Leah Ingram's latest book, Keep Toss Sell!

I hate clutter. I’m constantly weeding through boxes and bins of toys (not that we have many) and throwing out broken parts, mismatched bits, and goodie-bag swag. I keep our crap to a minimum (and I’m grateful that I have family, on both sides, who don’t overwhelm my boys with gifts).

Usually when I have major purges of stuff, it’s in response to a call from a charity, and I can always muster a clutch of giant garden-waste bags filled with clothes, household goods, shoes and toys. I’ve yet to think about other options, like selling some of our stuff for a sweet little sum. My friend and writer colleague Leah Ingram, however, has. As well she should: the writer of the blog Suddenly Frugal, Leah’s now written two books on money-saving. This guest post is derived from her newest book, Toss, Keep, Sell! The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In (Adams Media, 2010). Read this, then march into your playrooms and bedrooms armed with (like me) bags and (like Leah) a calculator:

If you’ve got kids, then you’ve probably got toys. And games. And books. Chances are your kids’ playroom or bedrooms are cluttered with things they have grown out of. Well, guess what? Instead of collecting dust, you could be collecting some cold, hard cash for them.

Recently, I did a TV segment to help one mom declutter her playroom, and guess what? In just a few minutes of time, she found a big box worth of stuff that she could sell to bring in extra cash and clear out the clutter. For example, she told me how she kept stepping over a camouflaged-clad helicopter and tank that her son, now 11, hadn’t played with since he was 8. Why was she keeping that stuff around? You can bet that those were two items that made it into her “to sell” box.

Not sure how to begin tackling the clutter? Well, in my new book Toss, Keep, Sell! The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In, each chapter has something called a Quick Clutter Challenge. It’s when I have readers set their timer for a predetermined amount of time, and then focus on cleaning up a specific kind of clutter. With kids, we’re going to focus on their toys.

If your kids are anything like mine, they probably have way more toys than they can ever play with. Or, they’ve grown out of a whole bunch of those toys, but you don’t have the heart to get rid of them, just in case they want to play with them again, for old time’s sake. (I think that’s what this mom, who kept those Army toys around, was thinking.)

Really, what are the chances of them wanting to take a trip down memory lane like that?

So as part of my guest post today, here’s a Quick Clutter Challenge for you. I want you to set your timer for 15 minutes and head into the playroom or your kids’ bedrooms. Find things that you know they’re just too old for, are still in good condition, and don’t hold any sentimental value (you can designate one box for keeping what you consider a keepsake, but limit it to one box only).

Once the timer goes off, you should consider bringing these toys to a local consignment shop so you can make extra cash. Not aware of any local places to go? I would recommend using the website of NARTS, the Association of Resale Professionals as a resource. On the site’s Shopping Guide page, you can search by state, zip code, or merchandise category for nearby resale stores.

In addition to locally owned stores, there are also national events and store chains that work on a consignment basis to help you make money from your castoffs. Here are three worth investigating.

* Children’s Orchard You can find store locations in 24 states.

* Just Between Friends (JBF) The JBF twice-a-year shopping event offers people like us the chance to set up our own consignment shop “booth” to sell children’s clothing, maternity wear, and other kid-oriented products in an established space. As of this writing, there are JBF consignment sales occurring in 22 states, from Arizona to Wisconsin.

* Once Upon a Child Once Upon a Child currently has locations in 40 states and three Canadian provinces.

Copyright 2011 Leah Ingram, Reprinted with permission from Toss, Keep, Sell! The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In (Adams Media, 2010)

Author, clutter-buster and frugal mom Leah Ingram

Well, here we are again. By “we” I mean my family; and by “here” I mean with one of us out of a job.

Several years ago, my husband left a job that was literally sucking the life out of him (thanks to a bullying boss and a badly-run organization, he lost: 15 lbs. and his natural, glass-half-full outlook. What he did not lose, thank heaven, was his remarkable, resilient, family-forged work ethic). Anyway, though he made the correct decision to leave that job, he had no way of knowing that smack on the heels of it would come the first rumblings of the great recession, or Great Recession, or whatever we’re calling the most recent economic downturn. He was out of work for a year and a half.

