Holly Meis

Do You Want to Stay at Home with Your Child...: ...but Don't Think You Can? Holly Meis

FOREWORD:

I took the first 6 months of our son's life off on maternity leave. I took every day that they would give me. Then the day came that I had to return to work. I found it incredibly hard to leave my baby with someone else every day. Every one said it would get easier. For me, it never did. So, I put him in a daycare facility that I could see from my fourth story office. Still, I cried every morning and I missed him terribly. I would check on him regularly. I knew I wanted to be at home with him, but didn't think we could afford for me to quit my job.

Not only did I miss our son terribly, I also had concerns about leaving him in the care of someone else. Unfortunately, my Mother was unavailable at the time and she is the one and only person I would have trusted our son with. One of my biggest concerns with leaving our child in a daycare facility was the possibility of physical and sexual abuse. I just couldn't live with myself if that happened to him at a daycare provider that I had entrusted him to. I knew the only way to keep him completely safe and properly cared for was to be the one caring for him.

My second concern was missing out on all of his "firsts" or not being able to cuddle him in his pajamas on his own couch if he wasn't feeling well that day. The clincher for the decision to stay at home with him no matter what it took came about six months later when I walked in to pick him up after work and the woman in the daycare said "Oh, he took his first step today!" I should have been excited, but my first thought was "And I missed it and YOU got to see it. That sucks"! I made my mind up on the drive home that day that I would do whatever it took to stay at home with him. So...............

I sat down with a pen and pad and began to put some numbers down. I wrote down what we were spending on daycare and the cost of me working (lunches out, gas to and from, make-up, cloth