able to leave your children with a person who is the most suited to raising your children the way you would. In fact they are better equipped to raise your children and they will most likely do a better job than you could. Not only that but they love your children just as much if not more than you do. You know that your children are safe with this person not only that but you know that they would lay down their very life before letting any harm befall your children.

Now this person you leave your children with doesn’t just take care of your children but also while you are at work they clean your house top to bottom and do all of your laundry and put it away. You get to come home to a nice hot meal that you eat with your children. After which this person does the cleanup so that you can spend some quality time with your children playing outside or helping them with their homework.

Now with a situation like this you inevitably would still feel guilt about leaving your children at home and not spending every moment you can with them but it would be the absolute least amount of guilt possible considering how well taken care of they and you are in return. How many of you out there would jump at the chance to work outside the home if such a situation was possible? I know I would.

Now go and tell your husband how lucky he is to live in that hypothetical world.

Before you laugh and say how true I want to present another hypothetical situation.

Pretend for a moment that you are a man and that you live in a world where someone else shoulders the entire financial burden for your family. You do not have to worry about where the money is going to come from to pay the bills it is just there every month. This person voluntarily gets up every day and drives in bumper to bumper traffic to get to a building with very few windows to sit in a tiny cubicle with artificial lighting. They do this so that you can stay home with your children. You feel no guilt at all over where your children are because they are with you.

This person also comes home just at the point where you are ready to throttle your children and takes them off your hands. You get as much access to your children as you could ever wish and have that person help when you have had too much.

For men or I should rather say fathers, because there is a difference, this situation sounds just as appealing as the above situation sounds to us mothers. Many feel they would love to live in that hypothetical world because they love their children just as much as we do (so they say, they didn’t carry them for nine months and nurse them so I still have my doubts). Nevertheless they feel just as much guilt about leaving their children as we would if the situation were swtiched. But for either a homemaker or a breadwinner to truly understand how lucky the other person is they would have to switch places, which for most of us isn’t going to happen. So lets chalk it up to the grass is always greener, but still remember how it felt for that moment when we realized even a tiny little bit how lucky we are to have a partner to make our lives a hypothetical heaven.