Now he’s once again out of work — I’ll spare you the details because every time I try to explain his odyssey of the last few years it starts to sound like I’m defending something indefensible, or worse, whining on his behalf. I whine all the time, sure, but he doesn’t. Suffice to say, and notwithstanding the fact that I’m his wife and have that love-and-fidelity bias, he was making the very best of a bad situation, and ended up being forced out for not-good reasons.

I’m of course nervous and heavy-hearted at the prospect of going through what we went through before. It wasn’t pretty. The fun included going to the bank to close the boys’ meager bank accounts to squeak us through another month. I’m not sure if I was crying because of what I was doing, or because the teller didn’t even blink as she cut the check. Another bright spot? Dropping our health insurance when the choice became that or the mortgage; thank goodness we’re knock-wood-healthy. But despite knowing what might be ahead this go-around, I’m not upset. In fact, weirdly (or maybe not so weirdly as I’ll explain), I’m feeling both upbeat and optimistic right now.

My optimism stems from a couple different places. One, put simply, we did this before and we can do it again. Two, my husband is now closer to figuring out what he really, truly wants to do with his life, his passions and his talents. It’s his time — and it’s my job as his partner to help him figure that out. It’s what we do. That feeling — that it’ll be hard but ultimately rewarding; that we are in this together — is, to my mind, the very best part of having a good marriage. Go team, and all that.

But another reason has to do with how we work here in our humble suburban home, in our nearly 10-year marriage, in our thus far eight-year-long foray into parenting.

A month or so ago, I was listening to a segment of the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC.org (yeah, that’s me; NPR radio streaming on my computer is the soundtrack of my working life), in which Lopate was interviewing Joan Williams, author of the book Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. Here’s the interview, if you care to listen. Many of the points Williams makes were riveting (I love this stuff), and also puzzling (because it just doesn’t work this way in my home.)

Williams brought up stats we’ve probably all heard before, about how even as mothers have entered the full-time workforce over the last several decades, they still do the vast majority of housework and childcare. She also mentioned something that really made me take notice, about how much time fathers spend with their kids as a function of socioeconomic class. Here’s essentially what she notes:

White-collar fathers are more likely than their blue-collar counterparts to “talk the talk” about being around for their kids day-to-day, but end up not walking the walk (whether that’s because when push comes to shove they don’t want to play “SpongeBob Operation” or coach the soccer team; or — Williams’ main point — because they are under enormous pressure at work to perform like serious, career-minded men are supposed to, which does not involve skipping out at 5 or, heaven forbid, actually taking paternity leave. More on that later). Meanwhile, blue collar men may not be talking the talk about equal care for and time spent with their kids (possibly they don’t even know the lingo — this is me editorializing — not having been schooled in the gender-wars zeitgeist). But, they do, in practical terms, end up being more apt to walk the walk. To change a shift so they can be there for the recital, for example, or to show up at the elementary school for career day.

The issue seems to be, to my mind: Who do you feel more sorry for — the corporate lawyer chained to expectations that “real men” don’t skip out after a mere 80 hour week to get LuLu to her ice-skating competition? Or the union truck driver who’ll never make it in the circles of power (but can coach Little League)?

I tell ya, I feel sorry for all of us modern moms and dads in these scenarios. Another thing Williams points out, and is also nicely discussed in this recent Newsweek article entitled “Men’s Lib,” by Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil, is that overall workforce expectations and set-ups are woefully inadequate to the ways today’s families, or many of them, strive to make a living and raise their children. As Williams pointed out in the radio interview, the typical corporate entity/company still sees the ideal worker as someone who gets a job, works full time, full tilt for 40 or so years, and then retires. The only people who are able to do that without losing all their marbles are men with stay-at-home wives. For everyone else, it just works better when it’s fluid. And the American economy and workplace norms (all the nods to paternity leave and so-called family friendliness and the precious few places with subsidized or on-site daycare and — in rarer cases — nice, pleasant places for working/nursing mothers to pump breastmilk to one side) are not fluid. In most cases, moms suffer for taking time from their careers, dads suffer when they try to be more family-friendly, and kids just…suffer.

