u/AutogeneratedName200

Three quick edits:

1. TLDR: I don’t want to be a SAHM but I also do not dream of labor
2. The post title is a quote from the poem “The Summer Day” by our queen Mary Oliver
3. I’m a writer and have been musing on this for days. I wrote this in a document (with my human brain and human fingers on the keyboard) and edited it several times over several days to arrive at the well-articulated “thesis” below. It is SO frustrating as a writer (by trade and by hobby) to be accused of (using? being?) AI because of well-crafted, polished writing with proper grammar. My fingers were ITCHING to use my beloved m-dashes, but AI has stolen those from me too 😭

Original post:

Lately, I’ve noticed a recurring battle on here between two camps:

“I hate being a working mom. I wish I could be a SAHM. I feel constant guilt that I’m not giving enough to my kids.”

and

“I love being a working mom! I love my career!”

And I’m pretty firmly in a third camp:

I have zero guilt about working/zero desire to be a SAHM. But I also don’t think you’ll ever see me on here praising work or capitalism and talking about how much I love being a working mom, because liking aspects of my job is very different from loving a system that asks us to spend so much of our lives working.

I like intellectual stimulation and solving problems and staying sharp. I like feeling competent and accomplished. I like using and growing my job-related skills. I like engaging with other adults. I genuinely think I would struggle with being a SAHM and I love the relationships & opportunities that outside childcare has provided my kids. (And let’s be real I like financial freedom and having money etc, but that’s bc I’m a product of the capitalism I hate).

But I also hate the grind.

I hate capitalism’s insistence that so much of our finite time and energy should be devoted to producing economic value. I hate that work is so rigid and inflexible. I hate being treated like an employee who needs to be managed rather than an adult who can be trusted to get her job done when and where I choose. I hate the constant logistical gymnastics of fitting my kids’ schedules around my employer’s schedule.

I hate how little room that leaves for the rest of life. Between work and kids, where is the time to exercise? Have hobbies? Walk around outside for no particular reason? Read a book? See a friend? Paint? Garden? Make something? Watch a movie? Sit in the sun? Putter around the house? Just be? (Not to mention adult table stakes like feed the family and keep the house clean.)

I feel like we’re still stuck in this weird binary inherited from the patriarchy, and it’s been amplified on this sub lately: either a woman devotes herself to unpaid domestic labor, or she enters the workforce and becomes devoted to paid labor.

And I don’t actually want either of those things.

I don’t want liberation to mean becoming better and better at sacrificing my life to the labor market. But I also don’t want the answer to be returning to a model where women are expected to find fulfillment primarily through unpaid domestic work.

I want a third thing.

(And yes, I realize this is idealistic. I don’t have a magical solution for how we get there. I’m talking more about what I think a good life should look like, even if our current economic system makes it difficult to achieve.)

I want to be able to work because I like some things about working, while also believing that work should occupy a reasonable and bounded place in a human life.

Motherhood is hugely meaningful to me. I don’t need an “identity outside of motherhood” that my career provides. Motherhood is probably the greatest thing I’ll ever do, and I’m happy to carry that identity with me everywhere. But I also enjoy being intellectually engaged.

I don’t want to be a SAHM.
I don’t want to be a work martyr.
I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder until I die.
I don’t want to spend my life optimizing myself for productivity.

I want work to be one good thing in my life, not the thing around which my whole life has to be organized.

In another life, I want to live in a matriarchy.

I’m hybrid with 3-4 days a week at home and 1-2 in office, as of the last year when we RTO’d. I’m in my early 40s with two little kids, and I feel like I never look good on my office days, and it’s eating at my confidence.

I’m not as in shape as I’d like to be, and I’m tired, and my face looks like a 40-something with no procedures, but in general I’m neutral to positive about my looks. At home I put on some athleisure or linen wide-leg pants & tee or a casual midi dress, barely do anything to my hair or face, and hop on camera or go to the grocery store or school pickup feeling pretty good and cute.

But for some reason, when I get to the office, I feel like a complete troll. I plan my outfits the night before and feel really good about them, then I get to the office and suddenly they feel too tight or too casual or too baggy or too frumpy (my office is business casual, plenty of jeans). My hair looks great when I’m working at home, seeing no one, and doing nothing to it (I have a short wavy bob). I look in the bathroom mirror at the office and it’s greasy or messy or flat or weird.

