I was in Ikea two days ago buying shelves when I overheard a conversation between two well dressed 20-somethings. (I admit to following them for a few minutes to catch the end of this exchange.)
Him: You know my mom hasn't worked in like 6 years?
Her: Really? What is she doing instead?
Him: Nothing. She just stays home and sponges off my dad.
Her: She doesn't do anything at all?
Him: Oh...she like cooks and cleans stuff and spends all his money.
Her: And he's okay with that?
Him: He seems to be. I don't know why though. I'd be p*$$ed as hell. I mean.....why can't she get a real job?
Her: Weird. Maybe she's good in bed.
Him: Ewww. That's my mom you're talking about.
Both laugh and then change the subject.
I just stopped for a moment in the aisle with my mouth hanging open. That didn't used to be called sponging, it was called "being his wife." I particularly liked how he couldn't just be okay with it because he's okay with it, but she has to be doing something else to earn her keep.
It was such an honest look at how the younger generations view my life, because I too "just" cook, clean and spend "his" money. Please may my own children never talk about my in such disrespectful ways.
22 comments:
I wouldn't take it personally. I feel like so many in my generation don't have a clue what life is like. It is like they live in a world completely different than mine... I think you are an awesome Mom and I aspire to be a wife and mother like you!!
Love you!
Don't worry! At 27, I still fall under the twenty something age group, and I am a stay at home mom pregnant with our third! :) I also know many many women my age who desire to stay home with their kiddos. :)
However, I have recently been contemplating what I will be doing years from now when our kids are grown. I do think that my generation doesn't understand the concept of a stay at home wife. Honestly, it was an alien idea to me until I joined the blog world and got to know some lovely ladies who do/did this.
When we first got married it was understood that I would teach until we had our first which was very short live since we concieved on our honeymoon.
However, if we have a large family, I will probably be old and gray by the time all of our children are grown. In which case, I'm sure I will volunteer etc, and still cook and clean.
I guess I do feel like I need to be doing something.... But if a woman isn't doing anything outside of the home, I would never think she is just leeching off of her husband! That is awful that this woman's daughter views her this way. :(
These 20-somethings will be in for a rude awakening when (if) they marry and start families of their own. Keeping a home is hard work. I only wish I could be a stay at home wife right now. :) We'd eat better, the place would actually be clean, I'd be able to research stuff more so we could make more informed decisions, I could develop additional ways to cut costs and up quality of our lifestyle, etc.
Honestly, I do think many in our generation (okay, I am 30, sigh :)) do long for family life more than career. They are just less prepared for the realities of it.
That conversation doesn't surprise me at all, sadly. I have encountered the same kind of attitude for many years now. I'm not married yet (25) but I want to be a stay at home mother when the times comes! I actually blogged about my experience with people telling me it wasn't a 'real job'. Ha! They should talk to my mom, who raised 8 kids while staying at home. You can read it here: http://findingsomethingbetter.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/lifetime/. It's something that really hurts me, because I believe being a wife and mother is my vocation, and when people disregard that in favor of more 'normal careers', it stings. A lot.
I'll say a prayer for you! :)
How sad :(. But something tells me your children will know better!
Sounds like they still have some maturing to do. In my circle of friends we have more stay at home mom's than working outside the home ones. I'd suspect that in a few years when these two are getting married and having families their outlook may change. My husband loves coming home to a clean house, a closet full of laundered clothes, dinner on the table, a happy wife and baby, and an occasional mowed lawn. He wouldn't trade it for all the money I could be making. I know this because he tells me so all the time!
I wonder what they would have thought of me.. a 30-year-old stay-at-home-wife before the babies came along. That would really throw them for a loop, haha! But the real point here is why a child would talk so disrespectful about his mom. Adult children of SAHMs that I know wouldn't have a negative thing to say. Maybe something else is going on there.. or maybe I just think that because when I listen in, I usually give people back-stories :)
Geez louise...
That's what the NOW generation has given us. Men used to expect women to give up their career (if they had one) and stay at home and take care of the him, the home, and the kids. Now, young men EXPECT their wives to work. My husband has been asked many times by co-workers why I won't get off my lazy *** and get a job.
Let's see I homeschool five children, teach RE, active in a Catholic veteran's organization, taking classes to finish my bachelor's degree, involved in cub scouts, on top of cooking, cleaning, and paying the bills. Yep, pretty lazy...
Sadly this doesn't surprise me either. However I do believe the husbands in these homes have a duty to show appreciation and love to their wives for this very demanding job of Stay at Home Mom/Wife; same as the SAHM shows appreciation for his hard work days. This way, the children will get the picture that both parents work, regardless of location. It's one of my favorite things about my hero husband, he mentions my hard work often to the children and asks them to help me as well, so the burden isn't always on me. I wish all women were as blessed.
