Why people of all genders who lack career orientation and seek to find fulfillment through homemaking deserve just as much as those who hustle for work.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to have career goals. People told me many things — “You’re going to be so successful”, “You’ve got a bright future ahead of you”. I’m sure they tell most teenagers that, but I ate it up regardless. I looked forward to proving them right, but I lacked any real purpose as to why. I am not shy to admit that I am a proud feminist. I always have been. I was raised by a woman who left the Catholic church to become a female Marine — one of the fewer and the prouder; women only make up 9% of the Corps. My mom is a devoted feminist. She never shied away from telling me I could be anything I wanted to be. She helped me survive sexual abuse; one of the most notoriously imbalanced gender crimes. She always wanted me to go to college, but she also didn’t stop supporting and loving me when I chose to drop out. She never stopped supporting me and loving me when I started doing sex work — as she put it, “[she] supports women’s right to live on their own terms.”
She knows my goals to be a happy housewife. I think at first, she was shocked. I am a very opinionated, articulate person. I also struggled with my mental health to a point that school feels impossible to finish. While it took a conversation for her to understand why I feel less career-inclined, she gets it now. I think many people struggle to forget how much stay-at-home partners and parents do. I am an avid feminist, which is why I feel perfectly comfortable saying stay at home parents (notably: wives) are truly a staple in society. Sadly, the sixty-hour work week was formulated with the idea of one person staying behind and the other working. It enforced gender roles and the idea of the nuclear family. I understand that. Times have changed drastically since then. The costs of living, education, childcare, healthcare, and so many other things have skyrocketed. There’s a limited job market thanks to families rebuilding post-pandemic. Many households require two people to work to make a living. People are putting off starting families because they can’t afford it.
The other day, I read an article by a woman who said because of the two years of life the pandemic stole from her, she was struggling to settle down. She had to come to terms with the idea that her biological clock was ticking and her dreams of having her own family were reduced. There are more babies being born to parents in their mid-thirties than ever before. I’ve been adamant to my mother and partner that I don’t want that to be me. Women 35 and older are subject to more pregnancy complications. Research has shown that while older men retain their ability to make babies, their sperm count and fertility dips drastically in their 30s. Personally, I find fulfillment in my writing and my family the most. I’ve come to find that it is my ultimate goal. I really don’t mind cooking and cleaning. My partner does a lot of it right now, but it’s a workload I wouldn’t mind picking up if I had more time to myself. I didn’t adopt my animals to spend the whole day away from them. I don’t want to bear children just to spend whole days away from them. Being a housewife doesn’t mean I can’t make my own money to meet my own wants and needs. I’ve told my partner: I want to make money from my writing. I’d like to sell art. These things are incredibly difficult to accomplish while working full time. Worst of all, the benefits offered by so many jobs are sub-par. My current job offers insurance, but it is limited. They only offer one week of paid time off per year. The commission rate per sale is better than competitors’, but still marginal compared to the cost of the merchandise. At the end of the day, it’s a repeated cycle of working for the man for scraps of their appreciation. That’s how every job feels to me — even sex work. Why would I want to go through life feeling this way?
At the same time, I don’t particularly want to be running a business. Doing it myself would be a tough endeavor. Finding employees to pay minimum wage to feels advantageous — if we’re being honest, that’s what many small businesses can afford to pay employees. The government taxes everything heavily. Your business is taxed, your shopping is taxed, your property is taxed, your car is taxed, your children are taxed, your income is taxed. I’m more a fan of small government — giving power back to the people and allowing them to make choices that work for them. I’m not particularly conservative by any means. Honestly, I’d support socialism, even if it meant taxes rising. I’d support it to ensure my money is being allocated in ways that I support — universal healthcare and education, better infrastructure, among other things. Though I am a child of two veterans, I don’t believe the majority of taxes needs to be thrown at the military. The U.S. has one of the strongest militaries in the world. But they can’t even pay servicemembers fairly for their service. Instead, servicemembers are subject to harsh conditions, living in moldy barracks and eating shit food. They’re given a $300 stipend for uniforms that cost much more. They’re only given basic housing allowances if they get married. Often times, in order to live more comfortably, servicemembers do get married. There’s a concept called contract marriage, where they enter an agreement with someone who is not romantically involved with them to get married for money. It has created a disgustingly high divorce rate among young servicemembers. Most of them experience divorce before they even turn 26. It is a sad state of the country, I think, to have to live in these conditions.
