I woke up earlier than usual this morning. It happens some days. Usually, Deus Ex Machina gets up around 4:45AM. I don't even hear the alarm. Sometimes I feel him get up, and I hear him starting his morning routine. I am lulled back to sleep by the familiarity of it: the soft rustle of him pulling on a pair of sweatpants and slipping into a long-sleeved shirt; the ticking of the dogs' toenails on the laminate flooring in the hallway as they run to the kitchen for their breakfast; the metallic squeal of latch on the woodstove door he opens to feed the fire; the click and whoosh of his opening the sliding glass door to let the dogs into the back yard after they've eaten.
Sometimes I lay semi-awake listening to the symphony of my house coming alive.
The dogs scratch at the glass slider, finished with their toilet and ready to come back into the warm house from the snowy backyard – perhaps hoping for a second helping of kibbles and bits. I unfold myself from the embrace of my warm bed to let them in. Sometimes I crawl back under the down and snuggle back into the cocoon. Sometimes I get up and join Deus Ex Machina in the living room for coffee and Yoga. This morning was the latter.
After Yoga, Deus Ex Machina heads to the shower. If I'm not awake for Yoga, he will gently wake me after his workout, softly caressing my feet and whispering, “Time to get up. There's coffee” (and there's always a cup of coffee ready and waiting for me on the counter), and I go into the kitchen and make his breakfast. Usually, something with eggs, because the backyard chickens are incredibly generous – even right now when the sun is still low on the horizon and living the Benjamin Franklin advice: early to bed … although not so much of the early to rise happening this time of year with our days still firmly in winter's grip.
After his shower, Deus Ex Machina gets his lunch together (usually leftovers from previous nights' dinners – I always cook too much, and he teases me about being an Italian grandma, even though I'm not Italian). Some mornings he wolfs down the breakfast sandwich I've made for him before he leaves. Some mornings, he grabs a cloth napkin and takes it with him.
Several days a week, he drops Precious off at work. She works at a local café and has to be at work before rush hour traffic (and their breakfast patrons). In season, Little Fire Faery, who is a landscaper, has to be at work at the same time. She grabs her coffee and some fruit for lunch and walks next door to her job.
By 7:00AM, the early morning rush to get everyone coffee'd up and out the door ends, and I'm left to sit quietly with a second (or third, depending on the morning) cup of coffee, a warm cat on my lap, and a few minutes to check email, read the news, and scroll social media.
My life as a work from home housewife is slow, and I don't mean that my days are languorous and long, but rather that the activities that fill my days are the slow kind of life that people who live a life-by-hand lead. Sweeping floors with a real broom. Caring for the backyard flock. Cooking from scratch. Tending the home fires, both literally and figuratively. In the spring and summer, there is planting and tending the garden, and caring for the baby chicks that will be next years laying hens or next winter's chicken soup. There's always something to do.
I often take for granted that what I do every day is just "normal" - everyone's every day life - but it's not true. I live an extraordinary life, and many people, especially two-income households, don't have the luxury I have every day to bake a loaf of bread or mend a pair of pants.
I call it a luxury, and it is ... ish. I have heard people lamenting that they wish they could have my life – to “not have to work” - but *they* don't think they can afford it.
That's where they are wrong.
It is absolutely possible to support a family on a single income, and moreover, not having a paid job working outside the home, can actually yield a higher “income” than what most women will earn annually anyway.
But there has to be a willingness to live with fewer conveniences and do more by hand.
A broom costs $8. A vacuum costs $40.
The median income for women in the United States is $25,307 (source: https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA). If that amount is for a full-time job (40 hours a week), the average hourly wage for a working woman is around $12. We'll assume that our source is giving us the before taxes rate, which means that the average take home per hour rate is around $10. That's the amount one will have to spend on stuff. And that's important for calculating what one is paying just to work.
Above I mentioned that I am able to make a loaf of bread. What I didn't mention above about making bread is that we are gluten-free. A loaf of gluten-free bread from the store costs around $6. Gluten-free sandwich loaves are smaller than normal loaves of sliced bread. A loaf of gluten-free bread is only about 12 slices (or six sandwiches), but the pieces of bread are about three-fourths the size of the piece of bread of a normal loaf of sandwich bread. So, basically, for $6, we can get four regular-sized sandwiches.
If both Deus Ex Machina and I worked full-time and brought sandwiches from home for lunch each day, we would need three loaves of bread just for our lunches (and that's if we each only use two slices of bread and have a three-quarters sized sandwich for our midday meal). If I earned the average wage for women in the US, I would have to work an hour and a half just for a few sandwiches. Eating out would cost a lot more, for sure, but isn't it a little dispiriting to note that bringing lunch to work costs 15 minutes of wages - even when the food is brought from home? Oh, and we didn't calculate the cost of meat, cheese, or peanut butter to go on the sandwich. That's just for the bread.
A loaf of homemade, gluten-free bread costs around $3. If I work from home, I don't have to have a sandwich, because I don't need a quick grab-and-go lunch, and if Deus Ex Machina takes a sandwich to work each day using my homemade bread, we would only need one loaf.
My NOT having job would save us $750/year (assuming $15/week for the bread times 50 weeks) just on sandwich bread.
