I hear a lot of chatter, especially online, about how women with children – particularly multiple children – can’t afford to work because of the high cost of childcare. And while it’s true, at least from a mathematics perspective, that what you earn is quickly and easily outpaced by what you have to pay in childcare, that doesn’t mean that the decision to stay home is ‘free’.
In fact, not working is far from free, and it costs you – and your partner – in untold ways over the course of your life.
Full disclosure: I’m not saying that you shouldn’t stay at home, whether your decision is one of simple economics or whether it’s just the choice that you feel is best for your family. In so many ways, the caregiving work we do at home – raising a family, taking care of a home, loving our partners – is some of the most important work that we do in our lifetimes. It’s certainly more important, for many of us, than the work we do from 9-5 that may or may not pay us a fair or living wage.
I believe the decision to stay home, to raise your children, is a good and valid one. It’s not the only one; very rarely is there only ever one real choice available to us. But it’s also not free.
Partners in a marriage often make this decision early on in their lives because, biologically, that’s when we are most able to have children. They make the decision, together, both because they want what is best for their children and because it makes sense for their families. Two people make that decision, even if one partner feels more compelled to make the choice than the other.
Under the law, marriage is a partnership. You make choices together for the mutual benefit of both of you and also of the children that you are raising.
The problem, of course, isn’t the decisions that you made during your marriage, it’s how the narrative can be twisted and turned against you if (or when, probably, if you find yourself on this page) you make the decision to divorce.
Once you divorce – or separate pending divorce – it seems like the narrative suddenly becomes all the ways that your husband (the higher wage earner) supported YOU. The stay at home mom is frivolous, lazy, lesser. She was supported.
It’s not reality. In fact, it is you who did the supporting so that your husband could earn what he earned. This is why, under the law, spousal support even exists! The statistics clearly show that married men have better outcomes – they earn more over the course of their lives, they enjoy better health, they live longer, recovery more quickly in the event of illness, and even suffer less depression. They have higher life satisfaction! They even – though I’m sure it’s no stretch to imagine THIS one – do less of the unpaid domestic work.
Marriage, for women, is often a difficult proposition. Many of us want to marry and have children, of course. But married women often earn less over their lifetimes than single women. We do almost all of the unpaid domestic labor within our households and we suffer WORSE health-related outcomes. (Much of this is probably because we are expected to be back up and at ‘em quite so quickly that we push ourselves to the point of exhaustion.)
It’s not about arguing over who did more. I’m actually back to economics again. An economic choice was made when you decided to stay home, and two people – a husband and a wife – bear the responsibility for those choices.
If you stayed at home, you left the workforce – making it harder to re-enter it, and harder to earn what you would have earned had you not taken a career pause. (That’s what we’re calling it now – a career pause. I like it.) In many instances, you will not achieve the professional or economic heights you might have achieved had you not stayed at home. That’s not a dig – it’s unfortunate fact for many women.
If you stayed at home, you may have to re-enter at a lower wage or salary. Not only that, but you’ve missed out on years – or even decades? – of time that you could have been contributing to your own retirement accounts or your social security. Sure, you can take a portion of his, under certain circumstances, but … you could have earned your own.
And now, what’s available for you? Do you have access to benefits? Because, once the final decree of divorce is entered, he won’t have to cover your health insurance anymore.
So many ‘benefits’ of working compound over time so, for any time period that you weren’t working, you miss out on valuable years – your youngest years! – when what you might have contributed to retirement or have saved for a rainy day would have turned out to be worth the most.
But you didn’t make the choice alone, and I think that’s a point a lot of people miss. Will you have to get a job? Maybe. But, in any case, it’s not like you’re just freeloading. You were a provider, even if what you provided wasn’t a wage. You have an entitlement to certain things under the law, and you shouldn’t feel guilty – or allow others to make derogatory comments – for taking them.
After all, you earned them, too. In supporting him, he was able to focus on his career. He was able to earn in a way that a never married, divorced, or widowered man couldn’t. Sure, there may be some cost to him now that the marriage isn’t working out, but, frankly, that’s nothing compared – in general – to the financial cost on stay at home moms.
We all have to make the best choices we can with the information that we have. And neither you nor I can change the fact that there’s a wage gap, stigma around career pauses and stay at home moms, or that women are less often promoted or published, less often cited, and more often criticized for physical or personality traits that would not harm a man in a similar situation. I can’t help that there’s a housing crisis, high inflation, and an unprecedentedly difficult political climate.
If your choice was to stay at home – or to take a career pause, whatever you want to call it – you alone should not bear those costs. I know; sometimes, we’re our own worst enemies, diminishing our own contributions. I do it to myself. But I also see you so clearly, and the work that you do, and the value that you provided.
So, talk to an attorney, get advice regarding your entitlements, and make sure to take your marital share. You may have earned less, but you’re not worth less. For more information, to request a copy of our divorce book for Virginia moms, or to register to attend an upcoming seminar, give us a call at 757-425-5200.