Because I Came Home - Part 1

Warning: this is long and it's only part 1 of 3, but I don't know how to tell this short.

I've needed to write about my journey through the workplace and back home for quite a while now. A dear friend who is a young mother on the front lines with three littles sent me a prop reel a few weeks ago, wondering what I thought of it.

I say "prop reel" because it had the feel of advocation for a specific life path - that of a working mother. Rhetoric was specific and targeted. It got me thinking about my choice to stay home rather than stay in the work force, and what brought that about.

Because these choices are only mine, based on revelation given only to me (private lesson), there's a danger this will be seen as judgmental if anyone reading this has received different personal revelation and made different choices. I could NOT be sorrier about that. I assure you: there is zero judgment in these observations which are born from my experiences and choices.

That said - part 1 is the background to the choice:

I never planned to do anything besides teach school. As a little kid, I absolutely loved everything about school. I was like a less likable Hermione Granger; it was ridiculous.

I grew up hearing often from my dad - a school teacher - what a great job teaching was for a woman. You must forgive this sentiment from a different generation, bless him. He longed for my mom to go back to school and get a teaching degree so there could be two teachers' salaries in our home. And while my mother could've run a Fortune 500 company, she was no teacher, and had no desire to do that. As we kids got old enough to all be in school, she worked as a secretary at the high school to ease the financial burden of a little family growing up on one teacher's salary. My dad had a lawn business in the summer for many years to afford the luxury of being a basketball coach; I have this notion he made more money doing that than teaching.

So while there was definitely some conditioning going on for me to become a teacher - looking back - I can't deny that I was born to teach. Some kids played hospital; I played school. As young as my toddler years, my parents punished my disobedience by taking away my books. This was the freakish child I was.

I got a degree in English and reading secondary education and taught in a junior high school for five years before my first child was born - a waiting period that is a whole other private lesson for another day. I had every intention of going back to teaching. She was born in June of 1985, and I was given a year's unpaid LOA from Jordan School District.

A year later, when I tried to re-enter the district, I requested a part-time position. The conditions of the LOA meant the district was under no obligation to re-hire me unless I came back to a similar position - full-time. That second school year began with me still at home and left me restless and ambivalent.

During that second school year, in February 1987, President Ezra Taft Benson gave one of the talks that began his figurative stoning: "To the Mothers in Zion." (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/eternal-marriage-student-manual/womens-divine-roles-and-responsibilities/to-the-mothers-in-zion-institute?lang=eng)

It was broadcast as a Sunday evening fireside, and for some reason, Dale and I didn't attend. The next day, Dale came home from work a little shell shocked.

"WHAT did President Benson say last night?? You should've heard the women at work today!" he said.

Every woman there was MAD. Called President Benson an out-of-touch old man with no idea what it took to pay for a family these days.

Dale and I looked in wonder at each other, and waited with great anticipation for the far less-than-instantly-available text of the talk. No technology to make it quickly available; we waited for weeks.

When we finally got a hold of the talk and read it, I had the same powerful spiritual witness I've had when I've read the Book of Mormon. I knew by the power of the Holy Ghost that this talk was a "thus sayeth the Lord" talk.

I put the career I had planned for my entire life on the altar that day and never looked back.

Well. Almost.

Looking back, it was the tiniest of widow's mites. It made the widow's mite of the Old Testament look like a Jon Huntsman donation. Talk about meager. But I witness: I laid it somewhat reluctantly on the altar with my whole heart, and proceeded to try - over the next 22 years - to devote my life to something I truly, truly reeked at.

I nearly lost my entire identity making this choice. I cannot overstate how horrible I was at homemaking and mothering. I remember wandering through grocery stores when I went alone, bewildered at what my life meant, and wondered what it was supposed to be. I suffered from depression for much of it.

Now, you might say - perhaps I wouldn't have been depressed if I'd just gone back to teaching - the job I felt more suited for - the job I felt I was born for. But beneath the difficulty of staying at home, I knew I would've come home exhausted - teaching 200 students for 6 hours is a special kind of adrenaline rush. I knew there would be nothing left for my most important job when I got home. And as an English teacher, I knew that job that sucked the life out of me wouldn't even be finished.

So I tried to figure out homemaking and mothering. And while I really, really stunk at it, I can at least tell you this: I loved my children in the most fierce and flawed manner possible. I tried to give them what my parents had given me: I taught them the gospel. I read to them. I gave them Suzuki piano against their very wills.

When Dale went back to work after both our children were born, his life resumed the patterns and routines it had always had. Mine vanished irretrievably.

I quit teaching when we had a little starter home with a mortgage with a 14% interest rate. There was a "government program" at the time which subsidized some of that until we made more money; my $11,446 first year teaching contract was almost too high to qualify for it. Knowing what we now know about "government programs," we probably wouldn't have done it, but at the time, it seemed like our only shot at getting into a home.

I started teaching piano lessons to six - maybe eight kids in the neighborhood, charging $20 a month. Wow. What a huge financial contribution.

I sold Discovery Toys for a few years when for some reason, piano teaching had become quite odious. I imagine it had become odious because I started it with the same reluctant ambivalence that took me out of the public schools. Remembering snowy winter nights, lugging toy crates in and out of homes, I have to laugh that I imagined THAT was more attractive and less odious.

I taught a music pre-school with no private students for a couple of years - again - ambivalent about wanting to teach, but trying to figure out how to do it from home.

I was offered a job at a junior high school in 1997 for maybe 48 hours. I accepted it, had a major panic attack over it, and then called to turn it down. As bewildering as homemaking continued to be - even then - I recognized it as the treason it would have been, and couldn't make myself do it.

After that, my piano studio grew to 20-35 students over the next 10-15 years - long past when my children were out of the house. By then, I saw it as the personal ministry it was, and felt almost called to do it. No one was more surprised at this change of heart than I was.

These are the choices I made based on a real and profound revelatory moment which I cannot deny.

That moment of "thus sayeth the Lord" wasn't a command that removed my agency; it was an invitation to a harder, higher climb. I was invited to place my career on the altar, and I obeyed.

Part 2 - my reaction to a prop reel based on my life's experiences this far...

Part 3 - the lessons I learned from my choice...

If you're still reading, God bless you.