And that's just one, very small example of the cost savings. The fact is that having a two income household does not, necessarily, raise one's standard of living, when the cost of having a job is figured into the budget.
There are so many, other costs that are often ignored or glossed over, because those things are just part of having a job – like putting gasoline in the car.
In January 2018, after working from home for 20 years, I took a job working part-time outside the home. I had a very short commute, compared to most people. My job was 10 miles round trip from my house. Depending on traffic, my total commute there and back was about a half hour per day, five days a week.
My car is fairly fuel efficient, averaging 32/mpg, which means at 10 miles per day, I used one and ¾ gallons of gasoline per week to get back and forth to work. Gasoline has been averaging around $2.50/gallon for the last three years. My annual cost for gasoline was $218.75.
That doesn't sound like much, for sure, but I had to work 15 minutes just to pay for the gas it took to drive my car to work, which means I lost that money and that time - just to have a job. If I had to pay for parking, which occasionally happened, it was $5/day. I lost another half hours' wages just to leave my car in a parking lot while I worked. I can park it for free in my driveway - just sayin'.
Most people aren't lucky enough to live 5 miles from where they work, and neither do they have as fuel-efficient of a car as I have. The average commute for folks here in the US is around 32 miles round trip (so three times my commute), and the average gas mileage for a car here in the US is 25 mpg. A worker traveling 32 miles round trip in a car that gets 25 mpg uses about 1.28 gallons of gasoline per day. At $2.50/gallon, the annual cost for just gasoline to travel to and from work is $800. The person who is bringing home $10/hour has to work for an hour and a half a week just to pay for gasoline.
That's just for gasoline. That doesn't even include the cost of the car payment (because most people also don't own their car outright), taxes, and insurance. It also doesn't include the cost of parking fees or turnpike fees - both of which are a reality where I live. It costs $2 a day for a commuter pass on the turnpike, which is an additional $10 a week - or another hour of lost wages just to get to work.
Before starting my part-time job, I had spent many years working from home. I was a huge advocate for more people adopting a WAH lifestyle, because I'd done a lot of research on the cost of having an outside-the-home job. I knew the benefits of a one-income family with a SAH/WAH parent/partner.
In 2017, I dissolved my home-based business. My kids were, mostly, grown up, and like many stay-at-home moms with older kids, I thought, maybe I should get a job outside the home.
In December, the organization where I had been a long-time volunteer announced a job opening for an office manager/admin assistant. With almost 30 years of experience in office work and business management under my belt, the job description could have been written with me in mind, and since I was already doing several of the job duties as an unpaid volunteer, applying for the job seemed like a no brainer.
But, after almost three years in that job, when I realized how much my job was costing in actual money spent just to keep going to work (and that's not including any of the mental or emotional toll the job took on me and on us as a family), it no longer made sense to keep the working there.
What's worse, though, was that the income I earned going to work every day was basically the same amount of money I had earned working from home all of those years (allowing for inflation, I actually made MORE working from home than I did going to the office), but the cost of going to the job each day was significantly higher.
There is a misconception that is perpetuated by our society that two parent families NEED two incomes to survive, and in perpetuating that myth we are doing a great disservice to ourselves and our families.
In a 2012 commencement speech to the graduating class of Barnard College, then, President Obama told the women in the class, “We know … this country would be better off if more Americans were able to get the ... specific skills and training that employers are looking for today.”
The emphasis of his speech was to tell these women that they needed to work, nay, that they should WANT to work - above all else, because working = value.
Paradoxically, his wife, the venerable Michelle Obama, was a stay-at-home Mom through his tenure in the White House. While she "worked", as do many of us SAHM, on various community service projects and served on bunches of committees (unpaid, like my own work as a Board member at my local library and at my local food pantry, and a dog walker and foster care provider for the animal shelter), her professional career was curtailed shortly after her daughters' births and her husband's bid for the White House.
Undaunted by the fact that his wife wasn't a wage earner, he goes further to say that Americans “... are better off when women are treated fairly and equally in every aspect of American life — whether it’s the salary you earn or the health decisions you make.”
No mention of the nobility of eschewing a wage to be a home-maker.
There is no room for having a conversation about the unpaid work in our lives or for those who wish to do it full-time in lieu of a having a career making money.
Certainly, most of the women he was addressing went to college in the first place because they intended to be financially self-sufficient, as did I, but the problem with speeches like this and the ideas that they perpetuate is that they validate the assumption that women (and men) who don't earn a salary are not “equal” to men (and women) who do.
Well, unless they are the well-educated wives of rich politicians.
And that idea is the most egregious lie our society has embraced, and by continuing to conserve the notion that men and women must make money, we will destroy any hope of creating a sustainable future, because the fact is that unlimited growth, as measured in dollars (which is how we do it), is unsustainable in a world with finite resources. We need more people who can make something other than money, for reasons more noble than the desire to earn cash.
We're heading into a new world – one with diminishing resources – and we will need people who know how to do more than make money, but until or unless our society can start seeing the value in those of us who have chosen to be keepers of hearth and home, we will continue to lose the skills that we will need when our lives get slower, and driving 30 miles one way to a job won't be possible, because there won't be a job ... and there will be nothing to drive.
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