Question Answered

Terri asked:
"Oh, Bethanie! I can relate! May I ask why your husband wants you to continue working? You may have addressed this in an earlier post and I might have missed it. "

I looked back through some of my old posts on the subject and realized that I didn't address it.

I guess it boils down to the fact that he feels its normal. We were both brought up by hard working women. Outside of the home working women. On one hand, my mother chose a career. She went through 6 years of schooling, and worked her way up to being some sort of coordinator of something. But, my mother-in-law was a single mother who was forced to make things run on her own. She worked sometimes 3 jobs, doing whatever she could to make ends meet. Neither one of our mother's were the homemaking type. Theres a funny story:
I took home ec. in highschool. The first semester, for the normal girl, is pretty basic. You learn to cook the basic things. Biscuits, pie crust, waffles. When the teacher announced that we would be making waffles, I raised my hand and asked how we were going to do that when she had no toaster in the kitchen. My mom still thinks that story is funny. She tells it to people often, as if shes proud that her daughter honestly thought waffles only came frozen. You can also imagine how surprised I was to hear you could make pudding from scratch.
Anyway, I started this job because we had so many medical bills at the time. It was just after I broke my foot and everything. With the job we were able to get out from under that debt in just a year. So, I'm grateful that I got it. But, why am I still doing it? I guess because thats the way we were brought up. I know that if I did quit to stay at home, then we would get a lot of flack from our parents. My mother-in-law would say that I was lazy, as if she needed another reason to dislike me. And my mom would think something like, "My son-in-law made my daughter quit her job so she can be at home serving him" as if that were a bad thing. If we had children it might be different, or at least from my mother-in-laws side. But, we don't and may never. Still, even without a child, I feel the strong desire to keep my home. Its true that this job is only 3 hours out of my day. But its more than that. It takes up so much of my emotional time. I try so hard to separate everything, to compartmentalize. But, my work stress carries over into my home work. I hate feeling pulled away from my home, to serve others. Other wives's husbands. However, I will do it until.... Every woman has her hardships, this is one of mine. I shall be rewarded for being obedient, eventually.