If You’re Considering Staying at Home, Read This

If you have ever or are currently struggling with the decision to leave a job or career and stay at home with your kids, I want to pass along some advice.

Five years ago I quit my full-time job so that we could move to my husband’s family farm. I still worked part-time two days a week, sometimes more. A couple of years went by and I was pregnant with our third baby. We had discussed that because of time on the road and daycare maybe I should stay home full-time.

Now let me pause and tell you—I am a type 3 on the enneagram. And I have a Type A personality through and through. I am accomplishment-driven. I crave achievement and recognition. My job as an ultrasound technologist was mentally and physically challenging. I love being challenged. 

It was also financially rewarding. And, as all of you know, bills on the farm certainly don’t go away.

So there we were, on a farm with three kids to take care of.

The decision to stay at home full-time to raise our kids was the hardest decision I have ever made. I was so worried that I would be terrible at it (some days I am) and that our kids would grow up without (they are learning wants vs. needs).

I knew it would be challenging, just in whole other ways.

But here is the advice that made all the difference.

This powerful advice or words of affirmation were given to me by a friend who is in a different season of life. She was a SAHM for ten years, before returning to work as a teacher when her boys were older.  Her youngest son died when he was 20 years old.

She said to me, “Michaela, if I hadn’t have stayed home all those years I wouldn’t have had the time that I had with Todd.”

That single statement has had the greatest impact on my attitude and decision to be a stay-at-home-mom for this season of my life. 

So this is me, being brave and trusting that God will continue to provide. Because all my other passions, and my career—they’ll still be there. But my kids, my kids are slipping through the grasp of my fingertips at an almost-imperceptible rate every day.

In the words of that same friend, “time is more valuable than money.”

I’m not saying this to shame or make ANY mom feel judged. I just know that if I felt such huge, conflicting emotions when trying to decide on the best decision for my family, that someone else out there might also feel the same relief from hearing those words as I did.

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XOXO,

Michaela 

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