Well, I’ve done it. I’ve quit teaching to be a stay-at-home mom (SAHM) for a few years. Isn’t it funny how one thing in life leads to another? And sometimes it’s the decisions other people make that effect your life. In this case what started out as a terrible morning for me, ended up being the best “bad news” I’d ever gotten.
It all started on Friday morning a couple of weeks ago. I dropped the boys off at the sitter’s (whom my boys and I LOVE) like normal, but, when I told her my parents would be picking them up in the afternoon, she broke the news to me through tears—she wouldn’t be able to watch my boys next year. She and her husband were going to try to get pregnant this summer, and she wanted a light work load in the fall. My boys were the last kids she took on (not to mention part-time), so they were the first to go. I didn’t mean for that sentence to sound as flippant as it did, but that’s the gist of it.
As I was on my way to school after the tearful convo with her, I called my husband to let him know hat was going on. I had to pull over when the water works started again. Being a man he immediately started looking for solutions to the problem; one of them being me staying home. Now, mind you, we’d had this conversation before with it all circling back to not being able to afford for me not to work. I told him that he knew that wasn’t a possibility, but he said he’d “run the numbers”. When we hung up, I was trying not to hold my breath as I realized that staying home with my boys was exactly what I wanted.
Fast forward to that same afternoon. My phone rang while I was on the bus with 130 eighth grade boys on my way to a sex ed field trip. Yes, that was loads of fun. But I digress. So, my phone rang. It was hubs. He told me he figured it out. The finances. He figured out how to make it work so I could be at home with my boys. I never in a million years would have believed we could figure out how to afford for me to stay home, but, thanks to my wonderful, number-savvy husband, we did!
Gotta be honest here. As much as I knew this was what I wanted, I had mixed emotions about it. I was super excited about getting some of these treasured years home with the boys, but I was also nervous. Nervous about money and nervous about the lack of adult interaction in my coming days as a SAHM. I was also sad about leaving my fellow teachers whom I love. But, I have to say, as soon as this decision to stay at home was final, and I saw the smiles on my boys faces as I played with them that night, I knew hubby and I had made the right one.
And besides, I always have Twitter and Facebook for my adult interaction, right?
