Huh? None of them had babies or toddlers. They all had teenagers — children old enough to manage a few hours a day without Mommy, and to help with the younger ones. It seemed absurd to me that they were quitting work just when they seemed to finally have the most time for it.
Years later, I understood. So did the group of friends I was sitting with at a wedding. Leora and Dina were in their thirties, just starting to raise teenagers, while Chaya and I were well into our teen parenting journey. But we all shared one thing in common, and I summed it up with a line stolen from Rav Uri Zohar a”h.
“My friends,” I said, “we were robbed.”
When we’d been young adults, we’d heard — and fervently bought into — the hype about staying home with little babies and toddlers. We knew the science: attachment theory, the brain development that occurs before the age of three. We were ready to jump through any hoops it would take to keep our babies and toddlers home with us.
Most of us didn’t have the luxury of not working at all, but we managed to work part-time, from home, or at night, so that we wouldn’t have to leave our babies with babysitters. No one can care for your baby the way you can, we knew. We looked down on friends who did not share our philosophy.
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