Women's Work

I feel that in our class discussion pertaining to the chapter "Women's Work Inside and Outside the Home" there was an option that wasn't discussed. We talked about stay at home mothers, we talked about working mothers, we talked about the financial influence of those kinds of decisions, but I wanted to bring up that there's another choice, and it's what my mom did and does still: work from home mother. My mother was always the bread-winner, she was even my dad's boss for a while, and she has to work. Financially, it has never been an option for my mother not to work. She was vice president of a company for a long time, going into my teen years, and I barely ever saw her. When my sister and I fell into dark places in our own ways, we went into therapy. In a family therapy session (that only my mother and I were at), I was asked what I wanted from her. I shrugged and said, "I just want my mom back." When we left, she went back to work, walked straight to her boss and gave her two weeks notice. They didn't want her to leave the company, so they basically made up a job that she could do from home and she's done it ever since. She still works from home for the same company that's based in Texas. I think there's too much emphasis on the binaries, the black-and-white, the homemaker or the breadwinner. We can do both.