The government encourages the expansion of biological families but can’t support the children in foster care or the growing population. People are rejected every single day for government benefits they need — educational grants, disability, food stamps, and state funded healthcare. All because the government does not allocate enough funding to these programs. People are forced to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in a world that values career orientation and hustle culture more than it values people. The saddest part is that these benefits are contingent on disabled and poor people being unable to find employment. Yet the benefits don’t even give them enough to survive. Social security for disabled people in Connecticut is a little more than $800 monthly. The average cost of living between bills, groceries, rent, and other necessities is over $2000 — in fact, it is 22% of the average cost of living nationally.
I’d be a stay-at-home wife when it means not sacrificing my mental health to a job I care little about. I’d be a stay-at-home wife if my partner and I have the means to, because our potential children won’t be raised by daycare and after-school programs. I’d be a stay-at-home wife if it means having time to keep a clean home. Coming home to a messy house, yet behind too tired to clean it because of a thankless job kills me inside. It makes me feel like I’m not capable of doing enough to survive, even when I’m trying to do everything right. I won’t join the military if it means sacrificing my health, livelihood, or even life for crumbs. I don’t want to be in the job force if it means losing fulfillment in my home life. I certainly don’t want to be in the job force when it often means sacrificing my hobbies or boxing them within the limitations of my career. I have little motivation to be career oriented. I’m not complaining; if you’re comfortable working in these conditions or even enjoy it — do you, boo. I support your right to choose all aspects of your life. How you run yourself shouldn’t affect me or anyone else.
If I’m going to work, I really don’t want to work for a job that encourages employees to come in on days off or work overtime for no extra pay. Yet every job I’ve worked has presented conditions like this. My job in jewelry provided overtime but paid minimum wage and a seriously fractional commission on sales — .025%. I earned my way up to a whopping .075% commission rate before leaving that job. Meanwhile my mangers enjoyed up to 2–3%, depending on their rank in the company, and a much higher hourly wage or salary. Some companies dance around giving employees full-time hours, which are needed to survive on minimum wage in this state and many others. They’d rather pay overtime than invest in their employees through healthcare, retirement plans, and paid vacations. They enforce rigid workplace cultures that limit the self-expression of their employees. This is not what I want for myself. There are many women AND men who are happy to step up to the plate and be stay at home partners. People try to reason with “if you ever need to work, you won’t have any job skills”. I would have gaps in my resume, sure, but when you have time to focus on your own passions and interests, you can fill those gaps. Freelance work, side businesses, investing. These things all count for something and can be translated into professional skills. Those are what really add impact and value to a resume. Even being a housewife translates, whether people believe that or not. Don’t focus on the job title — focus on what you’ve honed to do these things for yourself. It takes a lot to stay at home, run a household, and raise children.
If you’re not career oriented, I’m here to validate your feelings. I know how hard it is to walk through a world where your worldview is not considered socially acceptable. I know how it is to walk through a world where people who don’t want to work are harped on for receiving government benefits that their taxes pay for. I also know what it feels like to be a person with multiple forms of mental illness, all federally recognized as disabilities. Yet we are still discriminated against by assistance programs for not “being impaired enough”. As if mental illness doesn’t take away your will to live for months on end or put you into manic cycles, thus affecting your ability to be an effective employee. I’ve worked in sales for five years now and while my resume is chock full of skills, my bank account has very little to show for it. The cost of living in my state is high; the cost of existing in my head is too. Even as an adult entertainer, I paid my dues to the system, despite getting nothing in return. I was even ineligible for unemployment during the pandemic, despite my tax contributions. It was thanks to an incredibly discriminatory policy in North Carolina’s (where I used to live) eligibility requirements that specifically denied access to sex workers and adult entertainers. The owner of my club filed as many dancers as servers as he could without looking suspicious — but he couldn’t get all of us. Even during a pandemic, my industry was left out in the cold to die.
