Does Salary Level Determine the Worthiness of a Job?

by | Nov 20, 2023 | Divorce, Parenting

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Does salary level determine the worthiness of a job or a person?

Most of us would say “NO WAY!” including myself, yet actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

When I was earning a decent salary (actually, some would have probably considered it indecent), for my age, people treated me differently. They seemed to respect me automatically, and I never felt I had to justify my actions. I was making a lot of money; therefore, my work was worthy, and by default, I was too.

Then I became a stay-at-home mom, and we all know how much we stay-at-home parents get paid, and that amount is zip, zero, nada.

Nobody questioned my decision when I first decided to become a stay-at-home parent. I had some savings from work and was expecting my second child. I had worked enough during the year to guarantee that I would get parental leave benefits when my second child was born.
Now that I think about it, it is fascinating how many people had opinions on my new status.

Most people told me I was making a good decision. They said, “Your children are only young once; you’re lucky to spend time with them when they are young.”

And I agree. I was fortunate to spend time with my kids when they were young.

But the other message I internalized from this comment was that I wasn’t genuinely working or working at a job that benefited anyone other than me.

As time went by and my kids got older (four years old and two years old), my justification for staying at home became more and more of a topic of conversation, and I became more internally defensive. I started keeping a mental list of how I was contributing to our overall household, which I began to obsess over almost daily.

The first question out of my spouse’s mouth, when he got home from work, was, “What did you do today?” although he may not have been looking for proof that I had worked, I had my list at the ready to prove I had not been surfing the web all day. My husband didn’t have to justify his actions because he brought home a paycheque every two weeks that confirmed he was working and contributing.

To make myself feel more justified in what I was doing, I decided I could live with less “fun” funds than my husband. I cut my leisure spending to one-third of my husband’s.

It is funny what my pay cut did to our family dynamic. I didn’t need that extra money, but in a sense, I had just taken a notional pay cut, which further minimized my mental worth. My relationship with my spouse was becoming more unbalanced – we were no longer equal in my eyes or his.
At that point, my husband and I had monetary proof that my job wasn’t as worthy as his.

This concept carried over into our divorce process. There was limited discussion about how I contributed to the household; my contribution was glossed over, and the main discussion revolved around when I would start “work.” We didn’t discuss the fact that I had effectively lost my job because being a stay-at-home parent is not recognized as a job. I had been on a lark, and now I had to get down to business and find something worthy.

What was the difference between my job and my (now) ex’s? His was paid; mine was not.

So, if you are considering becoming a stay-at-home parent, I strongly encourage you to set up your finances as follows:

Take your spouse’s salary, divide it by two, and automatically transfer half into your own bank account every pay period. Then, you and your spouse pay half of the joint family expenses, and you each pay for your personal spending from your remaining funds.

If you are about to become a stay-at-home parent, I encourage you to discuss a financial arrangement with your spouse before your baby is born. If you discover that your spouse does not support a proposal like the one I recommend above, you may have some talking to do with each other. It’s better to find this out before you give up your career to focus on a dead-end, unpaid job as a stay-at-home parent.

If your spouse supports this financial treatment, you will know that your spouse considers it a worthy endeavour – its worthiness is supported by the fact that you earn money to do the job. Despite the saying that money does not define the worthiness of jobs or people, actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

Working From Home When the Kids are Also at Home

by | Sep 10, 2015 | Divorce, Parenting

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I keep a file with half started blog posts and today I was searching around for a post to finalize and I opened this one: “Working From Home with Kids” and surprise surprise, it was blank.

I think that says it all.

It is challenging to work from home when your kids are home with you. I keep thinking I should be able to be more productive as my kids generally have nothing to do with me anymore, they go for long stretches doing their own thing, so why do I not have long productive work stretches?

I realize that I’m on constant alert when the kids are with me and I’m the sole caregiver. When I became a mother, biology kicked in and it suddenly seemed as if danger was everywhere. As my kids got older, some dangers disappeared but others surfaced to take their place. The danger these days is that my kids will kill each other when they get into a fight.  Logically, I don’t think this will really happen, but my mom biology will just not let me get immersed in my work.

