Stay-at-home moms acquire thick skin with parenting choice

STRATHMORE — Before the bra-burning era of the 1960s, the vast majority of women stayed home with the kids while the male breadwinner went off to work.

Many weren’t happy, and demonstrated as much with picket signs and undergarment bonfires. They wanted to go to work, earn some bread in the form of hard cash.

They won the right to work outside home, and a new army of working women took on a new attitude: ridicule of the women who chose to stay home.

Angie Williams, 64, of Strathmore was a proud stay-at-home mom who tired of the ridicule and fought back.

“They would say, ‘What, you stay home all day and do nothing?’ That’s ridiculous,” Williams said, sparks of red anger-fire flashing in her blue eyes. “I worked harder at home than any of them did on an outside job. Woman’s lib has done more harm than good. Yes, there should be equality for everybody, but some people took it too far.”

Williams’ way of fighting back was to work hard to give her children the best, and not accept the ridicule.

A military wife who lived in 14 cities in 21 years, Williams has three children, Kathleen Titus, 40, Gary Williams, Jr. 39, and Dean Williams, 37.

Raised in Dartmouth, Germany, she was a registered nurse who married at 21 and ended up traveling all over America with her husband.

The family ended up in Strathmore because her husband’s mother was there.

When she first came, she said she experienced more prejudice than she ever imagined. It was there, in Strathmore, she was first called a “Nazi.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Racism was everywhere, with everybody. It’s better now, but it was hard then.”

She had her husband’s support, which made it bearable. However, Gary Williams Sr. retired from the U.S. Army in 1993 and went to work for Tulare County as a corrections officer. Three years later, in August 1996, he died from cancer.

“I still miss him,” Williams said. “We had so many plans. He died too young and we couldn’t do them.”

Her husband would stand up for her when others ridiculed her for being at home, “doing nothing but watching soap operas and gossiping.”

He would tell her not to let the things people said bother her. That didn’t help.

“It still bothers me that people think so little of homemakers,” she said. “You know, when my husband bought this house, it was a fixer upper. In 1985, I repaired 97 percent of the roof, and I’m afraid of heights. It had to be done.”

Her husband, Williams said, had a good sense of humor, but she could outwork him. She, for instance, used a hand mower to mow the lawn. He came home one day with a riding lawn mower equipped with lights.

“Lights, of all things,” she said, laughing out loud. “The neighbors used to come over and say, ‘Can we borrow your wife for a while?’ when they needed things done. He was proud of me.”

He had reason to be — part of the work Williams did as a stay-at-home mom was to take care of her developmentally disabled son.

The boy contracted cerebral palsy when, while laying on his stomach in his bassinet, the oxygen was cut off from his brain. He was 7 months old.

In time, after he was 13 years old, it became necessary for Gary Williams Jr. to be placed in a facility that could better serve his needs. The challenge, Angie Williams said, was overwhelming.

Still, she attended school functions, took her children where they needed to go, cooked, cleaned, repaired, ran to doctors’ offices — in other words, she said, worked from the time she got up until the time she went to bed.

And, she said, she budgeted well.

Over the years she became a licensed CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant). Had she not married, she would have become a missionary nurse in Africa. Her eyes light up and her hands punctuate her sentences when she talks about that dream deferred.

Today, with her children on their own, Williams works as hard — in her garden, with her animals, dogs and cats, with ceramics, and most of all with her volunteer work with senior citizens.

She is there for them daily, at the Porterville Senior Citizen Community Center, helping to serve lunch and sharing laughs and stories.

“They have so many stories to share,” she said, laughing. “I learned a lot about Porterville listening to some of those stories.”

Still, if you ask her daughter Kathleen Titus, despite ridicule, her mother’s efforts were well worth it.

“As a child I had mixed feelings,” she said from her home in Visalia. “Other kids were able to go home and do whatever they wanted. I wasn’t able to do that. On the other hand, I always had someone at home to talk to. As a grown up, when I look back, I’m glad I had a stay-at-home mom, so much so I’m a stay-at-home mom myself now. I’m very glad. I think it made a world of difference in my life.”

It also made a difference in the life of her son Cory, 18, who is a student at College of the Sequoias. He told his mom, Titus said, that because she was home, she was there for him when he needed someone to talk to, and that he is “happy I was there for him.”

Titus said she, too, experienced ridicule for her career choice.

