I have always looked up to my mom throughout the years. After being laid off back in 2008, moving to New York without her family, then moving to Cincinnati and finally having us all back together, she is the strongest person I know. I sometimes wonder where she her strength originated from. I also wonder if she would have this same strength if she had decided to be a stay-at-home mother. After reading Friedan's article, "The Problem That Has No Name," I saw that other mothers have very different lives than mine. My mom gets up every day at 6:00 AM, puts on her business suit, and gets ready to sit in rush hour waiting to arrive at a company that is run primarily by men. While there, she coaches her own team and reports to her bosses on the team's progress on whatever project they are working on at the time. She works late to make deadlines, skips her lunch break to sit in meetings, and even comes in early to finish an assignment before her bosses arrive at work. Sounds dismal right? But, even with her busy schedule and staying in an office building for sometimes more than 20 hours a day, I have never heard her once complain about being upset with the life she's created for herself.
Before writing this, I wanted to see how many article are out there about the "Stay-At-Home Blues." I googled "Depression in stay at home moms" and got over 1,530,000 results. Once article that stuck out the me was, "Is Motherhood Causing My Depression?", by Kim Brooks. (http://www.salon.com/2013/02/25/is_motherhood_causing_my_depression/) This is a personal record of how being a stay-at-home mom makes her feel on a given day. She explains to us that, growing up, her mother was a stay-at-home mom. She remembers always seeing her mom crying and when she became a teenager she, "hated my mother for her inability to cope, saw it as a sign of weakness and self-pity." After watching her mother go through this, she knew she never wanted to be like her, until she had no choice. She was laid off from her part-time teaching job and forced to stay at home watch her kids. Immediately, she figured out how her mom felt: bored, upset, and resentful. This is only one example of how unfulfilling a stay-at-home mom feels every day. This problem goes much deeper than how Kim feels. It is a world wide, unexplained depression that affects people who don't feel like they are living up to their full potential.
This is why I believe my mom is happy with her busy, exhausting job. Even though it has taken her away from her family at times, caused distress with my dad, and been the source our family to having to pick up and start all over multiple times, she IS happy. If she would have to stay home all day and take care of my brother and I, she would go crazy (partially because my little brother would driver her insane). This "Problem That Has No Name" can be be traced back to people not living up to their full potential. Every stay-at-home mom deserves more, they deserve to be happy.
The article in your post about motherhood causing depression is very relatable to me and my mom too. Although, I am not a mother, I was diagnosed with depression in the fall of last year. My mom battles depression everyday, in fact she takes half an anti-depressant pill every day to keep herself level. When I was diagnosed my doctor asked if my mom or dad had depression because it is hereditary. I think the stresses of motherhood definitely contributed to the woman's depression in the article but I also think it was passed down from her mother. Specifically in my mom's case she raised 4 kids on her own as a single mom, she works multiple jobs to support us everyday. My mom is happy that all of her kids are successful in their lives and me in college, but I want her to be happy on her own without depression or medication, like Miranda said herself, because she deserves it.
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