Which brings me back to our little family. When we first had Daniel, my husband had just finished graduate school. I had a well-paying editor’s job, and downshifted my position and salary to a three-day week. He taught a couple of college classes, had a couple of personal-training clients, and a part-time job in a hospital weight-management clinic. We had a babysitter for the three days I worked. Most of the time, my husband was long gone by the time Daniel and I woke up, and I handed off the baby to the very capable and loving Maggie. And much of the time, though Maggie was able to be there until I got home at 6pm, I’d arrive home to find Robert starting dinner while our happy, fat son bounced in his babyseat or munched on a Zweiback in his high chair.

By the time we moved from the city to the suburbs, my husband had taken a different job, ditching the multiple-part-time schedule that had seen him through graduate school for a full-time, but at home position. Again, the juggling resumed: I welcomed the nanny, he drove me to the train station, then returned to his home office. Later, when I switched to freelance life after James was born, we were both in home offices (Daniel would say, “Mommy works upstairs, and Daddy works downstairs,” which I think is a pretty cool thing for a kid to say, not because my son’s particularly clever, but because it was actually quite cool that he had no experience or memory of it being any other way.) We did wonder what the neighbors thought, when we’d return from dropping them both off at daycare. (“So, the kids are gone, but they’re home…”)

I wish that weren’t so odd a situation.

Eventually, my husband left that job for the one with the evil boss, who very nearly robbed him of his enthusiasm. One thing about this woman — and she was a woman, a mother of a teenager — that he found incomprehensible was how dismissive she was of men in the office, like my husband, who would routinely leave before, say, 7pm. She was not just dismissive, in fact; she was derisive and scornful toward men who had such inconsequential jobs that they were home to make dinner. She was speaking not of my husband in this instance, who in those days never got home in time to make dinner, much less eat it with us, but of her own husband. (I’d tell you about the time she kept my husband late to fruitlessly and humiliatingly harangue him for a mistake he’d already corrected, while her own daughter was waiting for her to pick her up from an after-school job — “eh, she can wait. Or call her father” — but I’d just get depressed).

That’s just wrong.

As I write, my husband is on his way to a job interview. I hope it gets it, of course; I hope this or whatever other plans and schemes he’s working out for his next career step make him feel good about himself, as a man and a husband as well as a father. But am I wrong to admit that, absent thorny realities of paychecks, retirement savings, and health insurance, I wish he could stay home, too? Because when we’re both working productively, but also both parenting equally (or equally-ish; he still isn’t quite sure of the pediatrician’s phone number or what goes in the lunchboxes) we’re all happier.

The subtitle of the Newsweek article I linked to above reads, in part, “Why it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home.”

Couldn’t agree more. Because that, my friends, would really constitute some honest-to-goodness family values.

I’d love to hear what you think about men and women, work and family, class and (in the case of certain ex-bosses), the lack thereof.

So, last weekend my family and I were up in the Catskill Mountains, in upstate New York, at a family-style resort we’ve been going to, on and off, my whole life (my dad used to go there as a teen, that’s how long we’ve been patrons of this particular spot). By “family” I mean a lot of us–my parents, my sister, her boyfriend, her kids, her boyfriend’s kid, my brother and his wife and new-ish baby, and me and my boys.

I’ve written about this sort of vacation before, and I’ll write about the whole multi-generational family vacay again, I’m sure, but for now I bring it up because it was yet another chance for my boys to take in little tiny lessons about money. Specifically, the quarters they asked for so they could feed the machines in the game room and increase their stash of rubber bracelets, fake rings, and sticky frogs. As it was vacation, we were liberal with dips into our pockets for extra quarters after they ran out of the modest amount they extracted from their piggy banks at home.