No wonder, after a global pandemic, and struggling to contend with my undiagnosed illnesses for years has burned me out at such a young age. I am now diagnosed, but it took away whole childhood where I could have gotten the help I needed. I’ve always wanted to be a mother and a wife. My generation, a weird cross between millennials and Gen Z, has been raised to pursue fulfillment. But the systems in place do not support being fulfilled unless you are career oriented. They do not support dreams of staying home to raise your family. They don’t support dreams of being able to travel and see the world, unless you work in a career that is oriented towards that industry. You’d think they would, considering the whole “nuclear family” ideology and all that. But corporate greed has run amuck. I’m lucky to have found a partner who has confidence in his ability to support both of us by the time we are ready to start a family. I’m here to say that it’s okay to make peace with fulfillment as a homemaker. You don’t need children, even, to be a valuable homemaker. The work that goes into caring for a home shouldn’t be as discredited as it is. It’s okay to support yourself or your savings off of side hustles. If your spouse or partner is okay with it — it is okay to let them support you as you support the shared household.
The only thing I will advise you on is to build a savings for yourself, because sometimes the world is not fair. I don’t want to encourage anyone to leave themselves behind to the point of risking homelessness or severe financial insecurity. Be honest with your partners about what you want. A career-oriented person and a family-oriented person can make a great combination with effective communication. Create income from your passions and hobbies instead of burning yourself out at a job you could care less about. Use your free time to help support your family, but in a way that nobody else can take away from you. Cultivate your passions and talents. Remember that your identity as a homemaker does not strip you of who you are.
Look at countries around the world that support the emotional infrastructure to allow healthy work-life balances, pay, healthcare, education, and family planning. Don’t Americans deserve that, too? Careers, stay-at-home partners — all of it deserves acknowledgement of how both can be equally rewarding and fulfilling. It’s time for society to be able to support these ideals again — for all genders, for relationships of all orientations this time.She knows my goals to be a happy housewife. I think at first, she was shocked. I am a very opinionated, articulate person. I also struggled with my mental health to a point that school feels impossible to finish. While it took a conversation for her to understand why I feel less career-inclined, she gets it now. I think many people struggle to forget how much stay-at-home partners and parents do. I am an avid feminist, which is why I feel perfectly comfortable saying stay at home parents (notably: wives) are truly a staple in society.
Sadly, the sixty-hour work week was formulated with the idea of one person staying behind and the other working. It enforced gender roles and the idea of the nuclear family. I understand that. Times have changed drastically since then. The costs of living, education, childcare, healthcare, and so many other things have skyrocketed. There’s a limited job market thanks to families rebuilding post-pandemic. Many households require two people to work to make a living. People are putting off starting families because they can’t afford it. The other day, I read an article by a woman who said because of the two years of life the pandemic stole from her, she was struggling to settle down. She had to come to terms with the idea that her biological clock was ticking and her dreams of having her own family were reduced.
There are more babies being born to parents in their mid-thirties than ever before. I’ve been adamant to my mother and partner that I don’t want that to be me. Women 35 and older are subject to more pregnancy complications. Research has shown that while older men retain their ability to make babies, their sperm count and fertility dips drastically in their 30s. Personally, I find fulfillment in my writing and my family the most. I’ve come to find that it is my ultimate goal. I really don’t mind cooking and cleaning. My partner does a lot of it right now, but it’s a workload I wouldn’t mind picking up if I had more time to myself. I didn’t adopt my animals to spend the whole day away from them. I don’t want to bear children just to spend whole days away from them.