Taking my little opportunity to be controversial here...isn't there a difference between SAHMs and SAHWs in this respect? Possibly the first twentysomething has half a dozen younger brothers and sisters at home, some of them school-aged; and maybe she's the youngest (or the only child) and there aren't any kids home to take care of. (And I don't think we can assume that her mother is home-schooling anybody.) So there's a difference between being a home-schooling mother of young children, and a SAHW with no children at home to take care of. That doesn't mean that a husband and wife shouldn't decide that the wife should stay home and not work, but I think the comment has two potentially different meanings - one undercuts a traditional system in which married women were not expected to support themselves financially (I'm a traditionalist, and I would love not to need to work, but I think there are two meritorious sides to this debate); the other suggests that the work of taking care of small children at home is not worthwhile, and I think that's a much harder position to defend.
sad :( Really sad. I have to say, though, I think more and more people around my age (I'm 26) are more appreciative of the traditional stay-at-home wife and mom roles. At least I've seen some of that :) But there are still the others (probably a bigger percentage) who think the way these two do :( I feel bad for the mom that they were talking about her that way.
Young dude probably has no idea what his mom does for the family.
Speaking of stay-at-home wives (no children 18 and younger to care for), I have mixed feelings about them. At times I may envy them. Okay, at times I do envy them because they are not dealing with nasty office politics like I have. That's not to say they don't deal with nasty people in the course of handling the household administrative and cleaning stuff.
Work comes in all forms.
I meant to say work comes in different forms.
I laughed out loud, because ooo do they have a rude awakening coming.
I was a stay at home wife for a few years. I figure I earned the right to be one.
The thing is even being a stay-at-home wife would be a full-time job. I could come up with a really long list of things that should be done around the house on a regular basis but just aren't. And how many women who work full-time outside the home still have to come home and do 90% of the housework. That's so much fairer, right?
I would say that young 20 something was just clueless...probably 'cause his mom still cooks and cleans for him, too, and he just takes it for granted.
I speak as a dad of a large family. I doubt this comment will be popular! Here's what I've observed out there in the culture today:
1) Nobody is a better judge of his mother's work ethic and level of care than a son. 90% of the time a son will give his mom every benefit of the doubt. I would listen carefully to the kid here. My guess is he speaks the truth about his mother's contribution to the home.
2) I do believe this is a generational thing...but in the fact that the majority of the SAHMs I know don't strike me as the traditional "heart of the home" of yore. As a general rule, they are visibly lacking in parenting skills, cooking skills, organizational skills, spend money like water, park in front of the tv, and generally don't keep themselves up to boot...all the while expecting great lauds for their "being their kid's mom" as if the position itself, no matter how it's performed, deserves credit.
3) The SAHM is a skill position - by far the hardest position in a family - and nobody is teaching women these skills in this day-and-age. If I ran a "SAHM business" I would fire well over 90% of the ones I know, because they simply can't get it done, for whatever reason, and their kids know it. If I had this general lack of work ethic and lack of skills at my current employment, I would indeed be fired in rapid order.
Sorry if this is too much truth for polite company. But I expect to hear a lot more of these conversations as time passes. And yes, I have done the SAHM job of my large homeschooled family before...and I got up at 4:00 AM and worked my *ss off. It ain't easy. But I didn't work any harder than I do at my current job, however.
Boy, your comments are really, really sad. You must hang with a sad crowd. For a woman to be expected to work and take care of the house and the kids is too much. Obviously you're of the generation that didn't appreciate their mothers. If know any lazy stay at home wives or moms, they are the exception not the rule.
All stay at home moms and stay at home wives I know work hard. It isn't any harder than your current job? Well, then I'd think you'd have a little more respect!
But the working wives and mothers I know not only work outside the home, but as another commenter said, also do 90% or more of the work around the house, including home repairs and paying the bills.
I for one am sick of men of younder generations asking my husband why his lazy wife doesn't work! Why do you think women are dying of more heart attacks and other stress related diseases in as high or higher rates than men? Because most women are expected to do the woman's job AND the man's job, too.
Hi there,
I have a question about your site, would you mind emailing me back @ kthomas@primroseschools.com?
Thanks,
Kathleen
I feel really blessed in that when my husbands co-workers ask him if I'll ever return to work he always says 'she is working as a SAHM and she works way harder than we do'. He also says if he was at home and I was earning the money he would probably put the kids in public school and hire a maid. -Loretta
This topic sure is coming up a lot recently.
We still have folks asking when I'm going to get a "real job"-- I'm hugely pregnant and have a toddler ATM-- and I've got a rant bubbling somewhere about the stuff that's involved in properly keeping a house.
Given the number of single guys who will go from whining about how they never can keep their finances straight, how expensive it is to always eat out, how their landlord won't come over and do this or that five minute job on their apartment....
I think a lot of people are just being idiots. Same way that folks can't figure out how paperwork could possibly be stressful.
I wonder if the SAHMs and SAHWs would gain more respect if they gave themselves and others a more "official" title like Domestic Engineers? The love of my life is only 23 and we're planning on getting married and he said I can be a Domestic Engineer if I want to be :)
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