But it was interesting to watch, especially as I’d just written a piece for the website DailyWorth.com about teaching small money lessons to kids. Not big teaching moments: we weren’t drawing up lessons about compound interest or how the Fed works (which I don’t always get myself). But little ones, like the value of a quarter, a dollar, a couple of bucks. Here’s what I wrote for DailyWorth:

I like to treat my five- and seven-year-old sons, but I don’t want them to believe Silly Bandz fall from heaven, or that my wallet is a magic dollar dispenser. So every time they troll the grocery store with me or get tempted by the snacks for sale at summer camp, I try to impart little money lessons—and they’re actually adding up.

• Dollars and sense. Candy and ice cream at day camp are usually a dollar or less, and my sons didn’t understand why I was reluctant to just hand over a buck or two. So I totted it up for them: $1 per boy, per day, comes to $10 a week. That number produced newfound respect for how much their snacks really cost. And respect is where responsible spending starts.
• Size matters. The other day, I tossed a loaf of raisin bread in the grocery cart, remarking that it cost $3.50 a loaf. My seven-year-old piped up: “The Subway sandwich at camp is $3.50.” Ding! “That’s one sandwich,” I said. “This is a whole loaf of bread—breakfast for you and your brother all week.” And he got it. I could see him mentally comparing the idea of all those breakfasts against a measly six-inch hero.
• No matter how you slice it… I sometimes let the kids buy pizza ($2 a slice)—but I usually stop them at one slice (they want more for competition’s sake with their friends, not because they’re hungry). I tell them: $2 may not be much money, but $4 is too much for a lunch they won’t finish, especially when I have perfectly good food at home. I have to repeat myself (often!), but the other day I heard my older son say to the little guy, “You don’t need two slices of pizza for lunch, you know.”

Of course, I get regular reminders that this is a big learning curve for them—and me. Yesterday was supposed to be Carnival Day at camp, and I gave the kids $5 for the games and activities. Well, the carnival was postponed due to bad weather, but guess who spent the $5 on candy anyway? Sigh. One step forward, two steps back.

Since the last time we went upstate to this particular resort, in those ancient, lovely mountains, we didn’t have a lot of things. We didn’t have, for example, the experience of my father undergoing (successful!) surgery for lung cancer. We also didn’t have my newest nephew, Nico, or know what college my older nephew Nicholas was going to. The point is, we’re growing, we’re changing, we’re together.

And we’re thrifty!

The big payoff? When kids get it about money.

Tell me something: When you hear your child say things like, “Gosh, that’s so expensive,” or “Mom, when we run out of the other cookies, and you have a coupon, can we get the [fill in the blank]?”, would you pat yourself on the back for getting an important money lesson across to him–or would you feel you’ve perhaps burdened him with too much knowledge of your own and the world’s financial realities?

Is a seven-year-old too young to know that you can’t afford to go to Hershey Park (where we’ve never been, but which has been stuck in the kiddo’s head ever since he heard of a magical place that combines rides and chocolate consumption) this year, but maybe next?

Is a five-year-old too young to understand that if Grandma gave him $5, he can get the Mater car, but not the Mater car and another Chick Hicks car to replace the one that went missing somewhere in the house (which itself replaced the one that went missing on show-and-tell day last year in pre-K)?

I don’t think so. In fact, I think that overall it’s gotten so easy to get what we want, when we want it (even when we can’t totally afford it), and so seductive and so easy to shroud our kids from economic pain we may be feeling, that most kids have no cotton-pickin’ idea what things cost, or that things have a cost (or that cotton is something that needs pickin’). Now, I don’t sit my boys down to tutor them on mortgage rates, and my husband and I save our angst-y discussions about money and the future for after they’re in bed. But I’m starting now, right now, to teach them that things have value, that there’s value in waiting for them, and that no, my sweet child, you can’t have the [fill in the blank] cookies today.

I was thinking of this in a serious way lately because of a tip I added to a story I wrote for the excellent website Daily Worth. You can see it here. The piece was about how I stretch my grocery dollars, but it got me pondering how open I am with my boys about the reality of prices, or of our finances.