So even though the kids are up in their room, my mind is focussed half on my immediate circumstances and half on being “on guard.” My eyes in the back of my head are in the switched on position. In fact, there is also a touch of anxiety in my stomach that makes me even less productive than normal.

What I have discovered is that I can do low level mental acuity work. I can do things that I’ve done before and could do with my eyes closed. Bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, data entry, yup – can do that.

Talking to a new client about what I do and what they need? I tried that, it was like texting while driving.

Writing a new blog post from scratch? My brain needs more time and space to be creative.

But hey wait a minute. I seem to have just done it.

Where are the kids? It’s awfully quiet in here.

Time to go check on them.  

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The kids were fine – and I’m finally finishing this post two weeks later when I have time on my own (the kids are back in school). It’s true that I have to have uninterrupted time to do anything new and challenging.  Unfortunately, this was driven home to me this past few weeks while the kids were on summer holidays.

So how do I get that uninterrupted time? I could stick them in front of the TV and I could lock them in their respective rooms, but those solutions are less than ideal and seem to lead to increased anxiety in the pit of my stomach.  They got a lot of screen time this past week and I still got low level work done.

What I need to do is plan better and adjust my expectations. At the beginning of the summer, I was concerned that I would only have the kids for half a summer because they were spending the other half with their dad. I thought I would have so much time without them to get work done and I wanted to hoard the time I did have with them by not committing to day camps for the kids that would take them away from me. What I do need to realise is that I cannot truly work effectively while the kids are at home with me and if I try do so, it just leads to anxiety for me (and my kids).

The added bonus of my new understanding is that it will now be much easier for me to be grateful when the kids are with their dad. I never thought it would happen, I thought I would be sad forever, but I am slowly adjusting to having the kids with me for half their lives.

 

 

Transition Days

by | Aug 18, 2015 | Divorce

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I often wonder if there are other parents out there like me. I start wondering it about five minutes after dropping my kids off at school. Day one of five days they are with their dad on our 2255 parenting schedule. Are there other parents out there that know what a 2255 parenting schedule means? I have yet to meet them and when I explain it to intact families, their eyes glaze over and say “how do you keep track of that? Oh, we have a shared Google Calendar, but I don’t need it. I know when my kids are coming back and I know when they are going to be leaving. I wish I didn’t know as both the anticipation of their return and the dread of their leaving wreaks havoc on my day.  I call the days that lie on either side of the day my kids come and go “Transition Days” and it seems like every other day is a Transition Day.

I am always surprised by the waves of sadness that overtake me. Just thirty minutes earlier as I hustled the kids into the car I was feeling annoyed because they weren’t getting their school bags or putting their shoes on. The night before I was exhausted after a day spent as an accountant in the final days of tax season and as a single parent whose two rambunctious sons would not get ready for bed. My six year old son had stayed up until 10 pm and wanted me to sleep with him, likely because he sensed the emotions running high in the house but I needed some alone time to recharge after a long day. Oh the irony. I would be having five days of alone time starting in twelve hours. So he fell asleep on the couch in the room next to where I was watching TV and I carried his sweet sleeping person up to bed and tried to hold onto the feeling of having my son in my arms because I knew it would be gone the next day.

I have learned to schedule things for the time that my kids are gone, but I can’t schedule all of it. After all, I am single now and when the kids are gone I put myself to bed and wake up alone. Today I’m meeting a friend fairly early. She is going to text me just after 8 am, but I wake up at 6 am and the silence of the house reminds me that my kids are not here. It seems small, crowded and messy when the kids are here but when they are gone, I basically live in one room and even that seems too big.

So it is impossible to not be alone when my kids are gone. I try to think of many of my friends who tell me that they would kill to have the chance to sleep in and do what they wanted for the day. I try to remind myself of how just yesterday I was trying to fade into the background at home so my kids would forget I was there and not demand that I play Crazy Eights with them. I also know that my kids are happy with their dad and taken care of, not to my standard of course, but then, they are getting a different experience of how to live with their dad and more ways of seeing how the world works can only help them.

But my waking and going to sleep thoughts always bring me back to how I have my children in my life for a short time which has been shortened again by half and then the sadness overtakes me. I wonder if it will ever go away. Perhaps I will simply have to manage my grief until that time my kids are older and would be leaving the nest anyway. Maybe by then, the sadness will leave me.