What mom spends 14hrs a week cooking? The kids getting souffl? every night? CEO work, really?
Honest question here for the femalez. Every stay at home mom I've ever met complains endlessly about how hard/thankless their job is (including my mom growing up as well as my stepmom), and I always ask the obvious question "why don't you work and just pay for a nanny/maid?". Obviously there is the pragmatic reason such as "I have four kids under the age of 10 and could only haul in 40K a year, so it isn't worth it", but most of the time it's more along the lines that "My precious Timmy will grow up to be a sociopathic mass murderer unless I am present 24/7". I may get flamed for this, but I hate the use of the word "hard" in reference to housework/child rearing, and I hear it all the time. There are differences between hard, thankless, and shitty. Calculus is hard. Doing laundry and changing diapers is just shitty.. I've told every woman I have ever seriously dated that I don't want her cleaning toilets and running laundry all day, and that with the exception of maybe a year off post childbirth I expect her to have a job- not because we would necessarily need the money, but simply because a) you can hire barely literate people at 9 bucks an hour that do a fantastic job at cleaning/laundry, and I feel my potential wife's time is worth more than $9 an hour and b) I feel that the extended (5+ years) stay at home mom suffers from some serious confidence/self-worth issues. I'm no longer marketable, I don't feel pretty anymore because all I do is run around the house bedraggled doing laundry and feeding the kids, my husband earns all the money, etc.. Entirely subjective, but the most stable happy relationships I've seen aren't where the wife stays home, but when both partners have jobs and the "power" is equally distributed.
