The Existential Crisis of the Wait-at-Home Mom

JUST BECAUSE THEY’VE become ladies who yoga doesn’t mean they aren’t still ladies who lunch. There are six of them here, sitting around the table in the very designed dining room of a very designed stone home up a very landscaped drive in Bryn Mawr. They’re between the ages of 40 and 55, all stay-at-home moms, all with impressive past lives — there’s a management consultant, an event planner, a tech executive, an advertiser and a fashion merchandiser. But all of them, as they nibble on three different chicken salads made by their hostess, are in various stages of freaking out over the exact same question: Now what?

“In the hours when I’m just doing domestic things and there’s no other input, I start to feel brain-dead,” says the 45-year-old former tech exec who opted out a decade ago to raise her kids, now 10, eight and four.

“When my last child went to college two years ago, I got busy with projects that needed to be done in the house,” says the former lawyer who’s been out of the game for 22 years. “But as soon as I had time to do all the things I wanted to, I no longer wanted to do them. I wanted to do something more goal-oriented.”

“I feel like you just told my story, but my kids are nine and six,” says a former money management consultant.

It’s not that they didn’t enjoy being home all these years. On the contrary. The word they keep using to describe that time is “blessed” — blessed to be there for the first day of school, blessed to watch the soccer games and violin concerts, blessed to keep the kids home that extra day or two when they were sick, blessed to be able to pick them up from school and hear all the stories and gripes and gossip that never would come up at the dinner table.

“I felt complete when they were young,” says Bryn Mawr’s Debbie Clower, a spunky fast-talker who arrived for lunch with a stack of articles and a list of talking points. Her kids are now 12, 16 and 18. “I loved it. I wouldn’t have done it any differently. I feel like I contributed.”

Yet as they listen to each other’s concerns about the next step, they all seem somewhat shocked that they’re now going through the same identity crisis, as if they’d each assumed, until this very bite of curried chicken salad, that they were wrestling with this issue alone. Even though this whole struggle has been on the coffee table since 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that women had to stop being dependent on men and start seeing themselves as women who, ahem, roar.