Why I’m a Retired Stay-at-Home Mom

Yes my kids are grown. And yes, I still stay home instead of heading to work in an office.

I became a mom long before I had a career so it made since for me to stay home with our firstborn son. I couldn’t earn enough money to cover the cost of childcare and I didn’t have family support that provided free childcare, so it made financial sense for me to care for our son myself. This was still true when we added our second and third sons to our family, so I stayed home to take care of the children and the household.

That household part is always the part everyone forgets about when they think of a Stay-at-Home Mom. I know working moms and dads still have to take care of households too, but I know that when both parents work, there has to be additional people who help keep the household functioning. There are the childcare workers who tend to the children all day long. There are the maids, the landscapers and the personal assistants that tend to the housework, the lawn and the errands. There are the handymen to do the household repairs and small projects. And there is the extended family and friends that do any of the afore mentioned tasks that help the working parents make it all function while earning a living.

Instead of any of those additional people, it was always just my husband and I. The two of us doing it all for our three sons while making it function and earning enough to support our family of five. I was the childcare worker, babysitter, maid, personal assistant and primary educator for my family and my husband was the handyman, landscaper and wage earner for the family. We also both helped out extended family, friends and church ministries during our years of raising our sons, so to say we were spread thin is an understatement of gigantic proportions.

My husband and I never had date nights or babysitters, so that means that I had our three sons with me all the time. The only times I had a moment without them, was also without my husband, and that wasn’t always what I wanted. Sometimes I wanted to spend time with my husband, so we would carve out time after the boys were asleep for the night. This made for long days and long nights which was doable in our twenties, but became a little more difficult in our thirties.

Additionally during the years when we had all three sons, my husband would be on-call over the weekends and would need to travel out of state, and sometimes internationally, for his job. This meant I was the only person keeping anything going for weeks at a time with no breaks and no assistance, so when he was home, I absolutely craved his time and attention.

Those years passed and our sons got older and then they could babysit themselves, which was amazing. My husband and I could go to dinner by ourselves and leave the kids at home for a couple of hours. That was the first time we were able to go on dates and we had been married for about fifteen years at that point. We felt like we had hit the lifestyle lottery and could now enjoy life being just a little calmer than usual.

Now with grown sons, we enjoy our lifestyle even more. Because we spent all the raising children years living on one income, we have no issue with continuing that with grown children. And there were a couple of years were I worked out of the home, around the boys’ schedules, and made an income, but the money I made went to erase debt, build up a savings or pay college tuitions for my sons. And the most recent and most lucrative of those working years were done at home from my laptop, so I was once again “still home” even when I was earning income.

I’m a Retired Stay-at-Home Mom because that is the work or career I did for twenty-five years. That was my main focus, the job I performed daily and the work I poured myself into on a daily basis. Am I still a mom? Of course. But am I a Stay-at-Home Mom? No because my children are all grown. Am I still staying home? Yes because that’s still where my family needs and wants me.

Although I am not taking care of children anymore, I am still the one who manages the household. At this point in my life, due to my efforts to keep us on a budget and my husband’s twenty-five year career, my husband and I can afford to have help from other people in the form of a maid, a landscaper and a handyman. We don’t have a need for an assistant, babysitter, chef, childcare provider or educator, so we don’t employ any of those positions. Because my daily work has decreased over the last few years, I have time to do all the things I wanted to do in the decades past.

I can spend time reading books, writing all sorts of content, organizing my home, cultivating my time and experiencing the little things in life. I can relax. Relaxing has to be one of my favorite activities and something I have to come to cherish. It feels so good to relax and exhale and enjoy the moment.

Whether you work or stay at home or work from home, just remember there will be a day when your youngest child is grown and you will be finished raising children. It may make your feel retired, like me, it may make you question where the years went and it may not even be something you take note of in your life, either way, it will be the end of a chapter. And when one chapter ends, another one begins, so think about how you want the next chapter in your life to be written.

Maybe you want to slow down and savor life, or maybe you want to seize the day and ramp up your efforts in your career and earning potential. Both are good options, both have benefits and both have drawbacks. Just like the decision to earn an income or not while raising children, what you do when they are grown is another decision you will need to make and I’ve made mine.

I’m staying home even though my children are all grown and I’m enjoying the next few decades of my life before the aging process makes that more difficult. Because I don’t know the future, I may be looking at ten years or fifty years, but whatever it is, I want to enjoy those years with my husband and my sons. I want to enjoy the fruits of our labors, I want to enjoy the perpetual date my husband and I have been on for the past few years now that he works from home and doesn’t travel and I want to enjoy everyday of my life to the fullest of my abilities. I loved my life as a Stay-at-Home Mom and I love my life as a Retired Stay-at- Home Mom.