Dear Dr. Laura,
I have been listening for only a few months. I want to share with you that you have opened my eyes to how I hurt my daughter when she was a little girl. In hindsight, I confess I KNEW what I was doing and I did it anyway, out of simple fear and selfishness. I want to share this in the hopes that it will drive home for others that, YES, they, too, are the ones you're talking about.
I had just started a job six months prior to my daughter being born. We had two incomes and more money than we needed. My job adjusted for me by reducing my overall hours and giving me one work-from-home day and two in-office days. My husband and I worked out our schedules so one of us was home at any given moment to be with our baby daughter. On my workdays, my lunch hour was a quick snack followed by 45 minutes in the bathroom, pumping breast milk. It all felt WRONG: the hustle and bustle of what we called the Baby Swap, meeting in a public parking lot between work and home to exchange the cutie-pie; the exhaustion of trying to balance the over commitment of home-care, baby-care, self-care; the effect it had on me in my most cherished roles of wife and mother; and ultimately, the effect it had on my helpless daughter.
My mindset came from my mother - a staunch, man-hating feminist – that to not contribute financially to the household income was to not be a valuable woman. So I felt foolish to consider not working outside the home. By the time my daughter was 5 years old and entering kindergarten, all my "vague" bad feelings had crystallized, and the negativity centered where it actually belonged - on my job. So, one day, without even consulting with anyone, I just up and quit. Looking back, I see that the time to feel foolish was when I was OUT of the home working, not IN the home being a REAL WOMAN.
Meanwhile, my daughter’s first 5 years was robbed of a mommy, and I see the effects of that today. She is now 12 and despite how devoted a mother I am today, I can see she has moments when she is not sure how important she is to me. I'm convinced it's from her early years, when my treatment of her simply was not commensurate with how important she really is to me. I've been slow to grasp, from listening to you, that this IS the case. Slow because I wanted to excuse my actions as being the exception. I hope other women who are at that moment of decision to not be home to raise their baby make a better one than I did back then.
Sincerely,
Pam