I have a pretty quick/light makeup routine: under-eye corrector and concealer, tinted SPF moisturizer, a little bronzer/contour and cream blush, plus a quick eyebrow pencil fill and mascara. Maybe a fun lip sometimes. It never looks like a “full face,” but more like a more even, more awake version of me. But when I get to work, it just looks greasy or like it’s not even there (in a bad way).

My husband and I are high earners (tech), but I feel like I look like a slob, not a successful, professional 40-something businesswoman. I always hear your 40s are when you don’t give a fuck, but I feel less confident than ever.

What’s the deal? Am I just being self-conscious because I haven’t worked in person with people for 7+ years? Is my whole wardrobe/makeup/hair routine just not suited for harsh office lighting? Is there a curse that transforms me into an ogre when I go to work (like reverse Cinderella)? Is it perimenopause?

I don’t know if I want tips or just to vent or have people commiserate with me. But I’ll take it all (unless it’s criticism, then I’ll go cry abt it).

Edit: I’m looking for outliers like me who did NOT have the neighborhood bike gang experience. I fully believe those of you who did have it/believe it is true, as it’s the prevalent online narrative. Mostly just wanting to commiserate and connect with people who feel left out of that narrative ☺️.

Original:

(Preface: I’m a 41 year old elder millennial/1985 baby).

TLDR: The popular idea that all 90s kids spent summers roaming neighborhoods on bikes doesn’t match my experience. Growing up rural, I mostly stayed home, watched TV, and only saw friends during sleepovers when parents drove us to each other’s houses. Am I the only 90s kid who didn’t have the classic “bike around with a pack of neighborhood kids” summer??)

In case you’re not following, there’s been a lot of online influencer-led discourse lately around giving kids a “90s summer.” The intention is probably less screen time, but what people are saying is actually wildly inaccurate to what a 90s summer was really like. Lately the narrative has been shifting to reflect the reality of what a 90s summer actually entailed ( neglectful parents, a ton of screen time, being told to go outside and play, not having a single sip of water all day, etc.).

I like this new narrative because the initial version of the “90s summer” was overly curated and it really just made moms feel guilty, especially working moms like us who are sending their kids to camp or whatever. So I like the correction that’s happening.

But… In this narrative shift where everyone is correcting the record about what actually went on in 90s summers, pretty much every single comment I see online says something like “We were biking around with our friends in the neighborhood from sunup till sundown.”

That was not my 90s summer childhood experience.

I grew up very rural, and I only got to see my friends when their parents brought them over or my parents brought me to their house for a sleepover. Parent-led playdates obviously weren’t really a thing, but we had sleepovers regularly, and that’s when we would, I guess, wander around aimlessly in the woods. But there were no roving bike gangs of children in my neighborhood (I didn’t live in a neighborhood lol).

I imagine other millennials and older adults had the same experience, but it seems completely absent from the online discourse. It’s just so shocking to me that apparently every single 40+ year old grew up biking around with packs of children, and this seems to be positioned as THE defining characteristic of our collective childhoods.

So my question: Is there anyone else like me who didn’t have that experience in the 90s? Whether it’s bc you lived rural or went to camps or some other reason? Make me feel less alone.

For what it’s worth, I did experience the rest of the collective 90s summer starter pack: I was watching Maury, Rikki Lake, Sally Jessie, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, The Young and the Restless, Days of our lives, and The Price Is Right all day on summer break (and closing it out with some late night infomercials, Murphy brown, & M.A.S.H.). I was absolutely left alone to fend for myself just like the best of you in the 90s, but I was also just home with my sister, bored as hell with nowhere to go unless our parents drove us there.

I’m in my early 40s, a mom of young kids who works hybrid (casual corporate office 1-2 days a week, wfh the rest) and lately shirts seem to be where my outfits fall apart. I’m size 8-10ish. But very short and curvy, big hips/butt/thighs, slight mom tummy, small chest. I wear a lot of flowy pants (ie: wide leg linen pull on, etc) but shirt style eludes me. T-shirts make me look schlumpy (my post-breastfeeding boobs are pretty flat…compared to my belly). Crew neck especially looks disproportionate. I’ve never liked button ups bc my hips are so much wider. What shirts do you like for casual but trendy/put together looking outfits?