- Joined
- Sep 27, 2008
- Messages
- 20,601
I don't know. If you want to have a family someone will have to do with less. This smacked my wife and me in the face when I was deployed to Central/South America and called home. Some friends answered the phone. When I asked why they were visiting they said I obviously had not heard (the days before widespread internet). Her unit had been deployed to the Middle East and they were there to take care of our daughter until one of us got back. I exchanged some letters with my wife. Something had to give if strangers were not to raise our daughter. One of us had to put their career on the back burner.
In our case it was me. I left active duty and went into the Guard. Because you know they NEVER deploy and it's only one weekend a month, two weeks during the summer.
Well, wouldn't you know? 9/11 happened and I was recalled and sent to Iraq while my wife was in the middle of medical school. With two kids. She made it with some help from friends/family, but a few years later when I was looking at another recall while she was in residency we realized something had to give. The kids couldn't scrub into surgery with her. So I retired.
As the kids got older I did start to go back into the workforce full time, but I always put that second until recently as they left the house.
There is nothing second rate about raising a family and it's much more important than a full 401(k). I think we are often tough on past generations and try to put our mores and beliefs on them when they lived in a different and more labor intense age. In a time when a refrigerator was called an "ice box" because you had to get ice delivered to keep stuff cool, just getting groceries and preparing food was a full-time job. No precut frozen chickens or other prepackaged food. No microwave. No freezer until maybe after WWII. "TV" dinners, those prepared meals we just throw into a microwave or oven didn't really come out until the 1950's So women stayed home and ran the household.
It took time as society modernized for those structures and the attitudes that went with them to change. My mom really wanted to follow her dad and go to law school, but it was tough enough in 1950 as a single female to get into law school. Married? Forget it. Not happening (though in fairness even married men were often excluded from law school).
But these are all bridges one can cross as he/she comes to them. Each step of the way one will need to evaluate their life both as an individual and, if it comes to it, as a spouse and maybe even a parent.
If I could give this 5 likes I would!