The Existential Crisis of the Wait-at-Home Mom

Today, Drayton works for a global nonprofit called Ashoka, based in Virginia. Her latest project involves working with organizations that use sports to create social change for women — like an African group that makes sanitary products for girls, and a Pakistani company that manufactures breathable burkas for Muslim women, all so they can compete in sports, which previously wasn’t an option for them due to those very limitations.

After she got the job, she sent an e-mail to the 60 women who were in her Comeback program, explaining how she negotiated her employment arrangement — full-time, but working remotely, and with a comp-time policy so she can still take off whenever she wants to watch her kids play tennis, which they do competitively.

“That’s important to the family,” Drayton says. She waits a second, then adds: “That’s important to me.”

OF COURSE, DRAYTON is one of the lucky ones, and not just because she found her dream job and got it. She’s lucky because she recognized that some self-analysis was needed. And she did the work. She figured out who she was. Because the truth is, motherhood messed with these women. It turned their values all around, and flipped their senses of self on end. It changed them without their even knowing they were changing — until their kids didn’t want them hanging out at their soccer games anymore. And suddenly, when they weren’t needed, they had to look at themselves for the first time in years. They had to ask questions they hadn’t even considered since they were job-hunting as recent college grads — what do I want? What will make me happy?

Most of these moms are flailing in this figuring-out stage because they’re just not used to being center-stage. “Finding Yourself” isn’t included on the Wharton Comeback program syllabus, nor is “Overcoming Your Existential Crisis.”

But there does seem to be some promise of that on a flier posted on the bulletin board at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, the one announcing an “integrative coaching workshop for women who want to create new possibilities for themselves.”

That’s because workshop leader Katrina Ogilby has been there. The only thing she knew for sure when she decided to opt back in was that she didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. “I’ll teach!” she thought, and ran back to get a master’s in education — only to discover, almost as soon as she finished, that there was another thing she now knew for sure: She didn’t want to teach.

“I didn’t do enough soul-searching,” she says. And now, through her Wayne-based coaching business, Beyond Empty Nest, and its “What’s Next?” workshops, soul-searching is what she’s all about.