Our friends have been hearing it for years now when we talk about Nikki staying at home with the kids:  Only a couple of years now until Nikki goes back to work.  It’s a familiar tune we have been singing for a long while now.  It was a lifeline for Nikki when the boys were really young and it was HARD to be home all day.  Really hard.  Hardest thing you can do, probably.

There was multiple sources of stress placed on her back then; stress from the kids who were very very busy and required super human patience to just make it through the day (see HurriCael and other posts about Quinn and Cael for proof of this), stress from herself when she felt that she wasn’t up to the task and guilt from just wanting to be somewhere else.  Not to mention the financial issues with having a single bread-winner (myself) on various contracts that aren’t necessarily stable.  It added up to a lot of crazy days and some really hard ones on everybody involved.

She would justifiably complain that she was too tired and wiped to really appreciate her time with the boys at home when they were really young.  It’s a catch-22 that really sucked, basically.

Now it all seems like a distant dream.  The kids all get along really well, in fact the Christmas holidays went so well we all were sad to see them over, unlike past holidays when the sense of relief when the kids go back to school ripples through the house.  They used to just need to get out of each other’s hair, but these days they all get along so well it’s a let down when the regular schedule starts again.

The struggle is for Nikki to decide how strong her desire to go back to work really is.  Things are running so smoothly now it’s a hard decision to uproot everyone’s life just to go back to work.  It’s not as much of an escape for Nikki as it used to be, there’s a sense of uprooting the house schedule for even less of a reason.

Then we look at two income households longingly, sheer earning potential aside there’s a whole lot of stability to be had when both spouses are working.  I’m pretty lucky to be working most of the time, but I probably haven’t taken more than two days off in a row for about 8 years now.  Some “paid” holidays would sure be nice now and then.  Not to mention that a job with some medical and dental benefits would certainly help out a lot.  But, we’ve made it this far, what’s another few years?  <knocks on wood-like government desk>

So there you go, it’s pretty clear:  there’s just no right answer.

I saw this article in the Globe and Mail (read it before their stupid paywall comes crashing down.  Why on earth would anyone pay to get access to articles that happened in the past?) and it sparked this post since it resonates strongly with our current position.