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• Wednesday, January 4, 2006 05:14 PM

  Informed Consent

  I'm astounded at the number of people who have missed the biggest point of this article. This isn't solely about the decision to stay home vs. the decision to keep working. Hirshman's point is well taken. Men don't really have that option when they decide to become parents. Society expects them to keep working, regardless of whether they become parents or not. If women expect to be treated as equals, perhaps its time we began behaving like equals. A woman must take responsibility for her life -- for her survival for her entire life. This seems to be getting overlooked by many of the responses to this article.

  I was happy to stay at home and raise my daughter for the pre-school years of her life. And I wouldn't have traded that time for anything, because I think it had a very positive effect on her. But every year, when Social Security sends me a summary of my benefits, and I compare it to that of my same-age friends who were working moms, I can't help but be struck by the fact that I lost a consider amount of retirement income because I made that choice. My benefits fall between $700 and $1000 per month less than my contemporaries who remained in the work force for those four or five years, even though I worked as hard or harder as a stay-at-home during those years. My ex-husband, who became a parent on the exact same day as I did, suffered no such loss.

  This was something that I never considered when making the decision to stay home. Had I been made aware of exactly what I was sacrificing in the long run, I might have gone ahead and made the same decision. Then again, maybe not. That grand a month isn't enough to make me rich, but could very well be the difference between being able to live comfortably on my pension and SS benefits, and having to (as another poster wrote) eat Fancy Feast.

  Though my ex and I both made the decision for me to stay home and raise our child, only one of us will be paying for it well into her golden years. It's a matter of informed consent. Every woman should stop to think seriously about her future before she decides to stay home, and she should have a Plan B, in case, as Hekker points out, she's one of the 54% of all American women who ends up divorced.

  ~AS~

  —AmandaSo Read AmandaSo's other letters
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