Because I Came Home, Part 2

It felt important to lay out my fraught experience with motherhood before I offered an opinion about a reel that felt like propaganda in favor of mothers working outside their homes. (https://www.laureensimper.com/post/because-i-came-home)

Thanks to the shared mentality from the Tower of Babel/Babylon, we humans tend to compare. A LOT. Women, particularly. I say this to reiterate: if any woman reading this got different revelation than mine - made different choices than mine - no harm, no foul. I'm merely sharing my impressions, based on my road. Kudos to you and your road.

When my younger friend still in the trenches sent me a link to ask my opinion, I was shocked to see it was from the Facebook page of one of my church's university pages. It didn't feel neutral to me on this topic, though it either tried or pretended to be.

I will never discount a woman and her husband seeking, receiving, and acting on personal revelation. The woman in the reel may very well have received such revelation. I only know that based on my life's experience of the last 46 years - not to mention watching those of countless other women - I've seen an alarming trend to choose working over staying at home. I think the reason I've seen it is because a prophet of God warned me of it 39 years ago in a very profound way.

In this reel, I heard a well-meaning young mother speak of building her strengths and talents in her career. She even went so far as to say that building those talents was God-like, and that she wanted her children to see her striving to become like God as she developed those talents in the workplace. The language was so subtle, stating that of course strengths and talents could also be built at home, BUT...

Sadly, that BUT cancelled out the first part.

This choice has been fraught with controversy for decades now. My mother felt horribly guilty for choosing to go back to work in the late 1960's - so much so, that she wore herself out demanding the standard in our home stay the same. She continued to sew most of my clothes. We rarely ate out - partly just because back then you rarely did, but partly because we still couldn't afford it very often, even with now two incomes. Our house was still spotless, and she continued to CAN every fall. CAN, I tell you. After work.

The stigma of working mothers was softening when I made the choice to stay home 20 years later. I constantly second-guessed that choice, but in the end, I couldn't deny that important moment of revelation. And, as I said in Part 1, I knew it would be an act of personal treason if I went back to work.

Now here we are, 40 years after that, and to me it feels like the philosophies of men have mingled with scripture so much so that our thinking has been infected by those philosophies far more than we realize. If a church school can publish a piece like this - clearly advocating for working mothers - it speaks volumes to how much closer to the world's thinking we've come as a people who have made covenants - particularly knowing this is the same church whose prophet leader gave the talk that inspired me to leave the work force in 1987.

I am not speaking about women who have no choice. I am particularly not speaking to women who are single mothers. And I am absolutely not saying that the Lord will never NOT inspire women to work - double negative intended. I will never second-guess or judge a woman's receiving her own revelation on this point.

I simply believe that content like the reel I saw can lead women to make the choice they'd RATHER make, and then feel good about it because it's become so much more mainstream - and because in so many ways it feels easier.

Elder Glenn L. Pace gave a talk at BYU in 1986 called "That Elusive Balance" - where he talks about a phrase commonly used in the church that made him cringe: "I've prayed and feel good about it." He asserts that this often signals a spiritual laziness that must be avoided.

(https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/glenn-l-pace/elusive-balance/) He teaches important points to consider.

Watching the world over the last 46 years of my marriage has brought me to this: I just don't think making the choice to work outside the home takes a woman into the crucible of family and motherhood the same way as staying at home does. There. I said it.

I don't write this to pile on to any woman's personal pile of self-imposed purgatory - the lists of faults and failings we all keep handy and at the ready. No need to wait for the accuser to indict us at the judgment bar; we too often indict ourselves with the list we've neatly cataloged in our minds.

I write this all to give another nearly archaic point of view in a world I did not grow up in. I actually developed more strengths and talents by leaning into a place where there were seemingly no strengths and talents.

For me, it would have been mentally and emotionally easier to lean into the strengths and talents of the workplace. And somehow, making that choice would have provided me with the justification for choosing a harder road physically and financially, and a far more dangerous road spiritually.

In Part 3, I'll share the lessons I learned from going into that crucible without the insulating buffer of a job outside my home.