Being a housewife doesn’t mean I can’t make my own money to meet my own wants and needs. I’ve told my partner: I want to make money from my writing. I’d like to sell art. These are things that are incredibly difficult to accomplish while working full time. Worst of all, the benefits offered by so many jobs are sub-par. My current job offers insurance, but it is limited. They only offer one week of paid time off per year. The commission rate per sale is better than competitors’, but still marginal compared to the cost of the merchandise. At the end of the day, it’s a repeated cycle of working for the man for scraps of their appreciation. That’s how every job feels to me — even sex work. Why would I want to go through life feeling this way?
At the same time, I don’t particularly want to be running a business. Doing it myself would be a tough endeavor. Finding employees to pay minimum wage to feels advantageous — if we’re being honest, that’s what many small businesses can afford to pay employees. The government taxes everything heavily. Your business is taxed, your shopping is taxed, your property is taxed, your car is taxed, your children are taxed, your income is taxed. I’m more a fan of small government — giving power back to the people and allowing them to make choices that work for them. I’m not particularly conservative by any means. Honestly, I’d support socialism, even if it meant taxes rising. I’d support it to ensure my money is being allocated in ways that I support — universal healthcare and education, better infrastructure, among other things. Though I am a child of two veterans, I don’t believe the majority of taxes needs to be thrown at the military. The U.S. has one of the strongest militaries in the world. But they can’t even pay servicemembers fairly for their service.
Instead, servicemembers are subject to harsh conditions, living in moldy barracks and eating shit food. They’re given a $300 stipend for uniforms that cost much more. They’re only given basic housing allowances if they get married. Often times, in order to live more comfortably, servicemembers do get married. There’s a concept called contract marriage, where they enter an agreement with someone who is not romantically involved with them to get married for money. It has created a disgustingly high divorce rate among young servicemembers. Most of them experience divorce before they even turn 26.
It is a sad state of the country, I think, to have to live in these conditions. The government encourages the expansion of biological families but can’t support the children in foster care or the growing population. People are rejected every single day for government benefits they need — educational grants, disability, food stamps, and state funded healthcare. All because the government does not allocate enough funding to these programs. People are forced to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in a world that values career orientation and hustle culture more than it values people. The saddest part is that these benefits are contingent on disabled and poor people being unable to find employment. Yet the benefits don’t even give them enough to survive. Social security for disabled people in Connecticut is a little more than $800 monthly. The average cost of living between bills, groceries, rent, and other necessities is over $2000 — in fact, it is 22% of the average cost of living nationally.
I’d be a stay-at-home wife when it means not sacrificing my mental health to a job I care little about. I’d be a stay-at-home wife if my partner and I have the means to, because our potential children won’t be raised by daycare and after-school programs. I’d be a stay-at-home wife if it means having time to keep a clean home. Coming home to a messy house, yet behind too tired to clean it because of a thankless job kills me inside. It makes me feel like I’m not capable of doing enough to survive, even when I’m trying to do everything right. I won’t join the military if it means sacrificing my health, livelihood, or even life for crumbs. I don’t want to be in the job force if it means losing fulfillment in my home life. I certainly don’t want to be in the job force when it often means sacrificing my hobbies or boxing them within the limitations of my career.
I have little motivation to be career oriented. I’m not complaining; if you’re comfortable working in these conditions or even enjoy it — do you, boo. I support your right to choose all aspects of your life. How you run yourself shouldn’t affect me or anyone else. If I’m going to work, I really don’t want to work for a job that encourages employees to come in on days off or work overtime for no extra pay. Yet every job I’ve worked has presented conditions like this. My job in jewelry provided overtime but paid minimum wage and a seriously fractional commission on sales — .025%. I earned my way up to a whopping .075% commission rate before leaving that job. Meanwhile my mangers enjoyed up to 2–3%, depending on their rank in the company, and a much higher hourly wage or salary. Some companies dance around giving employees full-time hours, which are needed to survive on minimum wage in this state and many others. They’d rather pay overtime than invest in their employees through healthcare, retirement plans, and paid vacations. They enforce rigid workplace cultures that limit the self-expression of their employees.
