The Existential Crisis of the Wait-at-Home Mom

And then, in the Philippines, she got the call. It was her live-in nanny on the phone. One of the twins had rolled off the changing table. The baby was fine. But Drayton wasn’t.

“I was used to being good at everything, and suddenly I felt good at nothing,” she says now. “Something had to change.”

Figuring out what had to change and how it had to change wasn’t easy. She was the breadwinner for her family, and every accomplishment in her life thus far (the bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke, the master’s in communications from NYU, the stints at National Geographic and the United Nations) had led to success. What’s more, Drayton thought of her company as a huge part of her identity, her “first baby.” Except now, she had real babies. And the real ones were her priority. She talked to everyone she knew, asking for advice: Should she scale back? Should she hire someone else to run things? Should she give the company up completely?

That stepping away completely was even an option said a lot about how much the women’s movement had evolved by the ’90s. All the roaring of the ’70s had died down long before, starting with the 1980s backlash that blamed feminism for pretty much everything from infertility to teen suicide to bag ladies. Backlashing against the backlash, die-hard feminists started to back down, rumbling that there might be, in fact, a difference between the sexes — that men are, by nature, more “autonomous” and women are, by nature, more “relational” (translation: better suited to taking care of the kiddies).

By the mid-’90s, when Cynthia Drayton was weighing her options, the feminist movement, under the leadership of Gloria Steinem, had evolved (or, some might say, devolved) into what’s been dubbed “choice feminism” — in which any choice a woman makes is fine. (Or as Charlotte so eloquently put it in Sex and the City: “I choose my choice!”) Work? Go, girl! Stay home? Rock on, sister! Work a little and stay home a little? Girlfriend got it goin’ on!

Not that Drayton was lying awake at night asking herself, “What would de Beauvoir do?” She was simply trying to figure out what would be best for her and her family. What was best, in the end, was selling the business, and buying a 200-year-old farmhouse with lots of land in Valley Forge. Still, in the back of her mind, she always knew she’d someday go back to work.

That day came almost three years ago, with the twins in fifth grade. But reentry has been nothing like she expected it to be. “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she says. She didn’t expect to spend three years looking for something that suited her, or to need to call a recruiter friend in New York to help her “package” herself. She didn’t expect to be viewed by potential employers as a risk, as not serious about a career, as a person who doesn’t stick with things and will always take time off for family.