I don’t think too hard about what I’ll tell them and what I won’t; I figure that when it comes to talking to kids about money — as with talking to them about sex — they’ll take in what they’re currently capable of understanding, and the rest becomes background noise. But if I keep talking–telling them that the reason we shut lights is because the electric company sends us a bill every month for our use of them; or that that we borrowed a very, very big amount of money from a bank to buy our house, and have to pay them back a little bit at a time; or that “on sale” are two of mommy’s favorite words–eventually a lot of it will be absorbed.

The best lesson my father ever imparted was taught slowly and unconsciously over time. He taught me how to handle money, that work brings it in, that things have value, that having things you can’t really afford is ultimately unsatisfying, not to mention dangerous. Not once did he sit me down to explain these things. I just kind of absorbed it, watching him sit at the blue desk (which he still has and which I still covet) and pay the bills, slowly and patiently and carefully, or watching my mother organize coupons and write her shopping list, slowly and carefully.

Tell me what you think. I have a feeling this isn’t going to be my last post about money!

We had quite the day on New Year’s Eve. We woke to a snowstorm, which we drove through, slipping and sliding, for an hour to reach a lawyer’s office in a town that’s normally a 20-minute drive away. We were closing on a refinance of our home mortgage, a process that had taken many frustrating months and literally reams of paper (you’d think much of this could be done digitally, but alas, no). We’d gotten several extensions of our locked-in rate, the last of which expired on that day, so there was no option left: We had to drag the boys (no available babysitters) to a boring law office on a snowy day.

This stapler? About the most exciting thing in a law office, from the boys' perspective.

And there we sat, in a conference room, waiting for the closer to gather her stack of papers and Wite-Out and stapler (seriously, folks; digitize. Let’s go paperless!) and get the process started. While we were waiting, and out of the clear blue, Daniel began complaining of an earache.

Meltdown city? In fact, no.

My husband, in a break during the loooong process of signing multiple copies of loan documents, ran across the street to a convenience store for some children’s Tylenol, which helped Daniel temporarily, but even without the pain, both boys had to hang around a dull office (complete with fake ficus tree) for two hours without complaint and without bugging us endlessly so we could concentrate on signing our names over and over and trying to listen to the details of our particular refi process.

And they did it. They both had activity books and a box of crayons, markers, and colored pencils to entertain themselves, which turned out to be an inspired choice of distraction, since they could pretend they were doing “work” while we did our “work.”

When, finally, the last paper was signed and the last fax received (honestly? Faxes? In almost the second decade of the twenty-first century? I digress, but I was amazed at how many trees had to perish so we could secure a lower mortgage rate. Maybe that explains the fake ficus), the woman who handled the closing pronounced our boys “excellent.” She said: “We end up having a lot of children in here for closings, and I have two children, so I know what I’m talking about. Some of the kids are awful, but you’re excellent.” The firm’s partner, wandering by in his snowboots and fleece, invited the boys to his office to plunder a bowl of candy on his desk, and jokingly offered Daniel an internship (he likes calculators, my little geeky second-grader).

I get this a lot:

“Oh, what angels your boys are!”

“What well-behaved children, my goodness!”

“Is he always this polite?”

“Denise, do your boys ever scream and run around like lunatics?” (this last was a comment from my cousin’s husband, Mike, as he tried to corral his kids and a couple other random female cousins at the tail end of a party, while my boys placidly waited for their coats.)

The answer, to Mike and everyone else: Yes, they do scream and run around. No, they aren’t always this polite. Yes, they are well-behaved and angels. Outside the house.

At home? Eh, not so much.

At home, Daniel and James run, literally run, from one end of the house to the other; leap onto and over furniture (Daniel can’t get across a room without making my heart stop in 12 different ways); slam monster trucks against the base moldings (that would be James, who wants to drive monster trucks for a living someday, after which he might be a dentist); and squabble with each other. Constantly.

Normal boys, right? Of course they are.

But outside the house, you’ll see Daniel slinging a protective arm around his little brother, introducing him to strangers, and stepping out of the way to let other kids run rampant at the library or the post office or the supermarket. James is more rambunctious and mischeivous when we’re out in public, but without Daniel as his foil, he calms down pretty quick. Give him a slice of American cheese at the supermarket and he’s my puppet.

