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Different Is Right for Us
by Juli
My husband, Russel, and I are navigating the world of sharing parenting
as he stays home with our son, B. I'm a full-time sociology PhD
student, and Russel works part-time as a consultant in a web
application developer position. I take my student role very
seriously and treat it as a 9-to-5-and-often-weekends-and-evenings job;
my goal is to go into academia when I'm done so I know that I have to
treat it this way to be a viable competitor in a very crowded and
demanding field. At the moment, Russel is trying to figure out
what he wants to do next, career-wise, once B starts preschool - we're
planning to have him start when he's 2 1/2, next September (so he's 18
months now).
Russ has been home full-time with B since he was 6 weeks
old, which was when my maternity leave ended and I went back to
work. Before you gasp at the awful work/life arrangement in this
country (and I do just that, often), I actually chose that
timing. I truly hated being at home, even during that short time,
and was always itching to get back to work. Our arrangement has
been trying at (many) times, but it generally has worked well for
us. But of course, that's just the child care side of the
story. We've been working on equally sharing - or, if not equally
sharing, logically dividing - the rest of the work that comes along
with having a home together, a child together, and three big needy cats
together.
My work used to be very flexible, so I would work at home a
lot in order to aid in my goal to exclusively breastfeed B for his
first year. (I also did a lot - a lot - of pumping in various
places, though thankfully in an office when at work.) Russel and
I would divide the child care not by specific times but more by
whatever popped up at the time. I still can't decide if this was
a good idea or not; I think that in retrospect given the amount of
attention B has always needed it was what we needed to do at the
time. B is what you might call an "attention-seeking" child, to
put it nicely: he's very bright, and as a result would prefer to spend
every single minute learning something new and taking more objects
apart rather than, say, eating or sleeping or getting his hands out of
the toaster. He spent much of his first year of life not napping
at all and being generally frustrated at not being a theoretical
physicist yet. (Okay, by this I actually mean, being annoyed at
first that he couldn't sit up, then that he couldn't stand up, then
that he couldn't walk, then that he couldn't talk, etc. Every
single basic milestone was a gut-wrenching feat of frustration and
anger and perseverance. Now it just annoys him that he can't read
yet, so he spends much of his time learning letters and how to tell
time.)
We moved to Los Angeles three months ago so that I could
begin my PhD. Unlike our previous arrangement, I now leave for
school at 8:30am and come home at 5:30pm. In the evenings, after
dinner, Russel starts his work and works until about midnight.
During this time, I deal with bath time, bed time, entertaining B, and
evening clean-up; B goes to bed around 10-10:30pm. This gives me
another hour before bed to do some more work. B gets up around
6:30am (after visiting us once or twice at night, usually) and we start
our day around 7am. While I'm in classes, we're committed to this
arrangement. Once I'm in my third year and "just" working on my
dissertation, we'll likely change things around again. At that
point, Russ will likely have a job outside the house again, B will be
in preschool...and life will be quite different.
Once I finish my PhD, we will have to move to wherever I
get a job, hopefully a postdoctoral position and then a faculty
position at a research university. Russel is still working out
whether he wants to go back to school while we are in one place for
five consecutive years, whether he wants to focus on his art or his
computer background (he's really strong in both; combining them leads
to parts of both fields in which he's not interested), whether he wants
to find a position that will allow him to continue working from home or
not, and whether he wants to work full-time at all or actually work
part-time and work on his own projects part-time. Wherever I need
to go for my career, we will go - although of course always with the
caveats that Russ needs to be able to find a job there, too, and that B
will be happy there (whatever that exactly means - though we know he
needs a lot of stimulation, so cities are a better bet for all of us).
The hardest part for me about all of this has been
constantly feeling like I'm doing this whole parenting thing
"wrong". It wasn't until I realized that, wait a minute, for us
this is working, for B this is going well, that it occurred to me that
we were doing it differently, not wrong at all.
Our life is not a conventional one, and we feel that every
day: when Russ gets asked if he's simply babysitting, when I get asked
when I'm planning to quit my job to be home with my child, to give two
mild examples. The most difficult part for us has been trying to
figure out how to practically work all of this stuff out without any
role models from which we could draw. So I'm committed now to
writing as much as I can in a public forum so that someone else out
there who is doing this can find some kindred spirits, as they say.
I'm keeping track of my commentary on our parenting
adventure at http://thebbt.wordpress.com;
there
are
other contributors to that site as well although their
comments are not on parenting, but my posts are written by a nickname
of "US". We also have a family blog at http://www.philipsimonthomas.com.
©Copyright 2009 Marc and Amy
Vachon
www.equallysharedparenting.com
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