Making Family A Priority Is A Choice
What’s more important to you, work or family?
We were in the fourth year of our marriage. Our daughter was ten months old when she started attending a daycare about a mile from home when I started my first job as a university professor. Most days, I’d pick her up by 4 p.m., except on the two nights I taught evening courses.
On those two nights, I had asked my husband to pick her up before the daycare closed at 6 p.m. He did that for about a month or two before he said he could no longer do it. He asked me to find an alternate solution.
On a quest to climb the corporate ladder, he thought telling people at work he had to leave (early) at 6 p.m. would tarnish his image. At that time, he had a female boss and I couldn’t understand why anybody would think it was a lame excuse to leave work for their child.
What upset me then was that instead of offering to brainstorm some possibilities together, it became my problem to fix. If I wanted to work, I had to find a way to care for our child. “Why did you have kids then,” he would ask.
That should have been the first red flag for me, but with all the “good girl conditioning” in a very patriarchal upbringing, I found an alternative. I paid one of the girls who worked in the daycare to take my daughter to our…