So my secret is out: Those well-behaved boys trailing me in the mall like cute little ducklings? Just imagine the bigger one stomping angrily around the house and making his most determined “mad face” because I’ve asked him to shut the TV/go brush his teeth/stop banging on the piano. Just picture the little one telling me to “stop talking to me! don’t even look at me!” at the dinner table because I committed the grave offense of requesting that he eat one bite of hamburger.

I guess that they feel safe and comfortable enough at home to, as my mom would say, let it all hang out. But the fact that I get the glowing reports on my angels in the outfield? Yeah, that feels good. Because that’s always been one of my goals: I want to be the parent who leaves the doctor’s office (or, in the case of last week’s refi episode, the lawyer’s office), or the family party, or the playdate, and be able to hear, as the door closes behind us, “what nice boys. We’d love to have them come back again.”

Me, in fifth grade. Back when you got a free comb on picture day.

The other day, both boys came home with the familiar order form and info sheet in their backpacks: Gear up, mom and dad, it’s almost Picture Day!

I hate picture day.

To be precise, I don’t hate the day itself, since I’m not, literally or otherwise,  in the picture. True to my meanness and aversion to being a Joiner, I don’t even volunteer to herd kids to the all-purpose room or comb hair and fix bows.

What I hate is the form itself (murky, impenetrable); the packages offered (many choices, none of which make sense); and even the modifications you can make to the packages offered (again, none of which make sense, because none of them modify the packages to the point where they make sense, at least to me). The packages all cost too much for what they include. In the last year or two, the company’s started offering what seems like a great advantage: a photo CD of your kid, so you can (gasp!) download and print or have printed your own shots. But guess what? You can only buy the CD as part of a package. The most expensive package, the one that includes something like three 8X10′s (I’m sorry, does anyone aside from a few grandparents, my own parents not included, even want an 8X10 anymore?).

Those packages also include weird sizes. You know how a standard photo size these days is the nice, desk-top-frame friendly 4X6? No such thing here! You can get 5X7s, of course, and those anachronistic 8X10s, but no 4X6′s.

But hey, how about eighteen inch-and-a-half by two-and-a-half inches? Really — 18 of them?

Gah. I won’t go on. And in case you were wondering if I was protecting the innocence of the company in question, I’m quite happy to name names. It’s LifeTouch. And they come back in the spring!

My question is this: Why do we fall for the pitch?

These reasons not to fall for it are obvious, but bear repeating:

We all have cameras now. Many of us have very good cameras. Even our cheaper cameras take good pictures. That was not always the case, of course. On my desk right now is a 5X7 black and white photo of my grandmother with my dad, when he was two. A photographer came to the house and persuaded my normally quite frugal grandmother to spring for some photos. He must have plied her with that age-old effective strategy: “But Madam, you look so lovely in this photo! So youthful! And your son! How adorable!” All of which is true, but you know. My point, though, is that these old-time traveling shutterbugs had one major ace in the hole: that set of photos of my dad at 2 are probably the only extant photos of my dad at two. Want to know how many photos I have of Daniel at two? So do I.

Here’s that pic of my grandma and dad:

Brooklyn, circa 1938. And this was probably an outtake of the day's photo session!

Everyone we know takes pictures of our kids. Lots and lots of them. I challenge you, right now, to compare a stunning unposed shot you probably have tucked in an album, with one you had taken at Sears Portrait Studio, or its equivalent. I took Daniel to Sears exactly one time for photos, at 18 months. I felt like I should — other moms shlepped to the photo studio on a monthly basis! The shots are cute, of course, with my baby’s wispy curls that are no more, his chubby feet and sweet baby face. But I don’t even have that in a frame. What I do have framed? A shot we took of him at 9 months, on a park bench near where we used to live. It’s so… perfectly Daniel:

This is exactly how Daniel still looks, minus the chub.

Whereas the Sears shots? They’re Sears shots. No more, no less. And certainly no essense of Daniel.

