James' World 2

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As soon as I quit my job — a decision I made unexpectedly when my son was 8 weeks old — I began to encounter headlines that attempted to quantify my new role. “If SAHMs were paid, their salary would be $184K/year,” went a typical one. My son will be 4 on his next birthday, and in my travels across the Internet, I still come across that number at least monthly. It’s a sum that far exceeds any salary I made, but it seemed especially irrelevant once I was doing what felt like both the most relentless and high stakes work of my life. What was the point in knowing my worth in theory, when it was accompanied by nothing material?

That fantasy six-figures appears, too, early on in The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — And Come Back Stronger Than Ever by Neha Ruch, founder of the website (and popular Instagram account) Mother Untitled. When she invokes the number, it is to point out that, in her words, “Our work inside the home is critically important and valuable, yet few mothers I’ve met feel like a revered six-figure-earner during their career pauses.” Ruch’s mission is to change that. The Stanford MBA and former brand strategist’s current project, launched after leaving her corporate career following the birth of her kids, is to rebrand stay-at-home motherhood.

It is, perhaps, a role that could use some sprucing up. A perusal of any relevant online comment section, as well as plenty of IRL conversations, will tell you that opinion is split on whether the 21st century SAHM is a pitiable or a privileged figure (neither is a positive assessment). Ruch situates herself in the Lean In, girlboss era, but the stay-at-home mother faced disdain and condescension long before Sheryl Sandberg. It doesn’t help that the role as we conceive of it is largely mythological: In the history that Ruch starts the book off with, she shows how the postwar stay-at-home mother of the popular imagination was a historical aberration that became cemented in our minds thanks to the concurrent invention of television. When people picture the kind of mom who stays home, they’re picturing June Cleaver. When her work is done, Ruch hopes we might instead imagine a striving, multi-hyphenate woman whose years at home don’t condemn her to stagnant invisibility but take her somewhere even better — someone a bit like herself.

Ruch is threading a difficult needle at a time when tradwives dominate media attention and real political energy is aimed at reducing the choices women have gained over the last century. To distance herself from such currents, Ruch identifies her project as a feminist one and repeats the phrase “modern and ambitious” like an incantation against all that. She also sidesteps the mommy wars entirely: “Staying home with your kids isn’t a virtue, and neither is working,” she writes, and notes that “research shows that a parent’s career status has no bearing on the happiness levels of their children.” Instead, her focus is on what a career pause — her reimagining of the dreaded “employment gap” — might mean to the person taking it.

It’s a somewhat surprising book: self-help for people in a stage of life in which selfhood may feel secondary, a professional development manual for those out of a profession.

Midway through the book, Ruch recounts a remark by her husband. though it’s something anyone parenting full time has probably heard before, about how he could never do what she does. This is a comment she has come to understand, she writes, “as a ‘polite’ way of saying, ‘I’m just too complex for at-home parenthood. I need the challenge of work to stay fulfilled.’” Her resistance to this extremely common characterization evades its usual forms — unsubstantiated claims about the negative impacts of day care, lists of a million supermom accomplishments, or conservative talking points — and instead rests on a conceit I haven’t seen articulated elsewhere so clearly. It’s the idea that full-time caregiving can offer an immersive period of personal growth and that this alone might be reason enough to embark on it, if you can swing it.

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