This is part two of a two-part series on why I became a homemaker. If there’s anyone else out there who is also stay-at-home mom, let’s hear your comments and your support!

After getting married we moved to Baltimore where Felipe got his first job and I got a public school teaching position a little later. I soon started singing in professional choirs in the area and I was getting pretty well-established, as well as enjoying my public school post. There was even a period in there where Felipe’s contract ended with his first employer and he specifically decided to look for jobs only in Baltimore because I was starting to get traction in my career. We were near Peabody, which is a great Music Conservatory, and I was considering attending school there to get a doctorate in musical arts. A doctorate would enable me to become a college professor in a music department in the future, which was my career aspiration. That was the first chapter of our life, both of us pursuing careers and Felipe even compromising a bit to make sure I could continue to develop her career.

Then we got pregnant and having a baby was a life-changing experience. It made us ask questions we had never asked before and have considerations we have never considered before. When I first got pregnant, I had assumed we would find an au pair or a live-in nanny and I would go back to work. I got six weeks paid time off followed by the regular summer break. So during that unanticipatedly long time spent with our tiny little baby, a chage happened: I couldn’t imagine putting her into the care of anybody else. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving her to go and teach other other people’s kids. It made confront the question of who was going to model adulthood for her.

We came to the conclusion that we couldn’t trust other people, the public at large, the public school, media, etc., because of the kind of value system society at large embodies. The values of present-day society were not values that we wanted her to adopt. Predictably, nearly every subsequent month after I handed in my resignation, for about the first two years of my daughter’s life, I had a life crisis–What am I doing with my life? What is my career? What am I doing just staying at home? We get bombarded with gender equality propaganda, constantly told that women should be equal to men and that they should go out and pursue everything a man pursues. Society makes it seem like staying at home and taking care of children is so low on the bar; that it’s something to aspire to. “You have so many gifts and you’re not leveraging them in the outside world, you’re not using them to become renowned and famous to gain respect and honor for you and your family.”

One of the reasons why it’s so emphasized that women must pursue their own careers is so that they have power in relationships; because when divorce happens, they say, women are protected. Women will have a career to fall back on, money-making skills to take advantage of. This is also why people always advise that couples have separate bank accounts. We don’t. We decided that we would pool all of our money into the same place. We avoided all the advice that everyone gives that essentially builds a sort of independence, a state of separation within the marriage from the get-go. It was quite a transition in the beginning having to live off of one income, and that one income being Felipe’s. I felt like a sort of leech or paid servant because he’s paying for me to live or for cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. This is not the right mindset. Felipe hands over his whole check to me every time. It’s not really his, it’s the family’s and that’s what a family really is: a single unit where things are all in common.

We realize that not everyone can live off of a single income. Felipe doesn’t make tons and tons of money. We make sacrifices by living like this. But, this is your sacred duty, mothers out there, that you raise your children and you impress upon them the values that you deem important. To the husbands, this doesn’t mean that you do the forty hours at work and come home to sit on your rear because you’ve done your forty hours. You’re doing the forty hours because the end goal is to support the family. So when you get home you still have to support the family. This means that if she’s falling to pieces because there are so many things to do at home, then you pitch in, you do the dishes, you do the laundry, you do whatever it takes. Leadership is about servitude, is about serving the family, sacrificing, even giving your life for it. The moment your bride sees that you think you’ve done your bit and you’re done serving is the moment that she starts the moment you start going down a slippery slope of fragmentation: each person serving their own interests and not the interests of the family unit.

The actual traditional model is that everyone is a servant to the family unit. Having a child was a fundamental transformation about what marriage life was about. There’s a lot to the saying that “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”. The mothers of the world actually raise the children that then go on to run the world. In effect, mothers are laying down the groundwork for the ruling of the world. It boils down to what value system do you want your children to adopt? The value system that is common, out there in the public? Or, do you want them do adopt a different set of values? If you want a different set, then you have to take control.