This is not what I want for myself. There are many women AND men who are happy to step up to the plate and be stay at home partners. People try to reason with “if you ever need to work, you won’t have any job skills”. I would have gaps in my resume, sure, but when you have time to focus on your own passions and interests, you can fill those gaps. Freelance work, side businesses, investing. These things all count for something and can be translated into professional skills. Those are what really add impact and value to a resume. Even being a housewife translates, whether people believe that or not. Don’t focus on the job title — focus on what you’ve honed to do these things for yourself. It takes a lot to stay at home, run a household, and raise children.
If you’re not career oriented, I’m here to validate your feelings. I know how hard it is to walk through a world where your worldview is not considered socially acceptable. I know how it is to walk through a world where people who don’t want to work are harped on for receiving government benefits that their taxes pay for. I also know what it feels like to be a person with multiple forms of mental illness, all federally recognized as disabilities. Yet we are still discriminated against by assistance programs for not “being impaired enough”. As if mental illness doesn’t take away your will to live for months on end or put you into manic cycles, thus affecting your ability to be an effective employee.
I’ve worked in sales for five years now and while my resume is chock full of skills, my bank account has very little to show for it. The cost of living in my state is high; the cost of existing in my head is too. Even as a an adult entertainer, I paid my dues to the system, despite getting nothing in return. I was even ineligible for unemployment during the pandemic, despite my tax contributions. It was thanks to an incredibly discriminatory policy in North Carolina’s (where I used to live) eligibility requirements that specifically denied access to sex workers and adult entertainers. The owner of my club filed as many dancers as servers as he could without looking suspicious — but he couldn’t get all of us. Even during a pandemic, my industry was left out in the cold to die.
No wonder, after a global pandemic, and struggling to contend with my undiagnosed illnesses for years has burned me out at such a young age. I am now diagnosed, but it took away whole childhood where I could have gotten the help I needed. I’ve always wanted to be a mother and a wife. My generation, a weird cross between millenials and Gen Z, has been raised to pursue fulfillment. But the systems in place do not support being fulfilled unless you are career oriented. They do not support dreams of staying home to raise your family. They don’t support dreams of being able to travel and see the world, unless you work in a career that is oriented towards that industry. You’d think they would, considering the whole “nuclear family” ideology and all that. But corporate greed has run amuck. I’m lucky to have found a partner who has confidence in his ability to support both of us by the time we are ready to start a family.
I’m here to say that it’s okay to make peace with fulfillment as a homemaker. You don’t need children, even, to be a valuable homemaker. The work that goes into caring for a home shouldn’t be as discredited as it is. It’s okay to support yourself or your savings off of side hustles. If your spouse or partner is okay with it — it is okay to let them support you as you support the shared household. The only thing I will advise you on is to build a savings for yourself, because sometimes the world is not fair. I don’t want to encourage anyone to leave themselves behind to the point of risking homelessness or severe financial insecurity. Be honest with your partners about what you want. A career-oriented person and a family-oriented person can make a great combination with effective communication. Create income from your passions and hobbies instead of burning yourself out at a job you could care less about. Use your free time to help support your family, but in a way that nobody else can take away from you. Cultivate your passions and talents. Remember that your identity as a homemaker does not strip you of who you are.
Take a look at countries around the world that support the emotional infrastructure to allow healthy work-life balances, pay, healthcare, education, and family planning. Don’t Americans deserve that, too?
Careers, stay-at-home partners — all of it deserves acknowledgement of how both can be equally rewarding and fulfilling. It’s time for society to be able to support these ideals again — for all genders, for relationships of all orientations this time.
