By Jay Smith
i didn’t plan on having a baby. or getting kicked out of school.
but like other young parents, my life was destined to change
Samantha MacEwan is my neighbour. We both used to be career women. Now, technically speaking, we’re stay-at-home mothers. Sometimes our partners are, technically speaking, stay-at-home fathers. The dynamic between our home lives and our careers is fluid.
“Stay-at-home versus career mom relies on an artificial distinction,” Samantha says to me. On one hand, there’s the liberated woman who achieves success in the work world; on the flip side, a woman shackled to her domicile, devoting all her anti-feminist energies to the womanly cliché of nurturing a family. “All moms will work at some point,” Samantha says, “and all moms will stay at home at some point.”
We’re driving home from cross-country skiing at Goldbar Park. The dashboard clock reads the surprisingly late hour of 10:30 p.m. Well, not that surprising: our evening out started late because Samantha’s 15-month-old took longer than usual to fall asleep. My 16-month-old daughter is at home with my partner, who has only recently been able to put her to bed without excessive melodrama. So we set off well after dark and skied the halogen-lit trails until the lights progressively started to go off: from the peripheries towards the park’s centre, we seemed destined to glide half in light and half in darkness. Our adventure in this nocturnal forest was a suitable backdrop for our conversation: how to have successful careers while being equally successful as parents.
Samantha used to work as a creative writer for a software company and as an Athabasca University research assistant. In the summer of 2006, faced with the end of her maternity leave, she struck upon another career: she and her husband decided to capitalize on Alberta’s economic boom and started a construction company.
“My mat leave was over when Hazel was nine months old,” Samantha explains. “She was such a little baby, and breastfeeding so much, that I could not go back to working nine-to-five. The idea was just disgusting to me – leaving my baby with someone else for all her waking hours while spending a lot of my time at work just holding down an office chair.”
Category: Entrepreneurship, Work
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