“They would say, ‘Hi, how are you? Where do you work?’ I’d say I’m a stay-at-home. ‘Oh, how come?’ like it’s something wrong,” Titus said. “If the family can afford it, I think the children benefit. I had problems as a teenager. Had my mom not been around to guide me in the right direction, I might have gone in the wrong direction. My mom is a great woman. I think a lot of her and what she went through.”

A different kind of stay-at-home
Tammy Booth, a Springville stay-at-home mom, has a different story to tell when it comes to why she came in from the office.

She stays at home, but home is the office from which she works.

Booth is a virtual administrative assistant.

“That means, I can do anything an executive assistant can do for you except get you coffee,” she said.

Before moving to Springville in May 2007, the Booth family lived in Thousand Oaks and she worked in Century City.

“I was very unhappy taking my daughter to day care and leaving her for 10 to 12 hours a day,” Booth said. “She was in day care eight to 10 hours, and then there was the travel time. Her dad would pick her up, so I wouldn’t personally see her for long stretches of time. She would call me and say, ‘Mommy, I need you.’ It would break my heart.”

The family moved to Springville after three years of visiting friends there, and getting to see what it was like in the area, Booth said.

They wanted to get horse property, a daunting task with the exorbitant home prices in Southern California.

The family decided to move when they realized her job was moveable, and her husband is in a field (computers) wherein he could go into any industry.

“It was also because of the lifestyle here,” she said. “It’s not quite so fast, not so densely populated.”

Even so, a stay-at-home mom anywhere will have her challenges.

“When I tell people that I changed my line of work and came home to be near my children, it seemed to take away from my professionalism,” Booth said. “From the executive ranks, it was like ‘Oh!’

“Yet, I was clearly able to put out the same quality of product, but they seem to think I was at home eating bonbons. I think I ate and drank more in an office setting because at home I’m always busy, always there’s something I need to get done.”

The joys she experiences, she said, are insurmountable.

“Clearly the joy is getting to spend time with my children the way I had hoped it would work out to be, and also, to see my business thrive like I had hoped it would,” she said. “I have been working for myself for almost 10 years.”

What are the challenges of being a stay-at-home mom, including home schooling her girls, Danielle, 14, and Raquel, 9?

She laughed out loud: not having enough grown ups around to talk to.

Booth’s original challenge was when her children were small. Then, she had to juggle conference calls and meetings and she had to teach them to be quiet.

“It caused a level of anxiety because you worry about people hearing the children crying or dogs in the back,” Booth said about those early days.

Once, when Danielle was 4 or 5 years old, she answered her mother’s client phone. She’d met the client before, so she answered the telephone thinking she was helping.

“The woman went ballistic,” Booth said. “She told me if it happened again we’d have to part ways. I made sure it never happened again.”

Booth said she home schools her girls because at one point Danielle missed more school than she was attending because of her health. She managed to be an A student.

The two girls love the life they lead, and that their mother is there.

“I like it because I have more time to bond with my mom and my sister,” Raquel said.

“I like it a lot more,” Danielle said. “It was hard when my mom would have to drop me off at day care. I’d always call and ask when she was coming home. It’s nice that we’re all here and safe, and not to have to worry about rain, or other weather conditions that would delay her. And our communication is better. It’s lot easier as a family.”

Relative Worth
A stay-at-home mom’s worth in wages

If you think mothers, stay-at-home or not, are not valuable, think again. Below is a sampling of study conduct by the nationally renown Ric Edelman Financial Services in 1999. This excerpt of the study was taken from the Dec. 8, 1999 issue of Awake!:

If you were to add up the salaries for all the jobs that a mother performs throughout the year, how much would her services be worth? According to a report in The Washington Post, she would receive $508,700 a year!

This figure is based on a study of median salaries for occupations that mothers typically perform.

These are [just five] of the 17 occupations included in the report, along with their average annual salary:
-- Child-care worker, $13,000
-- Bus driver, $32,000
-- Psychologist, $29,000
-- Animal caretaker, $17,000
-- Registered nurse, $35,000
-- Executive chef, $40,000
-- General office clerk, $19,000.

According to Ric Edelman, chairman of the financial services company that conducted the study, these figures do not take into account such expenses as Social Security and other retirement benefits.

-- Contact Anita Stackhouse-Hite at 784-5000, Ext. 1043, or astackhouse-hite@portervillerecorder.com.