And yet I’m writing the checks to Life Touch. This is the last time, though. I’m doing it because it’s James’ kindergarten year, and because as the second son he’s gotten short shrift photographically, even given our shutter-happiness. And because the grandparents do still like them.

Next year, all LifeTouch is getting from me,I promise, is just enough for the class photo. Then I’m going to spend some time sifting through the four gazillion shots either I or my relatives take of my sons, find the best, and make copies (for cheap! Online!) for the grandparents. There. Done.

School photos are an anchronism. And as my friend Sandra pointed out, unlike when we were kids, you don’t even get a free comb anymore.

Last year, I wrote an article for American Baby magazine called “Can You Afford to Quit?” It’s a perennial subject for parenting magazines — how-to advice for making a smooth work-to-home transition. I remember when I got the assignment. On the phone, my editor and I batted around the details of what to include, and she asked me what I thought would make a good sidebar to the piece.

I hesitated a bit, but then I broached this idea: What about a sidebar addressing the case against quitting? My idea was, maybe moms who are sure they want to stop working haven’t considered the economic downside of giving up their jobs — income, of course, but also retirement savings, health insurance, and so on. At the time, it was a subject close to my heart: my husband, who is now once again gainfully employed, was at the time in the midst of a protracted period of unemployment. My freelance business was keeping us afloat, and I was as grateful (and proud) to have my income.

I don’t want to get into the should-you-or-shouldn’t-you about working moms — but let me briefly address it, just to get it out there. Whether or not you quit your job to stay home with your child (or how often you change your mind and your work-life situation) has everything to do with your comfort level, your financial reality, your career focus, and your family’s  needs, and nothing to do with anyone else’s ideas, choices, or judgments. I have no judgments myself. As much as I know my choice works for me, I also see how others’ choices fit their needs. Don’t get me started on the so-called Mommy Wars, with working moms pitted against their stay-at-home counterparts. I’m not going to go there, because in my opinion, it’s a made-up war, whipped to a frenzy at predictable intervals by a media that should, instead, be trying to expose inequality in the workworld, and dismal lack of support for working families in this country.

Rant over!

I went back to work 12 weeks after my son was born. At the time, I was a magazine editor. And I was lucky: I had a good salary, lived 20 minutes from my office, and I found a terrific nanny. What I never had, curiously enough, was guilt. I knew I had to work. It was a financial reality for us, yes, but it was also an inner necessity for me. I loved being home with my new son, but I also loved getting out of the house, doing a job I adored, and coming home with a paycheck. I remember my first day back very well. It was January, snowy and cold, and I felt weird at first, tottering on high-heeled boots, wearing makeup, and handing over my three-month-old to his nanny. It was hard to walk out the door, but with every step toward the subway, I felt more like me. I was running toward work, eager to reclaim my old self. But at the end of the day, I was also running toward home. (Literally, I ran home from the subway, I was so eager to get my boy back in my arms.)

And so began the push-pull of work and home that all mothers feel at different times. There’s so much to worry about, from childcare to career concerns to what’s for dinner, that there isn’t (or shouldn’t be) much mental energy leftover for guilt.

I believe the reason I don’t feel guilty working is that this is as much who I am as any other indelible aspect of my personality. It sounds like the classic working-mom cliche, but it’s no less true: if I were home all the time, I wouldn’t be as good a mom as I am. If being a working person is who I am, then why should it be any less true to say that being a person who works  is who I am as a mom?

But back to that sidebar to my stay-at-home American Baby article. That was written when the economy was still teetering; it hadn’t  yet collapsed to the point it’s at now. These days, more and more moms who’ve been out of the workforce for years are heading back out of necessity, not to stave off boredom or make some extra cash, but to pick up the slack. To pay the mortgage. To get by.

The New York Times published a piece about the new pressure on moms to work in response to the dismal economy. Turns out, the percentage of moms in the workforce always goes up when the economy turns down. Again, I ask, where’s the room for guilt? Ditch it, ladies. You don’t need it, and neither do your kids.

I’d love to hear how you feel about working, staying home, guilt, and high heels!