EconomistMom.com

Having just read the string of comments left on the Seattle P-I website in response to my Mother’s Day column, I noticed many readers were more fascinated by what happened in my household than interested in how I was trying to relate family budgeting to the federal budget.  So I feel compelled to explain that:

• No, my four kids did not drive my au pair (literally) crazy.  It turned out she was schizophrenic.  What I had interpreted from the first day as her just being an unusually uptight person (a “worrier”), turned out to be symptoms of a person hovering precariously over a schizophrenic cliff.  Apparently if one is predisposed to schizophrenia, one of the surest ways to trigger its onset is to put that person in a foreign country where their native language (in her case, German) is not spoken.
• We decided not to replace her with another au pair, because we could not find a “part time” au pair (there are such au pairs these days, called “EduCare au pairs”), and we had managed with so little help since she had arrived that we realized it would not make economic sense to pay for a full-time caregiver… especially given that our oldest was just a couple months away from getting her full drivers license and just two years from going to college, plus teenaged daughter #2 is very capable on the home front and also conveniently doesn’t have a lot of extracurricular activities.   (We realized the money we would have spent on child care would be really nice to have to save for college.)
• I decided to leave my Hill job not because the hours were bad in terms of average hours per week (they were not), but because the hours were not very flexible or predictable.  I needed to find a job where I could spend a lot of time working at home in the after-school hours, where I could be around my kids and not worry about them, and hence actually be more productive at my work, not less, than if I were stuck in my office.  And as I’d look around the Hill at the typical staffer, I realized that I didn’t really know anyone else with as many responsibilities back home as I had.  Plus most are a lot younger than I and have some ambition to move up to more powerful and prominent government positions–or to a lucrative lobbying job on K Street–and I wanted neither at this stage in my career and family life. 
• When my kids were younger, I never felt like they missed me or needed me that much during the workday.  The au pairs we’ve had over the years were wonderful with them, and you know how little kids like anyone with a bright, smiling face who will feed them and play with them.  But as my kids got older, I realized that the au pair wasn’t as great of a substitute for mom or dad during that after-school time.  The kids got busier with their own activities, which I wanted to be a part of, and had more going on in their own lives, which I wanted to be around more to hear about and help them through.

So we are now a household completely without hired household help, with one teenager who serves as our ”driver” when she’s not working at her Baskin-Robbins job, with a house that’s a mess from months of housekeeping neglect (there’s a clear downside to having had 14 years worth of au pairs who picked up after the kids), and lots of evenings of carryout or frozen meals.  We’re still transitioning and figuring out what we’re willing to do without to save money, versus what we need to replace in terms of all the tasks around home that aren’t now getting done–to either newly do it ourselves, or to hire help.  Two things that have helped me already that I’ll plug here:  Let’s Dish (seems a little better than microwave and carryout meals) and Google calendar (a life saver for coordinating 6 people’s schedules from different locations).  (No, they’re not paying me for advertising…)   So stay tuned if you’re interested in the “home economics” of the EconomistMom household.  In the future you may hear about 1-800-GOTJUNK, new vacuum cleaners, and who knows what else.

This is the “chaos I call home.”