The Point of View of an Austinite Mother

The Point of View of an Austinite Mother

www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/lw9727/

The assignment for this week was to interview a true Austinite. I needed some answers to questions that were starting to grow in my head, so I took advantage of this opportunity and talked to Lucy Wood, mother of two children and a professor at UT. Since Juanito was born and I quit my job, it has not been easy to decide if I want to be a stay-at-home mom or develop a career as an entrepreneur. Or maybe, I could manage to balance both.

I think that balancing my role as a mother and my role as a professional is not easy. I asked Lucy if this had been difficult for her to see if I am the only mother that feels this way. To my relief, she answered: “Yes, yes!  I haven’t done it well. I think I just don’t eat right, I don’t sleep very well in the night and I don’t exercise. But I do a good job at my job and I do a good job with my children. But I don’t have any sleep time as a result, so I have to work on that. I think I’m a good mom and I think I’m a good worker, but I probably need to take better care of my body: sleep and eat better and relax a little bit more.”

 “When I was growing up it was very common for a woman to stay home. Most of the mothers in my neighborhood in Philadelphia stayed home. I was raised at a home where none of the mothers were working. In Austin, almost all the women I know work”, Lucy told me while comparing her childhood in Philadelphia with her current life in Austin. I even feel that work is an unspoken requirement people demand from us. And of course, many need to work to support their families. However, leaving the money factor aside, women that are mothers need to be excellent workers and excellent mothers at the same time. This is not easy and many mothers have to rely on people they don’t know to educate their children for them, although I imagine most of them would prefer to be at home with their children. I believe they have such social pressure for accomplishing professional development, that they don’t feel free to spend every day at their homes.

Here we are signing the Partner's Agreement for our
inflatable lifejackets business in Chile. 

Maybe this subject has been analyzed too many times already, but I didn’t know what was really at play until I had to experience this dilemma on my daily life. For instance, being away from Juanito means that I could miss an important stage of his development, like his first word. Or, as Lucy said, watching your children learn and enjoy new experiences and discoveries is one of the most remarkable things of being a mom. Of course, being at work means we are going to miss some of these things and that is the decision every mother has to make when trying to balance professional development against staying at home with the kids.

In my opinion, the hardest stage for being away from children is during their first two years of life. Every baby book says that this is the crucial part of a person’s development because it is when brains grow the most. About this, Lucy mentioned the importance of connecting to her children so that they know she is there for them, to see them grow and develop. So when we add the social pressure to work plus the importance of being there during the baby’s first stages, all we get is stress.

Juanito's first steps and his first trick-or-treating ever.

To top this off, maybe mothers were not satisfied with the already high amount of stress and pressure on themselves because they came up with multiple occasions to compete against each other. This can become really insane. Mothers compare every stage of development of their children with other kids. Here in the US, I have noticed that people are really frantic about whose kid begins walking first. For example, the guy who rode with me during my driver’s license test here in Texas told me he had bought a book titled Teach Your Baby to Walk Early, poor baby walking when she was only 7 months old!

Anyway, Lucy gave me a solution for each of my concerns. When we were almost done talking, I asked if she could give me some advice, since she is already an experienced mother. She told me wise words: “Be easy on yourself. Be kind to yourself. Just realize that it goes fast and that you are doing a great job and try to give yourself positive energy.” I think I’m going to do just that.