Mid-life Without the Crisis

It really isn't the destination, but the journey. May be cliche, but it's true.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Live and Let Live

Perhaps this week you've heard about the brouhaha stirred up by CNN commentator Hillary Rosen's comment that Ann Romney (wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney) has "never worked a day in her life." (BTW, she stayed home to raise 5 boys.)

Also this week, I saw a question to an advice columnist asking how to deal with stay-at-home moms who say, "I didn't have my kids to have someone else raise them."

It seems that there is an issue here between working moms and stay-at-home moms.

If getting older has taught us anything, it should be that we all have to make hard choices in life.  Maybe someone would have preferred to be a stay-at-home mom, but financial circumstances simply didn't allow that.  Or maybe someone longed for the busy life of working, but just couldn't see leaving children with a sitter.  We all had to make choices about how to live our lives and we have to live with the consequences, positive or negative, of those choices.

But we all need to remember that just because the choice we made worked for us in our circumstances at the time, that choice was ours, not someone else's.  Meaning that someone else's decision is not ours to make.

So don't judge one another about these decisions.  We don't know what someone else may be dealing with or the reasons they made the choices they made.  We should not be judging working moms or stay-at-home moms based on our own choices.

If growing older has taught us anything, it should be live and let live.

4 comments:

Kathy Fain said...

Love it. I can't count the times that I heard people say, "being a stay at home mom must be boring," or "I couldn't stand staying at home." Truth is, I wanted to work at first but my circumstances were different. I enjoyed staying at home with my kid and if it can be done, then more power to you.

J.R. Davis said...

Exactly. Either choice is legitimate and shouldn't we support one another?

Peri Hansen said...

Well said. If all of us could "live and let live" the world would be a much happier place.

Cheryl J Cole said...

Absolutely live and let live!! (One of my favorite Bond movies of the '70's by the way!) But the 'ones' in power are NEVER going to let 'us' do that. It's all about control.