The Existential Crisis of the Wait-at-Home Mom

So how, then, does Cynthia Drayton advise her 13-year-old twin girls? She’s worried that they only view her as a mother, not as a successful businesswoman. “They never saw me during those 15 minutes of fame,” she says. “I want my girls to see the strength of that.”

Ellen Friedmann, who spends her Fridays at Jai Yoga in Narberth, sees it differently for her 14- and 16-year-old girls. Of all the opt-back-in-ers, Friedmann made the biggest life change. For the past 16 years, she’s been a stay-at-home mom. Or at least, she was until four years ago, when she started taking yoga. Until she realized that she needed to teach yoga, and that teaching yoga was something she could picture herself doing for the rest of her life.

Friedmann is the woman that all the other women in her position hope to be. She’s on the other side. She did the soul-searching. She lay in corpse pose at the end of yoga class and reflected as the teacher chanted, “Who am I? Who am I? They’re the three most important words. Who am I?” She found her answer. And she’s following through, having just finished a 200-hour yoga teacher training program with several other women, including a new college grad, a high-school grad, and a new mom in her early 30s.

“I just went to my 30th high-school reunion, and everyone was like, ‘Huh? Weren’t you into cooking?’” she says. Well, she was. She was into cooking and into catering and into paralegaling. And then she was into mom-ing. And now she’s into yoga. But she’s still into mom-ing, because that’s kind of the point, and that’s why she’s digging frantically in her bag for her cell phone after the Friday-morning class at Jai Yoga, where she works.

“Hey,” Friedmann says, flipping open the phone. It’s her oldest daughter. The girls have the day off from school. “I’m at Jai. You can come here and pick it up,” she says, then hangs up, pulls out her wallet, and slides out her Costco card. She’s very well aware that in 16 or so years, her daughters are going to be at the same crossroads she was at 16 years ago, the same one her mother was at 30 years ago. They’ll be confused and conflicted, weighing the mystiques and the mistakes, deciding what to do.

“I tell them I hope they’ll be able to do whatever they want to do,” Friedmann says. “But I really hope that if it’s possible, they’ll stay home with their kids.”

One of her girls is planning to do just that. The other isn’t sure.